From Weastland to Wetland [by Riccardo Mameli, April 2019]

From wasteland to wetlands: the cityscape as green transition toward Ecological Civilization.

The case of Minsheng wharf.

POLITECNICO DI MILANO Scuola di Architettura Urbanistica e Ingegneria delle Costruzioni Corso di Laurea Magistrale in Architecture and Preservation A.A. 2017/2018

From wasteland to wetlands: the cityscape as green transition toward Ecological Civilization.

The case of Minsheng wharf.

Relatore: Prof. Arch. Gennaro Postiglione Correlatore: Prof. Arch. Francesco Lenzini

Tesi di Laurea Magistrale di Riccardo Mameli_ matricola 840858

Table of contents

Introduction.............................................................................................................1 1 Approaching China Complexity (without) Contradictions....................................2 1.1 The cost of development. Rising of the middle-class, pollution and protests...... 6 1.2 Huangpu river past, present and new sensibilities.............................................12 2 HISTORIC EVOLUTION Industrial layout: paradigmatic shifts......................18 2.1 A Short History of modern Shanghai...............................................................20 2.1.1 The first development of the harbour in the west bank (1866).......................21 2.1.2 Development of the industrial activities in both of the banks (1946).............22 2.1.3 Development of the industrial heavy industry in Pudong district (1982)......23 2.1.4 Industrial delocalization and establishment of the Lujiazui CDB, Pudong (19 90).........................................................................................................................25 2.2 FUTURE VISIONS.........................................................................................30 2.2.1 Hassel studio...................................................................................................31 2.2.2 Agence Ter studio..........................................................................................32 2.2.3 Terrain studio................................................................................................33 2.2.4 West8 studio.................................................................................................34 2.2.5 Kcap studio...................................................................................................35 2.3 The Green leap forward Greenwashing of Chinese cities...................................36 2.4 Recovering Landscape as humanist ecology........................................................40 3 Industrial Heritage Re-tooled Case studies along Huangpu river..........................43 3.1 EXPO 2010 AREA...........................................................................................44 3.1.1 Subdivision of the area..................................................................................48 3.1.2 Structural analysis during Expo 2010............................................................50 3.1.3 Post-expo reuse plan......................................................................................56 3.1.4 Pudong plot future plan................................................................................58 3.1.5 Puxi plot Urban Best Practices Area...............................................................60 3.1.6 Power Station of Art......................................................................................64 3.1.7 Houtan park................................................................................................. 68 3.1.8 Industrial landscape...................................................................................... 70 3.1.9 The white elephant........................................................................................72 3.2 WEST BUND AREA.......................................................................................79 3.2.1 Reinventing the industrial layout.................................................................. 82

3.2.2 Spatial analysis......................................................................................................................................92 3.2.3 Culture and art pilot zone.....................................................................................................................94 3.2.4 Long Museum..................................................................................................................................... 98 3.2.5 Industrial landscape............................................................................................................................102 3.3 M50......................................................................................................................................................108 3.3.1 Creative cluster...................................................................................................................................116 4 In search of place: Minsheng wharf...........................................................................................................123 4.1 Minsheng warf area................................................................................................................................126 4.1.1 Zoom in: buildings on site..................................................................................................................132 5 Images of the Chinese landscape: a diachronic analysis..............................................................................166 5.1 Time table: from dynasties to contemporary China................................................................................178 5.2 A sustainable model for the future, looking to the past: the Chinese garden...........................................180 5.2.1 Strategically located buildings.............................................................................................................182 5.2.2 Natural system inside the garden.........................................................................................................183 5.2.3 Fragmentation of the garden: units and subunits................................................................................184 5.2.4 Sub-gardens and poetic units..............................................................................................................185 5.2.5 Viewing-in-motion: circuitous route design........................................................................................186 6 Reinterpreting the Chinese landscape........................................................................................................191 6.1 Reading the landscape elements.............................................................................................................192 6.1.1 Iconographic analysis of Chinese painting...........................................................................................192 6.1.2 Deconstruct the Chinese traditional landscape....................................................................................193 6.1.3 Constructing the urbanscape...............................................................................................................194 6.1.4 Designed ecology................................................................................................................................200 6.1.5 Phytodepuration.................................................................................................................................204 6.2 Design proposal: plan............................................................................................................................208 Conclusion..................................................................................................................................................240

Introduction The phenomenon of rapid urbanization played a key role in the whole process of the Chinese development, having a large impact on cities and people. These changes, together with the economic prosperity, created a large number of issues for the future steps of development. Pollution is, undoubtedly, one of the most prominent ones.

