In The Self-Sufficiency City, Vicente Guallart puts forward the concept of the Self-Sufficiency City and emphasizes that human life is self-sufficient and human beings are part of the natural environment. Through the full use of information, we can use less resources and energy consumption to meet the various needs of different levels of the city: relying on the new technology and new rules of the information age, on the basis of information interconnection, small to individual, large to the whole earth, can rely on their own resources production and energy supply capacity to achieve self-sufficiency. These ideas are consistent with the basic idea of “smart city” advocated by China. (Chen,2019) Based on the law of the city’s own development, although it highlights the role of the information society and the information layer of the city, it is believed that people still play a decisive role in the city. At the same time, it is worth noting that another important characteristic of a self-sufficient city is that it no longer relies heavily on the results of large-scale production from outside, but realizes self-sufficiency of the city locally with the least resources and energy costs through the full use of information. From Barcelona’s urban development, it can be seen that under the impetus of agriculture, trade, industrialization and digital technology, Barcelona has gone through 4.0 times from 1.0 times. Now, Barcelona’s 5.0 era is just seeking to realize self-sufficiency in resources and energy locally.
The significance of the people-oriented urban development concept to modern urban construction from the perspectives of history, society, economy and environment from the perspectives of single houses, buildings, blocks, communities, functional areas, cities, metropolises, regions, countries and the world. Each unit combined with the application of new information technology analyze how to build a self-sufficient modern city. It refers to the urban infrastructure, public space, urban management, industrial development, and the corresponding road map of realization at the conceptual and technical levels. These are of great significance to China’s ongoing “wisdom to promote sustainable urban development”(Chen,2019).
Under the background of China’s promotion of new urbanization, China’s urbanization is developing at a very rapid pace. While it has made great achievements, it has also accumulated many problems. The problem of insufficient urban carrying capacity has emerged in the rapid development of urbanization. Population, transportation, environment, resources and other issues have seriously restricted the further development of urbanization in China. Therefore, it is necessary to change the previous concept and mode of urban development. Due to the concentration of population and production resources by industrialization, in order to accommodate more and more urban population, the traditional urban planning concept divides the city into regions simply according to its functions, i.e. industry, commerce, residence and leisure are separated and concentrated in different regions.
The impact of information technology on regional and urban social, economic and cultural systems is rapidly deepening, thus making regional and urban spatial structure undergoing tremendous changes. The paper consists of three parts. First of all, through analyzing the elements of classical spatial structure, and then explain the corresponding changes in connotation and form of points, lines and planes of spatial structure under the influence of information technology. For point elements, their scale, function, status and connections between different points have all changed. The change of line elements is mainly reflected in the information technology that promotes the strengthening of the function of information flow on spatial structure, and the interaction between different networks is increasingly important. These lead to new spatial combination modes of polygon elements such as intelligent regions. Finally, a conclusion is drawn.
“Theory Readings: A Study of the Elements of Regional Spatial Structure in Information Age” is a project of IAAC, Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, developed in the Masters in Advanced Ecological Buildings 2019/20 by Student: Yue Zhang and Faculty: Marziah Zad.