Lujiazui 2040: Reurbanization Experiment in a new city zone of Shanghai

Re-urbanization is focus on new towns in China, which started from nothing, and grows into CBD within only 20 years. The cost is the absence of daily living spaces. Lujiazui 2040 tries to bring such spaces back to this area, discuss how daily livings may coexist with the super-modern landscape, and provide an example of how to make these new towns a real city.

The project takes place in Lujiazui, Shanghai, the first new town in China. Facing with the situation that its building environment is almost shaped up, the project veers its interest from macroscopic to middle and microscale. Followings are the key strategies: In urban district level, the first is to compress the spatial scale. Instead of demolishing existing buildings, the streets are narrowed into a pleasant scale for pedestrians, providing spaces to implanting more new multistory buildings, whose height are strictly controlled. Secondly, transit traffic is removed into underground to ease motor traffic, encourage public traffic and coexisting of pedestrians and vehicles. Specific to the south part of Lujiazui district, a multi-dimensional mixture is encouraged, not merely concentrating in mix-using of functions by implanting urban daily functions and housing into new multistory buildings along narrowed streets, but also in the mix-using of different time and space. A public space system composed by a street park constructed in the path of the old avenue, a series of pocket gardens and a square connecting the street and riverside provides various scales of public spaces for different civic activities, from celebration to market. In architecture level, the project rebuilds the street-block-square spatial system with high-rise typology common in this area. Three buildings sitting in the site are connected by a path starting from central courtyard, which provides public spaces in different heights. On the upper floor of the high-rise, functions other than office and commercial are inserted, creating a vertical street system including apartment, leisure, exhibition, greenbelt etc.: this block is the miniature of a new Lujiazui in 2040.