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