The Way of Mount Tai: Cultural Heritage and Everyday Life in Contemporary China

Abstract

What does the past mean, and how might it be operationalized, in contemporary China? “The Way of Mount Tai” explores these questions through a heritage-informed urban regeneration project at the foot of one of China's most famous peaks. The project develops 2km of streetscape, with adjacent parcels, from the historic temple to the base of the mountain. This area is equally an everyday urban neighborhood and an internationally significant pilgrimage route; the project’s strategies—shared mobility, graduated spaces, different directional experiences, and flexibility of building use over time—manage the tension between tourism and the everyday through the cultivation of an intense street life. This cauldron of bubbling sociality is a shared urban heritage as ancient as it is novel, as quotidian as it is spectacular.