As recent protests have shown, the Chinese middle class is not only in search of better economic conditions, but it is enlarging its awareness also for the environmental conditions. The east Bund of Huangpu River is now required to include public space quality enhancement, ecological environment optimization and cultural function clustering. It is the perfect occasion for a reflection of the redevelopment of brown fields in green fields.

The purpose of the present thesis is to analyze and understand the current social, economic and political situation, in order to propose a suitable model capable to effectively reinterpret the Chinese landscape

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Disparity 差距 |Development 发 展 Old 旧New 新 POE|SOE National|Contamination 污

ism 民族主义

染Modernity

旧之情Novelty 新

Developing country 发展中国家|Global

现代|Nostalgia 怀

奇|Chineseness 中国性

power 全球力量

Rural 乡村|Urban 城市的 People 人|Leader 领导 Monumentality 纪念|Cheapness 廉价 Polluted 污染|Sustainable 可持续发展Glocal 全

球本土化|Global 全球 Predictability 可预测性|Uncertainty 不确定 Preserve 保留|Dismantle 拆除 Hyperfast 超快|Established 既定 Duplication 复制|Identity 身分 Created in China 在中国创建 |Made in China 中国制造 Grass-rooted 草根| 城 市美化 Authority 权威|Negotiation 谈判 Medium scale 中等规 模Mega scale 超大规模 Advocacy倡導 |Spatial politics 空间政治 Traditional 传统|Computation 计算

Approaching China In the last four decades, China underComplexity (without) went significant structural shifts. EcoContradictions nomic reforms and open policies started in 1978 brought several changes to China’s urban development. From 1978 to 2002 the Chinese population living in cities increased from 18% to 40% (Anwaer, Zhang, Cao, 2013). Similar rates of urbanization were recorded in Europe in the century between 1800 and 1900 (Jedwab, Christiaensen, Gindelsky, 2014).

This underlines the extraordinariness of Chinese urbanization process, not only given by its speed, but it is the result of what we can call Chinese characteristic.

Moreover, how do we approach the com6

plexity of a world that politically and philosophically is different, and sometimes in antithesis, from the western world?

Chiri (2012), in his ‘Complexity (without) Contradictions’, proposes reflections about the peculiarity of China’s historical philosophical approach. The suggestion is to use a case-by-case approach: ‘We also have to accept the existence and perhaps the prevalence of a fluid and unstable comprehensive and inclusive approach for architecture and the city, as well as economy and science. […] Eastern thought is immune to idea of the model’ (Chiri, 2012).China’s at-

titude to deviate from a ‘model- making logic’ is largely underlined also by Jullien in his ‘The Book of Beginnings’ (Jullien, 2012).

In his essay “De l’être au vivre, lexique euro-chinois de la pensée”, Francois Jullien (Jullien, 2015) underlined the same concept, focusing on the continuous movement of the philosophical concept of yin and yang, that always coexist without any supremacy. This can be assimilate into a fluid dichotomy, or better binomial dialectic that implies the contemporary existence of the opposite (Fig.1).

In Realpolitik, this can be translated

into a system were peacefully coexist opposite approaches, issues and tendencies, without the collision, the supremacy and the contradiction.

Approaching the study of China’s contemporary urbanization, may request a reflection on the key models to understand the path the country is following since its ‘opening-up’. It might be useful to reason on some general issues that are plainly by Logan (2008): “To what do we compare China? Is China like any other country in our experience?. Through what lens the many transformations going on in the country make the most sense?” (Logan, 2008).

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There is a widespread assumption, among both western and Chinese scholars, that China is competing to be globalized and converge with the West (Friedmann, 2005) following the postulate West-modernization/globalization. China is undeniably undergoing trough a phase of change and transition, but which model is China following? Is it a specific one? Is it following the Western one or is it creating a new way? Answering to this question is not easy.

