Guangzhou’s Big Improvements Coming

Guangzhou’s BIG Improvements Coming

With three projects under construction and three more scheduled to start by the end of the year, officials in Guangzhou, China, are spending nearly $1 billion to prepare the north axis of the city’s center for the 16th Asian Games, which begin on Nov. 12, 2010. Although near-term activity is focused on improving the north axis, which covers 5.9 sq kilometers, the city has even more ambitious long-term plans, valued at $6.5 billion worth of construction, for the adjacent 16.1-sq-kilometer area, called the south axis.

credit: Hellermanus architect

Qi Ao Island Site analysis--Joege Ayala

Sources: Jorge Ayala

AA project-- Qi ao Island problem-Jorge Ayala

To become generic/ thematized

Qi Ao Island is threatened to become another generic or thematized Chinese urbanization that spread across farmlands.

A concrete example is Henqin Island, one of the 146 islands of Zhuhai, which will be promoted for investment from Hong Kong and Macau. Since late 2005, "Las Vegas Sands" has openly discussed its multi-billion plans to develop Henqin Island into a convention and resort destination.

Risk of flood
The main cause of a probable flooding in the island is the destruction of its mangroves reserve, due to increasing population pressure, increased coastal erosion, increased impact from storms, conversion to shrimp and fish farming, decreased agriculture, decreased aquaculture pond production, infrastructure and tourism, as well as pollution.
Coastal roads, subway tunnels, drainage pipes, housing, and just about everything else we will build along the coast is extremely vulnerable to higher high tides and storm surges.

1,153 square km of land surrounding the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong Province, China may be engulfed by rising sea levels by 2050. The cities worst affected will be Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong province, alongside Foshan and Zhuhai Coastline. "Climate change will negatively affect the economic development of Guangdong, which is currently one of the biggest consumers of energy and producers of greenhouse gases", said Du Raodong, an expert at the Guangdong weather centre.

Source: Jorge Ayala

AA Project Brief----Jorge Ayala

Contemporary social and environmental conditions pose significant challenges to normative design practices, stemming as they do from an increasing scarcity of resources and consequent shifts in economic, political and material processes. Landscape Urbanism sets out to develop new modes of practice that engage directly with these new conditions and the way in which they continuously reconfigure the city.

China’s economic boom, combined with migration from the rural areas, is fuelling a high-speed urbanism that is producing new cities in the shortest imaginable time and transforming the character of older towns.

This directional urbanisation, propelled from the coastal zones into the countryside has brought even the smallest villages, in some cases, face to face to with the phenomena of the globalisation, foreign capital and generic architecture.

In 2000, China formulated a plan to build 400 new cities by year 2020 to accommodate migration into urban conglomerations. AA Landscape Urbanism took this formulation as the framework for the year’s research, testing the applicability of our methodology to the limit. The test bed for the year’s project is the Pearl River Delta

Source: Jorge Ayala

SITE PICS

EXISTING CONDITION

 

 

 

 

Suzhou， Hangzhou， Shanghai

苏州博物馆

周庄

杭州西溪湿地

中国美术学院象山校区

 

 

 

 

 

'ecobay' masterplan by schmidt hammer lassen architects

in january, danish architecture firm schmidt hammer lassen won the design
competition for ‘ecobay’ a new town located near tallinn, the capital city of
estonia. located on a peninsula, the town looks out over the baltic sea.
SHL hope to turn the new town into a vibrant community complete with
housing, schools, local shops, businesses and daycare centres. as the
name suggests, ‘ecobay’ is being driven by a sustainable mandate. so far
this mandate has led to a number of design decisions. for instance,
by mixing facilities of different function within the community, the need for
transportation is reduced. wind farms, geo-thermal heating and
hydro electricity will also all be implemented on varying scales. the town’s
layout is also specifically designed to deal with harsh winds and maximize
solar gain. over the next 15-20 years, ‘ecobay’ will be home to 6,000 people
living and working citizens.

via:http://shl.dk

Masterplanning for a New City in Quingpu, Shanghai.

Postulate

Masterplanning for a New City in Quingpu, Shanghai.

VERTICAL TERRITORIALITY

The growth of cities, their influences and the mask which they define on the whole grounds must be reconsidered.

Extending a city should be no longer at the expense of arable land. Economic concerns that guide the new urban issues must be able to coincide with the Same concerns that have established practices for cultivation before the development of cities.

NESSIE project newly supplies the territory with oxygen thanks to the built towers which take place at the heart of the history of the territory.The towers have an open-aired column in their centers which allow oxygenation to go to the lower layer. Oxygenation, development of bacteria in these old asphyxiated strata, it can regenerate a necessary ecosystem to the superficial layers where life andvegetation grow. Groundwater, regulations, redevelopment, their bacteriological regulations in an autonomous way. And it can provide a healthy home to human activities, flora and fauna to immersed areas around the extension of the new town.

photo:via seiwooo

IF you want to know more about it, please go to this website:http://www.seiwooo.com/Project-Nessie