LAN WANG, MARIA CHIARA TOSI, MIRNA ZORDAN, CATERINA VILLANI, SILVIA MAROSO, ALEX PELLIZER, ALDO AYMONINO, GIANNI TALAMINI, MARGHERITA TURVANI
WALKABLE CITIES IN HIGH DENSITY CHINA Livable Healthy Sustainable
CONTENTS PREFACE 01 INTRODUCTION: WALKABILITY AND THE RIGHT TO THE CITY
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Maria Chiara Tosi
02 INTERMEDIATE SCALE VERSUS EXTREMENESS
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Aldo Aymonino
03 GROUND CHINA: STARTING FROM VILLAGES
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Mirna Zordan
3.1 3.2 3.3
CASE STUDY | URBAN VILLAGE Gangxia Rules - 47 Slow mobility network - 61 Ground motion - 67
04 CBD: A NEW POROSITY Caterina Villani
4.1 4.2 4.3
CASE STUDY | CENTRAL BUSINESS DISTRICT Lujiazui morphology - 87 Pedestrian multilevel networks - 99 Multilevel Porosity - 107
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05 SHARING PATHS
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Silvia Maroso
5.1 5.2 5.3
CASE STUDY | CAOYANG NEW VILLAGE Caoyang morphology - 121 Shared spaces - 135 Permeable Caoyang - 141
06 SYNTHETIC CITY
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Alex Pellizer
6.1 6.2 6.3
CASE STUDY | CAOYANG NEW VILLAGE Urban porosity in Caoyang New Village - 155 Connect to regenerate - 169 “Walk-in-progress” scenario - 177
07 WHERE BUILDINGS AND ACTIONS INTERPENETRATE Gianni Talamini 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7
Walter Benjamin, Deng Xiaoping and Portofino - 194 The notion of porosity - 196 Porosity in Shenzhen - 199 Visualizing porosity - 203 The tabula rasa and turnkey city - 205 Sensible-forms of Portofino - 207 New perspectives - 209
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Chinese architect Wang Shu winning the Pritzker Prize in 2012, in addition to the enthusiastic involvement of Chinese universities in creating a complex network of bilateral relations with major Western academic institutions, further increased the osmosis of urban research and studies between China and Europe, without however dismantling the professional and operative system of the city. As is well known, since 2014 the Pearl River Delta conurbation has become the largest megalopolis in the world for number of inhabitants (with 57 million as reported by the World Bank in 2015, and 45 million according to the figures provided by the People’s Republic), manufacturing capacity and territorial expansion. A true emblematic case and epitome of China’s “fastness in bigness” the city of Shenzhen, second in the region only to Guangzhou, lends itself to a series of reflections on what operating scale and remedial actions can be investigated to buffer the phenomenon of limitlessness as the only possible form of urban growth. With the narrative of its incredible development, this modest coastal village of 30,000 inhabitants became the privileged grounds of Deng’s new path for the experimentation of economic theories and development. Figures show an increase in the number of inhabitants to about 13 million in thirty years (which means an average growth of 430,000 new inhabitants per year), five metro lines built in 12 years, two airports over an area extension of 2000 square kilometers, double the size of Hong Kong and the municipality of Rome. While its largest industrial complex, the Taiwan Electronic Components company, employs close to 400,000 employees. The shape and form of the city faithfully convey the overlapping combinations of these tumultuous numbers. In paraphrasing Reyner Banham and his extraordinary analysis of Los Angeles in the 1970s, we could say that Shenzhen constitutes a constant threat to the intellectual tranquility and professional life of European Architects, Urbanists and Ecologists alike. It contradicts and overturns all established rules of Urban Design that those professions aim to promote through their work and their writings. More than 80 km along the east-west axis, the metropolitan residential area seems to have occupied almost all of the flat areas,
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forming a building expansion without a distinct form or apparent planning strategy. This area contains large urban enclosures with productive and service zones that are distant from one another for their functions and positions, and which seems to have definitively canceled any long-term strategic logic of urban planning plans in favour of the immanence of pure economic performance. Shenzhen represents the perfect city mechanism of pure production without the imperfection and seduction of the urban carriage of cultural heritage. In a city without memory nothing is hindered by the brisk and rapid changes continually required by an advanced state-run capitalism. This urban fabric, far from the isotropic mesh of the American megalopolis, destroys regional programming choices, while neoicons