Chinese Urbanism Research
As with any design process, a comprehensive analysis should be made of contextual conditions and trends for an accurate understanding of what needs to be designed. In 2014, I was apart of an urban design team commissioned by the Nanjing Planning Department to design a city center for +800,000 people in the Luhe District in Nanjing, China. The project took a total of nine months to complete; four of those months were spent in China participating and conudcting design charettes.
Before beginning to design, we analyzed the City of Nanjing - its architecture, culture, and urbanism - as well as other Chinese urban areas, to find things we felt were missing in Chinese planning and use those discoveries as opportunities to manipulate and infuse context into our design. The following images document a summary of some of our key observations as presented to the Nanjing Planning Department.
(All drawings, sketches and diagrams were done by myself unless otherwise noted in the image captions.)
THE "LUHE CITY CENTER" DESIGN TEAM
The design team, lead by Dhiru Thadani, consisted of designers and urbanists from Thadani Architects + Urbanists including myself; Bill Dennis of B. Dennis Town Design, Rick Chellman of TND Enginnering, local Chinese historian Matthew Hu, and a handful of more than capable Chinese interns from various local universities
World Map - Republic of China highlighted
Various regional and municipality maps showing the site and some context.
Nanjing existing transit and connectivity diagrams.
Sketch of a Buddahist temple atop the "Magic" Mountain close to the site
Various perspectivial and diagrammatic sketches of Chinese architecture and urbanism.
Luhe District City Center Site - Existing Conditions
Luhe District City Center Site; These diagrams convey the urban strategy the planning department of Nanjing before we were brought our commission. Key observatons to be noted are the enormous size of the blocks, lack of streets, lack of mixed use development advocacy, and the unhindered path of wide high speed freeways through the potential urban area. Upon visiting other Chinese cities, I discovered that this was a typical ideaology in the Chinese planning thought.
Within an average sized Chinese block, one can easily fit the equavalent of seven New York City blocks inside of it. This ultimately gives way to a tremendous waste of potentially developable land.
Luhe District City Center - Site Scale Comparisons with other world cities. These comparisons easliy expose the lack of effective urbanism with in the downtown core of Nanjing City, and Chinese planning in general. A grave misconception here is that "desnity" alone is equavalent to urban.
Downtown Nanjing,China: Main Intersection.
Street section of the main intersection in downtown Nanjing. The right of way is over 200 feet wide. To put that into perspective, you can fit New York's Park Avenue and Broadway Avenue inside its boundaries and still have room leftover. In all fairness, Paris' Champs Elysees is about the same size. However, the Champs-Elysees is a true avenue, a heirarchical main street equipped with a habitable median, landscape protected boardwalks for sidewalks, and a path that leads from one monumental city landmark to the next. There are only a few of its type within the city. Futhermore, the traffic is signifcantly slowed by the intersections formed from the many smaller roads and alles that run perpendicular to Champs-Elysees. This helps to create a safer environment for pedestrians, and consequently, a more urbane one. In the case of the Chinese roads, none of latter qualities are often present. This creates an environment more condusive to vehicles than to people.This is futher augmented by a lack of rad hiearchy. Every road fights to be a main road - they vary in proportion very little.
Analysis of the block, building typology and orientation. Residentially zoned blocks usually contain one building typology; tall and slender bar buildings. They are replicated over and over again on a site. Chinese government requires residential units in these buildings face a north-south orientation to maximize natural light exposure. The regulation is admirable in spirit but poor in execution. Because the blocks are so large in area, the skinny buildings have no relationship to the street edge and waste acres of land inside the block. We devised improved alternatives that integrated this Chinese building typology into a smaller block that meets the edge with the added benefit of high yields. To help define the street better, we also introduced a continuous podium programmed with retail, commercial, and residentail space. These block alternatives were the patterns our team used as the foundations for designing the Luhe City Center Masterplan.
Analysis of the block, building typology and orientation. Residentially zoned blocks usually contain one building typology; tall and slender bar buildings. They are replicated over and over again on a site. Chinese government requires residential units in these buildings face a north-south orientation to maximize natural light exposure. The regulation is admirable in spirit but poor in execution. Because the blocks are so large in area, the skinny buildings have no relationship to the street edge and waste acres of land inside the block. We devised improved alternatives that integrated this Chinese building typology into a smaller block that meets the edge with the added benefit of high yields. To help define the street better, we also introduced a continuous podium programmed with retail, commercial, and residentail space. These block alternatives were the patterns our team used as the foundations for designing the Luhe City Center Masterplan.
Contrast of land-use plans. Many of the urban ideas that our team collectively believes in were integrated into our design proposal: smaller blocks; more streets and deflected streets; clearly defined neighborhoods each with its own public square; human scaled treatment of the edges; and street parking just to name a few. Even before beginning research, we wanted no only to create a good masterplan but also to edcate the Chinese government, in hopes of seeing some of these principles integrated into the local zoning ordinances.
Arial sketch perspective of our final proposal. Our design proposal is denoted by the white buildings and rendered green spaces. The previously planned - and under construction - sites on the parameter show what very well could have been replicated within our site: large and un urban blocks unable to provide the level of street life and vitality desired.
(Masterplan collectively designed by the team; rendering produced by Andrew Krizman)
Our design proposal was ultimately the best of both worlds, a mixture of 'new urbanist" principles with the trendy flare of your standard city CBD (Central Business District).Here is one of the 'money shots' of our plan showing that duality. A rim of lower-scale mixed use buildings define the wedged public space in the foreground and are accompannied by mid-rise buildings in the intermediate. Both set the stage for the larger commercial towers in the background which are located in the heart of the district. There is a clear tier or gradient of development making sure that the more human scaled buildings are adjacent to the public spaces, set up visual moments like this. Visit the gallery on the Luhe District Masterplan for more images and drawings from our final design proposal. (Image by Andrew Krizman)