Deciphering Spatial Mixity in the Urban Evolution of Gulangyu:A Contextualized Analysis

The urban evolution of Gulangyu,a historic international settlement in the city of Xiamen on China's southeast coast,has long attracted the attention of scholars working in the field of Chinese urban history.Until recently,however,few efforts have been made to theorize the spatial for-mation of Gulangyu.Drawing upon existing research on the island's development,particularly since the early 1840s,this study aims to offer a criti-cal reading of the modern transformation of Gulangyu.By retracing the urban evolution of Gulangyu on the basis of historical maps and fieldtrip data,its spatial restructuring up to the early 1940s has been reviewed and analyzed.With GIS and CAD-based tools,conflated results are presented to explain the island's spatial mixity.The results show that from military fortification to village settlements,through the competition between local inhabitants and earlier imperialists,and then the coopetition of foreign residents and returned overseas Chinese,the making of Gulangyu as a histor-ic international settlement was hardly a Western-dominant process.Instead,it should provide an entry point for a contextualized critique of current research on similar urban space in China's modern history.