This dissertation is about the documentation and cultural mapping of a village in China that will give way to urban redevelopment. The village is my home village, where I grew up in the 1990s. It is located in the northern part of China, which is in the capital city of Hebei province named Shijiazhuang. Like many cities, Shijiazhuang used to be a small city with many villages gathered together. Shijiazhuang was once one of the many villages in Hebei too. In 1902 when foreign people came to Hebei, the French people built rail ways went through Shijiazhuang. These railways helped Shijiazhuang redeveloped into a big city while retaining the old name. There used to be many villages within the city center of Shijiazhuang, but with the development of the city, many of them were demolished and replaced by modern buildings. A similar situation exists in the outer areas of the city, where there used to be many villages, but they have been abandoned by the villagers (they have moved out to new modern residential communities). Although it may not be possible to conserve these villages, they do have long histories, dating back at least to the Ming Dynasty, and they have much educational value on the past life pattern of Shijiazhuang. However, I found that although much research has been done on almost every aspect of villages in China, there is never a thoroughly research about the villages in Shijiazhuang city. I believe it is important to research on these villages. As the documentation of the villages will provide important information on the historical and cultural origins of future bigger city of Shijiazhuang. If nothing is done now, Shijiazhuang will become a city of no record of the past, a city without memory. In order to keep a document of these villages in Shijiazhuang, I chose my home village Xijianliang as an example to carry on the research, which is one of these last remaining villages. I want to document the way people used to live in the old village, and this might be my last chance to do so. The rationale of this study is to have an accurate record of the way of living in a typical traditional Chinese village in Hebei, before the way of living disappears with the villages. I want to carry out this research in order to call on people’s attention and show them the way to record a village before these precious heritage is lost. Hopefully, more people who used to live in one of these villages will join in to record their own villages. Then we can gradually record all these villages in Shijiazhuang, and help to keep the memory of the city. / published_or_final_version / Conservation / Master / Master of Science in Conservation

Detecting the changes of land use and land cover of the earth’s surface is extremely important to achieve continual and precise information about study area for any kinds of planning of the development. Geographic information system and remote sensing technologies have shown their great capabilities to solve the study issues like land use and land cover changes. The aim of this thesis is to produce maps of land use and land cover of Shijiazhuang on year 1993, 2000 and 2009 to monitor the possible changes that may occur particularly in agricultural land and urban or built-up land, and detect the process of urbanization in this city. Three multi-temporal satellite image data, Thematic Mapper image data from year 1993, Enhanced Thematic Mapper image data from 2000 and China Brazil Earth Resource Satellite image data from 2009 were used in this thesis. In this study, supervised classification was the major classification approach to provide classified maps, and five land use and land cover categories were identified and mapped. Post-classification approach was used to improve the qualities of the classified map. The noises in the classified maps will be removed after post-classification process. Normalized difference vegetation index was used to detect the changes of vegetated land and non-vegetated land. Change detection function in Erdas Imagine was used to detect the urban growth and the intensity of changes surrounding the urban areas. Cellular automata Markov was used to simulate the trends of land use and cover change during the period of 1993 to 2000 and 2000 to 2009, and a future land use map was simulated based on the land use maps of year 2000 and 2009. From this performance, the cross-tabulation matrices between different periods were produced to analyze the trends of land use and cover changes, and these statistic data directly expressed the change of land use and land cover. The results show that the agricultural land and urban or built-up land were changed a lot, approximately half of agricultural land was converted into urban or built-up land. This indicates that the loss of agricultural land is associated with the growth of urban or built-up land. Thus, the urbanization took place in Shijiazhuang, and the results of this urban expansion lead to the loss of agricultural land and environmental problems. During the process of detecting the land use and cover change, obtaining of high-precision classified maps was the main problem.