of architecture, the so-called “urban icebergs”, aim to propose a continuous and long lasting resort town in order to contrast a disappointing mundane life. While the routine uses of the city generate residual spaces that produce gaps of disruption between space and time. However, in what Vittorio Gregotti defined as “the clash between geometry, geography and economy “ newly emerging urban forms could be capable of combining the recovery of intermediate collective scales. Ones that succeed in adjusting to a modality in which the quality of cohabitation can guarantee environmental resources, urban decor, leisure, and transfers to the intermediate scale of a more structural daily life. The creation of a human landscape can ultimately be perceived as an identifying value in which the quality of strategic thinking is directed at the development of local systems, towards a low-rise identity that aims to govern and shape. While granting identity and meaning to the sinister automatism of postmodernity, (so apparently triumphant and unstoppable) with its summation of objects that automatically transform themselves into the city. “Urban Villages” as large-scale housing complexes, except with volumetric scales defined by Chinese standards, were originally purposed to host the early giant flux of rural immigration towards the city. Then began to rapidly transform themselves into “sociallyconformed scaled communities” which could represent fertile
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GANGXIA VILLAGE IN SHENZHEN CBD
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3.1 GANGXIA RULES
Pearl River Delta Megacity In 2014 China’s Pearl River Delta Megacity was the world’s largest megacity in terms of population and territorial expansion, this is a result of an urbanization phenomenon that took place in East Asia during the past few years. Statistics expect that several hundred million of inhabitants will move to cities from rural areas over the next 20 years. The economy within China shifted from an agricultural system into a manufacturing and services based system. As a consequence, the cities are growing exponentially and the spread of the urban texture is moving and taking place in rural lands. Moreover, hundred millions of inhabitants moved, and the phenomenon is still ongoing, from the countryside to the city center to find employment in order to send money back to families they left in their hometown. Most of the migrants that flow to the city from rural lands do not find proper living conditions. In addition, migrants’ social rights are strict and limited to a workplace and a place for sleeping.
GUANGZHOU 13 080 000 INH. 1708 INH./SQKM
DONGGUAN 8 229 000 INH. 2747 INH./SQKM
ZHAOQING
SHENZHEN
HUIZOU 10 630 000 INH. 5184 INH./SQKM 4 600 000 INH. 421 INH./SQKM
3 930 000 INH. 265 INH./SQKM
JIANGMEN 4 450 000 INH. 451 INH./SQKM
ZHONGSHAN 3 150 000 INH. 1734 INH./SQKM
ZHUHAI 1 563 000 INH. 869 INH./SQKM
MACAU 576 650 INH. 20 500 INH./SQKM
HONG KONG 7 310 000 INH. 6544 INH./SQKM
WEST KOWLOON
1990
2000
2010
2020
1980-1990
1990-2000
2000-2010
2010-2020
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3.2 SLOW MOBILITY NETWORK A complex reality There is a paradoxical comparison between city and urban village environments. In the past villages were usually surrounded by walls and gates, every village was a defined piece of land with a precinct. This was intended as a means to protect the village and as an element of identity. Nowadays the city is growing following the archipelago concept. Every new block is commonly surrounded by walls or other precincts. This model of territorial expansion generates a lack of connection and, at the same time, this situation ideologically and physically divides the city into islands. The paradox derives from the fact that during the city expansion the preexisting villages lost their walls and only a few gates survived. As a result, the distances between the buildings of the old village and the skyscrapers of the new city is sometimes only around 20cm, thus creating a situation of no boundaries between the two fabrics. This happened not only because the parcels of the city are surrounded by precincts, but also because the structure of the fast mobility network increases the separation between them. On the other hand, urban villages are without fences but they still lack functional and spatial connections with the buildings of the city even if they stand close to them.
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FAST MOBILITY HIGHWAYS AND FIVE LANES ROADS ARE INVADING THE CITY. THE MASSIVE DEVELOPEMENT OF INFRASTRUCTURES CREATES ISSUES CONCERNING POROSITY AND PERMEABILITY OF THE CITY TEXTURE.
SLOW MOBILITY IN URBAN VILLAGES PEDESTRIANS AND BICYCLES ARE THE MAIN WAY OF MOVING AROUND. URBAN VILLAGES ARE THE MOST PEDESTRIAN-FRIENDLY ZONES IN THE CITY TEXTURE.
