Green to Lead Habitat Update: Goals and Measures of Urban Renewal Integrated into the Discipline of Landscape Architecture

The implementation of the urban renewal initiative is an important decision that China adopts to promote the optimization of its urban structure, function improvement and quality improvement during the 14th Five-year Plan period. How to ensure the high quality of urban development and human settlements has become a core task of the urban renewal. The landscape architecture discipline, one of the three pillars of the human settlement discipline group, should actively serve the urban renewal, and drive the high-quality promotion of urban renewal with its own discipline advantages of “ecological priority and green leadership”. Having analyzed the background and strategic needs of urban renewal in China, this research explains the roles of the three major disciplines of urban and rural planning, architecture, and landscape architecture in the construction of human settlements in the process of urban renewal, and further demonstrates the characteristics and potential of landscape architecture in urban renewal. On the basis of clarifying the three major goals of urban renewal that has been integrated into the discipline of landscape architecture, i.e., “green and ecological, beautiful and livable, and culturally comprehensive”, it proposes the measures and strategies based on the discipline of landscape architecture in five aspects: city units and habitat system, infrastructure and environmental quality, landscape images and ecological resilience, space matter and cultural vitality, and management methods and governance levels, providing theoretical references for landscape architecture to support the high-quality development of cities.