In recent years, China has accelerated the process of urbanization, a large number of valuable historical district is facing the dual pressures of its own decay and destruction of development, how to effectively protect the space of historic district is an urgent problem for the current development of urbanization. Current historical district governance methods are laborious, reach few information and are ineffective at gathering usable information from different departments for planning. This situation leads often to mistrust and dissatisfaction in the process and outcome. Development of more interactive and innovative methods is needed in the framework of protective planning and decision making so that historical district planning as a process could become more comprehensive, scientific, technological and open up. Through Planning Support System(PSS), Geographical Information System (GIS) and Public Participation GIS (PPGIS) new possibilities emerge to develop useful methods.

This Study introduces prototype of smart governance framework of historic district which was tested in City of Changsha in China. This is done by highlighting three application studies. One which sets up the data standard of various cities’ historical information, establishes the Geo-database of historic district in Changsha City for storing and governing multiple geographical data, remote sensing image data, professional planning data, statistical data, attribute data and meanwhile. All these kinds of knowledge are convenient to collect, aggregate, store, manage, interpret and share through the Geo-database. Essential is to form a plentiful database platform to the smart governance work of the historical district. The second application study, considered the protective demands of Changsha City, builds a protective evaluation system mainly based on the historical streets’ value of environment, ecology, history, science and arts. It then analyzes 14 historical streets inside Changsha City using many different methods such as multi-element assessment method, GIS spatial analysis method, Delphi method and statistical method, to obtain the specific and comprehensive values of historical streets. Finally, this study gives some advices about the special and classified protections of Changsha City’s historical streets, and the urgency degree of this protection for assisting the policy decision work of Changsha City’s historical streets protection. This helps improve the scientific and technical nature of the planning result effectively, and promote the maintenance and sustainable development of urban historical features. Drawing on a discussion of Changsha, we argue that viewing historical district problems as wicked problems allows for more fundamental solutions than urban cybernetics, but requires local innovation and stakeholder participation. So the final application study builds a website of Changsha City http://archlabs.hnu.cn/csgc/. This is an example of tools for publishing historical and cultural heritage information, exchanging consensus of protection and real-time monitoring and controlling the implement of protection.

This interactive information network platform can eventually advance the e-participation of different categories of urban stakeholders, including local citizens, in the protective planning and community development process. This method enlarges our view of the Public Participation Geographic Information system (PPGIS) and especially web-based PPGIS, which challenges the traditional top-down practices towards more bottom-up thinking.