Fulong Wu argues that ‘Chinese cities are emerging in multiple senses’; theoretically, he follows, they are rising because of peculiar characteristics and properties ‘that cannot be easily described by existing urban theories derived from Western countries’ (Wu, 2016). In addition, their future is not predefined by existing urban theory. The future development is, then, characterized by uncertainties and variability, hence, it may be altered through ‘active agencies and collective actions’: ‘The metaphor of using Chinese cities as a laboratory to observe contemporary urban changes across the planet means that we should be more flexible about the framework of research’ (Wu, 2016). A recurrent paradigm often applied to understand contemporary China’s pattern of urbanization, is neoliberalism. As Fulong Wu enunciates, neoliberalism and ‘developmental state’, a significant perspective developed in Eat Asia, may be combined together in the Chinese context (Wu 2016). Rossi and Vanolo (2010) instead, argue that using neoliberalism as a key to interpretation for broader dynamics is a common and useful exercise, however, it should not be regard as an inflexible and rigid body. On this matter, they continue, the distinctive practice of Chinese neoliberalism, with its untypical fusion of authoritarian state and market, constitutes a variant that diverge from the American or Anglo-Saxon model of neoliberalism.

Considering it as a ‘cultural practice’, it didn’t erased the existing social, cultural and political structures, bit it simply over8

laid without creating a cultural revolution or shock . This Chinese way trough neoliberalism reflects Harvey’s idea of ‘Neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics’ (Harvey, 2005). Friedmann, in his recent analysis ‘China’s urban transition’ (Friedmann, 2005), rejected the common inclination to generalize and oversimplify the contextualization of China: he insists, in line with the view of numerous Chinese thinkers, on the inappropriateness of the incorporation of the Chinese development into inappropriate narratives as ,for example, globalization or modernization. In this regards, Friedmann states that this type of interpretation is implausible for the Chinese process that cannot be assimilated as ‘part of the Western repertoire of experience’ (Friedmann 2005). He prefer to use the category of ‘endogenous development’ (Friedmann 2005), rejecting globalization as a major framework, because of the prominence to external forces that usually go with the idea of globalization. Instead the author prefer the idea of a development based on endogenous capabilities, historical experiences, and internal visions. In other words, his idea is that economic development and urbanization are mainly driven from internal social forces rather than by external global capital. Logan et al. (2008), instead, ‘take an opposite track’ in respect to Friedman. They approach urban change as comprising numerous dimensions, and try to merge different theories (modernization theory, dependency theory, the developmental state theory, and market transition theory), considering two main dynamics: the adoption of globalization as a preferred viewpoint to study Chinese urbanization and the recognition of the state as a ‘central player in every account’ (Logan & Fainstein, 2008). In addition, they state that the Chinese path could represent a model for late-developing countries, especially in relation to ‘how new forms of competition and partner-

ship with multinational corporations and world powers can be negotiated, how the state can keep a strong hand in a market economy in a post-socialist era’(Logan & Fainstein, 2008).

What it seems more appropriate is the consideration of a matrix composed of related and interconnected factors and variables from different currents; to some extent, it could be seen as a hybrid. Since it is very common, in academic literature, to find examples of ‘fixed categorizations’ (in this specific case, in relation to China’s urbanization development), this consideration cannot be taken for granted. In describing China, indeed, it is particularly significant; the risk is that to simplify a reality whose key word is ‘diversity’, may possibly distort its nature; not only concerning its size but also to the different strategies pursued, and, finally, as already anticipated, to the difficulty given by its attitude to deviate from predetermined models. We can finally say that all the above analyzed trends are relevant: globalization, for example, is undoubtedly a process embedded in the system of contemporary China. Walking through Shanghai, ‘the head of the dragon’, impressive skyscrapers, vibrant financial centers and bright billboards, may give the impression of being in any other global cities in the world, but it is only a superficial image of the city. For this reason, globalization should not be considered as the main, unique framework of analysis. The same can be said to post-fordism, sustainability and neoliberalism (considering the role of the party-state); all of them should be regarded as variables and fragments which take part in the overall process.

It is interesting to note how and how frequently the concept of transition is used in reference to the urbanization of China. It is clear, and it is also expressed in the New-type Urbanization Plan, that the government aspire to reach a further stage of urbanization, both in

terms of quality and intensity. It means that the shift is taking place. Despite this, very often the use of the term seems to suggest that the change, and thus the transition, will reach a defined ‘model’ or destination.

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Urbanization in China, Ispi, 2018

The cost of development.

