Information Services as a Method to Evaluate the Sustainability of Intangible Dimensions of a Historic Urban Landscape: A Case Study in Guangzhou, China

The historic urban landscape (HUL) is the result of the continuous dynamic process of production, interaction, and accumulation. It is full of information from bygone years and remains to this day as a living witness of antiquity and a benefit to the contemporary public, both in mind and spirit. These intangible benefits, however, are easier to overlook than the tangible ones in conservation and management efforts that aim at sustainability. Therefore, we return to the prototype of the category “cultural services” in the ecosystem classification “information service” to evaluate these intangible benefits. The objectives of this study are: (1) to provide a methodological framework to assess the ability of the landscape to continuously provide information services in the historical process; (2) to analyze the drivers affecting HUL’s ability to continuously deliver information services, and then discuss the governance experience of HUL’s intangible dimensions for sustainability. First, we regard HUL as an object to learn from the experience of urban heritage governance: using the methods and tools of ecosystem service evaluation, this paper evaluates the intangible services that the public receives from the landscape over several consecutive historical periods, summarizes the dynamic changes in these services, and analyzes their drivers. Furthermore, we consider that the aforementioned intangible services are brought about in part by the spread of heritage information stored in HUL among specific people, and the continuous provision of information services is considered the sustainability of HUL in intangible dimensions. We use Yuexiu Hill in the center of Guangzhou, China, as a case study to verify the feasibility of our methodological framework by evaluating the information services provided by this ancient area with a construction history of 2000 years over five historical periods. The data needed for the evaluation of the information service was obtained through text mining by retrieving 1063 ancient Chinese poems related to Yuexiu Hill from the poetry database. The results obtained through this evaluation framework will provide a quantitative basis for planning, design, and decision making in small and medium-sized landscapes.