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High walkability The new intermediate scale typology is composed of a vertical and central circulation that defines spaces and the spatial distribution. This circulation is a formal and visual extension of the ground floor that carries pedestrian flows from the ground floor to the first public and semi-public space ending with the new residential intervention. In this way, public space, the space for walkability, reaches a higher level of the city. This extension is shaped as a ramp that is a progression of the ground level that runs as a vortex at the center of the structure becoming itself the filter, the public, and the collective space. A place where also passing by is a way of seeing the community.
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7.1 WALTER BENJAMIN, SOCIALIST MARKET ECONOMY AND PORTOFINO In 1925, Walter Benjamin published the first and most famous writing in which porosity was conceived as attribute of urban space and in which the feeling (Gefühl) for a city is described as perception of space in relation to time (Benjamin, 2007). The work, coauthored with Asja Lācis, is a description of the social and urban structure of Naples. Relevant attributes of Benjamin’s depiction can be found in many other costal settlements in the Tyrrhenian and Ligurian Seas, which are similar to Naples by orology, climate, and urban and social structures. One of these Italian costal settlements is Portofino, a renewed Ligurian vacation resort (fig. 1). Benjamin, on his way to Naples in 1925, made a stopover on the Ligurian coast to retrace the steps from Rapallo to Portofino which, in the winter of 1882-1883, inspired Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”. Half a century later, in 1978, the Chinese government led by Deng Xiaoping decided to open up to the market economy. In 1980, Shenzhen was chosen as the first Special Economic Zone of China. Following the settlement of the Special Economic Zone Shenzhen recorded astonishing growth, becoming a central hub for national economy and a testing ground for urban development in the People’s Republic of China. In the Chinese collective consciousness, the historical and political image of Deng Xiaoping is linked to the astonishing urban growth that followed the Chinese economic reform. Also, he is often associated with a specific kind of urban development: the gated community. Shenzhen is the most notorious and significant example of contemporary Chinese fast paced urbanization growth and Portofino is one of Shenzhen’s most renowned gated communities. While the Italian Portofino (Portofino-IT) is deeply connected with the notion of porosity, the Chinese version of it (Portofino-SZ) can be taken as a model of an opposite urban development, characterized by exclusion, finitude, and predictability.
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FIG.1 PORTOFINO, ITALY
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7.3 POROSITY IN SHENZHEN
FIG.4 SHENZHEN; VILLAGES IN THE CITY (DARK GREY) IN SHENZHEN; BAISHIZHOU AND PORTOFINO. SOURCE: THIRTEENTH FIVE YEAR PLAN OF URBAN RENEWAL IN SHENZHEN, 2016
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Shenzhen is one of the fastest developing urban area in the world. Since the beginning of the 1980s the city developed rapidly, engulfing hundreds of villages that were the only human settlements in about 2,000 km² of its territory (fig. 4). In the initial stage of the urbanization process former crop fields of walled villages were turned into urban territory, mostly hosting industrial production. From a population of 300,000 in the beginning of the 1980s the city is now home to more than 15 million people. Due to a different administrative status, the former rural villages became the arrival hub for millions of migrants coming from the rural areas and not having the right of abode in cities. While on one side, new industrial and residential areas were covering former agricultural lands, villages surrounded by the city – known as villages in the city (ViCs) -, started to increasingly densify. This process turned traditional one story houses into 5-10 story condominiums, getting rid of no longer useful defensive walls, while only the original fabric was preserved. In a more recent process of urban renewal, gated communities are replacing industrial and residential areas built in the 1980’s. The result is a series of extremely dense neighborhoods surrounded by gated communities. The difference between the two urban structures is so great that it is evident at large scale morphological analysis. Very dense urban environments are juxtaposed by new gated communities, often inspired by the principles of New Urbanism, Baishizhou ViC and the gated community of Portofino are very good examples of this phenomenon (fig. 7). The former balance of walled villages surrounded by open fields is subverted. ViCs are now some of the few areas of the city to be fully accessible to the public (fig. 9). Due to a series of different factors, spatial and social among the others, they are extremely porous urban environments. In here, as in the Naples described by Benjamin and Lācis, “dispersed, porous, and commingled is private life. […] each private attitude or act is permeated by streams of communal life. To exist – for the northern European the most private of affairs – is here, as in the kraal, a collective matter. So the house is far less the refuge into which people retreat than the inexhaustible reservoir from which they flood out. Life burst not only from doors, not only into front yards, where people on chairs do
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