Rising of the middle-class, pollution and protests

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Urbanization is one of contemporary China’s central engines to boost economic growth (Sha, Wu, Yan, Li, Ting, Lim, 2014) and its distinctiveness as hyper-fast, mega-scaled and government led (Sha et al., 2014), played and is still playing a key role in the vitalization of the country’s economy. The scale and rapidity of China’s urbanization can be considered unique in its ‘ambition of urbanism’ due to the fact that ‘Over the last twenty years, the People’s Republic has undergone the greatest period of urban growth and transformation in history’ (Campanella, 2008). In the last three decades, China’s urban development progressed

rapidly; according to the Chinese Government Network, between 1978 and 2013 the urbanization rate raised from 17.9% to 53.7%, with an annual average of 1.2%. Only in 2014, the number of permanent urban residents increased by 18 million (National Bureau of Statistics of the People’s Republic of China, nd). By 2020, the Government aims at moving 100 million people from the rural areas into cities (Hsu, 2016), a target rate of 60% (Weller, 2015); by 2026, the goal is to move 250 million people (Hsu, 2016).

This trajectory led, to some extent, to an unsustainable urbanization path which

Cctv building Beijing by Oma, Forbes, 2019

need to be readdressed: images of polluted cities, construction and deconstruction processes, demolition and a chaotic urban sprawl are, in the collective imagination, among the most common representations of Chinese cities (Duan, Li 2016; Zhao ,2008; Li, Yu 2017).

Sadly the results are visible, and affect human life, the environment, the landscapes and the cultural heritage of the country. According to Pan Yue (Beardsley et al., 2012), the ex Chinese Vice Minister of the Ministry of Environmental Protection, the area of habitable land in China was halved in the last fifty years due to soil erosion and water loss.

One third of China’s landmass is affected by acid rain. More than 300 million rural residents have no access to clean drinking water. One third of urban residents breathe heavily polluted air. The public debate about these severe problems is largely confined to consideration of industrial pollution, while the huge environmental cost of constructing modern cities and urban landscapes is usually suppressed. The negative consequences of dirty smoke rising over factories and polluted waters flowing into rivers are easy to recognize (Wang, 2018).

This apocalyptic but realistic scenarios are the other side of the coin of a extraor11

SongJang, Shanghai 2013

Dallan, Llaonlng 2011

Annual PM concentration: 81 µg/m3

Annual PM concentration: 81 µg/m3

Protests forced a battery-maker to abandon its plans for a factory on the outskirts of Shanghai. The company decided to give up its investment and return the land for the factory to the government.

More than 10,000 protested to demand the relocation of a chemical plant.

Officials ordered the plan closure, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.

Kunming, Yunnan 2013

Qidong, Jiangsu 2013

Annual PM concentration: 67 µg/m3

Annual PM concentration: 85 µg/m3

People protested twice against a planned oil refinery that they feared would produce paraxylene. After local officials initially said the plant’s environmental impact assessment was a secret, they relented and announced the report would be released.

Demonstrators gathered in Qidong, a city of more than 1 million people on the mouth of the Yangtze River, to protest against a planned waste-water pipel ine which they said would pollute the sea. Leaders later decided to scrap the project.

Chengdu, Sichuan 2008

Ningbo, Zhejiang 2012

Annual PM concentration: 111 µg/m3

Annual PM concentration: 90 µg/m3

Residents in the Southwest city of Cheng- China Petroleum & Chemical Corp. du gathered to protest against an ethylene plant were scrapped alter hundreds of plant and oil refinery. protesters clashed with police.

Shilfan, Sichuan 2012

Dongyang, Zhejiang 2005

Annual PM concentration: 111 µg/m3

Annual PM concentration: 70 µg/m3

Thousands of people assembled in southwest Sichuan prosinc to protest the construction of a molybdenum copper plant.

After days of protests attracted national attention, officials agreed to halt the plant’s opening.

Concerns over pollution from a chemical park led villagers in eastern Zhejiang province to try to block the entrance.

After violence between ~llagers and police, the government, promised to close factories in the park.

dinary economical development, that brought to a unimaginable prosperity that helped create today’s Chinese middle class over the last 40 years. Estimates of the size of China’s middle class depend on the definition. China’s statistics agency puts the figure at nearly 400 million, less than a third of the population, by defining a middle-class household as one making 25,000 yuan (US$3,640) to 250,000 (US$36,400) yuan a year – a fairly low threshold. Considering the biggest and most developed cities, such as Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen (Carmenthesister, 2018), the situation is slightly different, and the 70% of householders earns more

than 50,000 yuan, with 54.8 percent of men in Shanghai earning more than 100,000 yuan annually (compared with just 26.9 percent of women) (China daily UK, 2016).

