The emerging tourism and leisure industry today has gradually become a very important driving force of the new urbanization process in China. However the sustainable development of the tourism and leisure industry meets great challenges because of the over-emphasis on the visual similarities in the re-creation of heritage treasures. The prosperity of tourism real estate development somehow further enhanced this tendency by chasing the instant short-term profit. Among those new proposed tourism facilities, large amounts of efforts are devoted to restore historical cultural identities while neglecting features with other deep social and ecological potentialities. Thus we will discuss the possibilities of finding an integrated urban strategy to approach both the historical and ecological aspects of heritage research. The features of heritage need to be systematically analyzed at different dimensions and experimentally tested in dynamic social and economic environments. Four of our recent architectural and planning urban practices will be discussed in this paper, that demonstrate the different focus of our urban strategies toward building a more balanced and sustainable tourism and leisure industry based on deep heritage studies.

There are three dimensions in promoting sustainable development today: ecological, economic and social dimensions. Heritage is a creative, dynamic and multidimensional process, the mechanism of analysis that the process offers us are the principles that guided our urban practices. The projects listed below were all from tourism and leisure urban programs; each of them is an example of the principles we try to integrate into our urban strategies.

In the city garden project of Bozhou Gujingong wine corporation, we intend to demonstrate the relationship between the historical wine production and the transformation of the city through different historical periods. The heritage of the city and the wine industry is actually a dynamic social relationship that changes from time to time and to create the unique media: the wine culture that lasts forever till today. Therefore, there real powerful thing that defines heritage because of its daily needs that are close to life itself.

In the Yiwu Dayuan village BIVP project, we adopt Building-Integrated Photovoltaic Technology to recreating a half-modern and half-historical mixed-use neighbourhood in urban area of Yiwu city in Zhejiang province. Because there is a very important historical site in the central area of the community, people there cherished this heritage as an important influence of the building style. Thus, we use solar panels to integrate into the historical architecture components, to re-create the historical style while adding technology there to promote ecological sustainability. This example helps to illustrate that heritage can get involved with modern technology and create deep ecological significances toward modernization.

For the rural housing historical feature control project in Deqing county, we cooperated with the local government to recreate their traditional living environment and restore their architecture and cultural identity. We started with a thorough survey to local heritage and living condition, and further analyzed the connections between distribution of the historical housing style and their living habits. Their houses are more and more getting involved with tourism and leisure local industry today so that the first floor is used for hospitality. Discovering the deep ecological purposes behind the historical styles, helps to take advantage of the modern technology to make sure that the historical housing features embrace our modern style of living today.

The last example is Zhang Jia Jie in Hunan province, where we were invited to design a museum for Kaiyuan Group, which is located in a historical tourism and leisure zone. The clients intended to use heritage to attract people to come to visit while combining the other commercial programs in this museum. The programs includes a shopping mall, a museum for heritage exhibition, and a local minority cultural show. The modern commercial purposes with historical significances is the main theme in this development.