The change of value orientation in contemporary landscape design includes the change of design behavior from creating pictures to creating places, from creating new things to reappearing the essence and original appearance of the site. The combination and common appearance of the historical and contemporary levels in the site is defined as “palimpsest”.
Copying is considered as a text perspective of landscape research, which analogizes the formation of urban physical space as “writing process”, and urban space elements as text fragments written at different times. The concept of textual metaphor is put forward in the study of place memory in western human geography, and the city forms a new text narrative structure under the rewriting effect. At the same time, many scholars and designers set the site as a written document, emphasizing the research value of distance and interval of different landscape elements from the perspective of language and text.
The core concept of copying theory is “layer”, which is a deconstructible, binary or multivariate material level, reflecting the corresponding changes in human activities. The appearance of binary / multivariate information is the uncovering rather than masking of differences, and presents non hierarchical features. This dualistic difference is also reflected in the opposite and unified relationship between the original and the new. The reproduction feature of urban landscape is the materialization of social and cultural significance, which is directly related to public memory and sense of place. For example, the historical sites of Athens and Rome in different periods jointly present the overall site memory characteristics.
Murzyn kupisz and gwosdz analyzed the shaping effect of katowitz in southern Poland as a heavy industry base, transportation hub and scientific and cultural center. Its complex and even contradictory identity features are reflected in the different heritages and landmarks formed in different periods.