The rising of a new economic power inside the Chinese society, together with unhealthy environmental conditions, is creating tensions in what once was called the Harmonious society (nota).

Citizens, mostly in the richest urban areas, are becoming increasingly environmentally concerned and started to organize protests against pollution (Deng & Yang, 2013).

Protests organized by middle-class against pollution. Datas by Bloomberg Visual Data

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Urbanization and economy 50

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Urban population breathing polluted air

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Rubbish in cities treated and processed in a sustainable manner

Tertiary sector(% GPD)

Prosperity ahead Rich

Polluted water in the seven largest rivers

Middle class Poor

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Citizens without access to drinkable water 13

Electricity generation growth

Current and previous page: Datas from Pan Yue. Urbanization and economy.

Datas from The economist Prosperity ahead. Datas from The economist Electricity generation growth Re-elaboration of datas fromThe World Bank Data Change in P.M. 2.5 (%) by province Re-elaboration of datas from Greenpeace report 2017

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Images rielaborated by the author 14

Heilongjiang Anhi Guandong Guanxi Shanxi -13,7 -16,3 -18,6 -20,8 -30,6

10,4 7,4 5,3 4,5 4 Shanghai Chongqin Qinghai Beijing Tibet

CO2 emission per capita (Tons) CO2 emission per capita (Tons) Re-elaboration of datas fromThe World Bank Data

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Gdp (US $) (10^3)

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Gdp (US $). Re-elaboration of datas fromThe World Bank Data

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Images rielaborated by the author 15

上海

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Huangpu river Shanghai occupies a special location in the Past, present and new Yangtze River Delta and in China’s eastern sensibilities seaboard, that makes it a pivotal point of connection between the east Chinese hinterland and the sea. After 1842, date of the Sino-British Treaty of Nanking, Shanghai became an open port for foreign trade and enterprises. Areas of foreign concessions in Shanghai were fixed to the United Kingdom, the United States, France and other countries which brought about increased volumes of international trade.

Waterway transportations became a primary resource of moving the goods and people. By the end of the 19th century, Huangpu river, designed by the there had been a constant and systematic author 16

Expo 2010 area West Bund area M50 Minsheng wharf Huangpu river Suzhou creek Central city

construction of docks and warehouses, densely built along the river in order to cover the growing river traffic, the production, storage and export of silk, tea, cotton and agricultural products, as well as imports of fuel, coal, industrial machineries from other countries. The riverfront development had been clustered in precise areas from Fuxing Island to Longhua Wharfs on the west bank and from Pudong Donggou to Zhoujiadu on the east bank (Pudong side) of the river, creating functional divisions of the Bund Finance and Commerce district, Hongkou Wharfs, Pudong Xinhua – Minsheng Wharfs, the Lao Bai

Du Wharfs, Yangshupu Industrial District, South Shanghai Industrial District and Longhua Airport area. After 1949, Shanghai became the economic center of new China, seeing further development of its shipping and manufacturing industries. The three industries - finance and commerce, shipping, and manufacturing - were the most developed of the industrial and business activities along the Huangpu River, playing a capital role in Shanghai’s economic growth and urban structure and shaping the foundation an aspirations of Shanghai as a modern city with three main economic functions (Yu, Li & Shu, 2012).

Industrial heritage sites are located in narrow, densely built and contiguous belt along the Huangpu. The proximity to water was needed by manufacturing processes (cotton textile mills needing large amounts of water for production, power plants needing water for cooling and condensation) as well as for the fast transportation and loads of the goods. For over the period 3 centuries, the Huangpu river was the core of Shanghai’s economic and industrial development and the growth of industrial sites along the banks of the river dramatically changed the old cotShanghai in the 30s, in ‘Shangton industry base economy, as the physihai Remembrance’ by Leo, Parcal structure of those areas, as well as the rent, Deely, 2000

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Minshengwarf Shanghai, in Minshengearf Report, Shanghai Design Institute, 2016

identity of the city. As a treaty port for foreign settlement, from the 1850s to the beginning of the 1900s, Shanghai underwent a quick urban based on its productive identity, transformations which was mainly driven by the arrival of Western capitals, technologies and ideas of modern cities. The influence of Western building forms and lifestyles made Shanghai a sharp contrast with other Chinese cities.

