Computational Generation of Hutong Neighbourhood Maps: A shape grammar for procedural modelling to represent the historical Beijing urban structure

The Hutong neighbourhoods, composed of Chinese courtyard dwellings (Siheyuan), are historically and socially significant urban spaces that embody traditional Chinese philosophy. There is a global interest in these spaces many of which face oblivion, this study presents a formal grammar for parametrically generating Hutong neighbourhoods, which replicates the morphological characteristics of historic cases. This research investigates traditional principles of urban planning of ancient Beijing, based on examples on the historical map Qianlong Jingcheng Quantu, to derive the lost design rules. These rules are then used to build up a procedural modelling process, which reveals the development of Beijing urban structure from Yuan (1271-1368) to Qing (1368-1911) dynasty. The grammar presented in the procedural modelling process contributes to the understanding of the generation of Hutong neighbourhoods. In support of traditional Chinese urban design, the grammar will be translated into an algorithm to be implemented in a computational environment by visual scripting that will generate new instances of Hutong neighbourhoods