This relation is present also in the industrial building of the past that were influenced in two ways: the technological one and the stylistic one. As the authors Yu, Li & Shu (2012) pointed out, the juxtaposition and convergence of differ18

ent elements created the diversity in architectural styles and forms in modern industrial buildings. Following this assumption, the industrial building can be categorized in three main types: • traditional residential style, industrial buildings evolved from traditional residential buildings. Even if the interiors have continuously changed their appearance, following the functional and technological evolution , the external features continued to be dominated by traditional brick walls without plastering, wood windows and doors and pitched roofs.

Minsheng wharf Shanghai, photo by the author, 2017

• western classical style, given diverse • modern minimalist style or functioncultural influences, some industrial al style, appeared in Shanghai in the warehouse buildings demonstrate 1920s, featuring box-shaped design, obvious characteristics of the Westmostly using reinforced concrete ern architectural styles. The eclectic structures or steel structural frames, style with concrete frame structure with simple and clean building facade and exterior brick walls was largely and dimensions conforming to stanused from the beginning of the 20 dard building modules. century. Columns or pilaster, with • mega-scaled buildings characterized the juxtaposition of abstract western by huge dimensions that, from the architecture classical elements such 1949, became the heritage of the inas capitals and the division of the fadustrial socialist era. The medium size cades trough those vertical elements buildings of the capitalist era of the and the use of cornices (as median city, were replaced by huge an mass and crowing element) were largely production oriented and scaled buildadopted. ings. Shanghai has been facing the 19

deindustrialization since 1980s.

The traditional industry areas in Shanghai had been profoundly affected by the economic conversion and industrial relocation. Since the early 1990s, a guided and fast rise in land-use fees in the inner city has forced the closing relocation of manufacturing activities in the peri-urban areas. To implement the new comprehensive metropolitan plan, a planning policy was proposed in the mid-1990s that permitted only one-third of the manufacturing enterprises that were compatible with functions of the inner-city to stay in the inner-city while one-third would be closed down due to poor performance and another one-third would be moved out of the inner-city to make room for tertiary sector activities (Yao, 2014). Manufacturing industries were removed from the inner city, leaving a large quantity of empty industrial buildings and warehouses. The government policy for Pudong development initiated in the 1990s and the occasion of 2010 World Expo presented two Historic opportunities for transforming the functional layout and spatial structure of urban space along the Huangpu River. In between this two periods, important steps had been done in order to create a new sensibility, that make possible the survival and the recognition of the industrial heritage. In 1998, Shanghai Planning Bureau entrusted College of Architecture and Urban Planning Tongji University specially to carry out survey work of outstanding industrial buildings in Shanghai after 1840. Through surveys, they found that, there were only 41 industrial buildings can be traced among 60 well-known old industrial buildings in documents and literature. In the research report of Appraisal and Protection of Excellent Modem Industrial Buildings in Shanghai, they proposed that 30 industrial heritage should be on the list of protection. In the end, 14 industrial heritage were listed on the third batch of Shanghai Excellent Modem Buildings issued by municipal government in 1998 (Ibidem).

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As results of an ongoing process, in 2005 Shanghai has gradually unveiled four batches of the Excellent Modem Buildings. There are different categories such as shipbuilding, post and telecommunications, light industry and textile, etc. Industrial heritage with typical historical, artistic and scientific value fall under the protection with the increasing proportion year by year. Besides the protection of individual buildings, the municipal government list 1 km road along Suzhou Creek in the protection list of industrial building in 2004. According to the historical, scientific and artistic value of the building, the requirements for preserving excellent historical buildings are divided into the following four classes of protection (Ibidem): 1. The elevation, structural system, plane layout and internal decoration of the building shall not be changed; 2. The elevation, structural system, basic plane layout and internal decoration with characteristics of the building shall not be changed,but the other parts may be changed; 3. The elevation and structural system of the building shall not be changed, but the internal parts of the building may be changed; 4. The main elevation of the building shall not be changed, but the other parts may be changed.

In 2009, Shanghai cultural relics administrative department sorted out more than 250 industrial heritage after investigation, which marked for the first time industrial heritage protection as a special type of urban heritage protection. Following the implementation of renewal and development plans for the South Bund, the North Bund and the 2010 World Expo area, comprehensive renewal and redevelopment have begun in riverfront areas in Yangpu, Xuhui and Pudong districts. Shanghai, through its urban development practice, has gradually established an evaluation system based on four sets of indica-

tors for historical, scientific, artistic and reuse values, for evaluating the huge number of widely distributed industrial remains and sites with unique features along the river, attaching importance to the integrity of Historic spaces and their accommodation in the environment.

Next pages: Shanghai 1866, Virtual Shanghai Project, 2003-2006 A Short History of modern Shanghai , designed by the author pp. 18-19 Shanghai 1839-42, Virtual Shanghai Project, 2003-2006 A Short History of modern Shanghai , designed by the author pp. 20-21 The third draft of the Greater Shanghai Plan(1946) land use, Virtual Shanghai Project, 20032006 Shanghai Plan(1982) land use, Virtual Shanghai Project, 20032006 A Short History of modern Shanghai , designed by the author pp. 22-23 Shanghai Plan 1990, Virtual Shanghai Project, 2003-2006 A Short History of modern Shanghai , designed by the author pp. 24 -25 Shanghai Plan 1999 - 2020, Virtual Shanghai Project, 20032006 Shanghai Plan 2010, Virtual Shanghai Project, 2003-2006 pp. 25 - 26 Shanghai Plan 2017 - 2035, Municipality of Shanghai, 2017 p. 27

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HISTORIC EVOLUTION 22

Industrial layout: paradigmatic shifts

A Short History of modern Shanghai

Chinese city British Settlement

1845-46 British Settlement

Chinese city British Settlement American Settlement

1848 1st British Settlement expansion and establishment of the US Settlement

Chinese city International Settlement French concession

1863 British & US settlements become International Settlement

Chinese city International Settlement French concession

1899 Expansion of International Settlement

Chinese city British Settlement American Settlement French concession

1848 Establishment of the French Concession

Chinese city British Settlement American Settlement French concession

1861 1st French Concession expansion

1899 2nd French Concession expansion

Chinese city International Settlement French concession

1914 3rd French Concession expansion

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Chinese city British Settlement American Settlement French concession Natural riverbank

The first development of the harbour in the west bank (1866) Shanghai entered into the modern era after the First Opium War (1839-42). The Nanjing Treaty (1842), commonly known in China with the name of Unequal treaty (不平等条约) imposed to China after the defeat In the Opium War, opened up Shanghai as a trading port to foreign countries. This treaty brought about tremendous changes in Shanghai (He, 2015). Among the most important were huge foreign investments, growing numbers of foreign residents, the development of modern industries, the construction of European style buildings, and the establishment of Western concessions (Wu, 2000).

Ship companies were founded along the banks of the river, together with small size factories and mills. As a result, the port infrastructures were constructed on a large scale. Many ports, which were built by foreigners, as well as the shipyards and warehouses belonged to the ports , appeared on the waterfront of Huangpu River (Lu, 2016).

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Companies along the West bank Companies along the East bank

Development of the industrial activities in both of the banks (1946) During the Republic of China period (1912–1949), the Kuomintang conceived the first generation of Shanghai’s urban plans: the Greater Shanghai Plan 1931, the New Urban Development Plan 1937 and the Urban Plan for Greater Shanghai 1946 (He, 2015). All of them paid attention to the expansion of the city and development of new urban areas. The third one made a significant contribution to the peri-urban development of Shanghai. In terms of its functional organization, this plan was strongly influenced by Eliel Saarinen’s “theory of organic decentralization”, while the road network design was inspired by the Greater London Plan 1944 (Shanghai Urban Planning and Design Institute, 2007). The waterfront started to be consider not only as a port and industrial infrastructure, but as also as a potential residential area.

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Heavy industries along the East bank

Development of the industrial heavy industry in Pudong district (1982) The Open Door Policy (1978) introduced the market reform. The establishment of the land leasing system (1979) differentiated land values, influencing the urban development. Moreover, urban regeneration became easier because of the higher land prices in the central city area (Zhang, 2007).

Under this shift, the Comprehensive Master Plan 1986 was issued. It was China’s first comprehensive master plan considering not only intensive uses of urban land but also social and economic goals (Zhou and Logan, 2004). The Plan 1986 played a dominant role in guiding the peri-urban development of Shanghai, increasingly influenced by market forces, but also shifted its focus into the urban regeneration of the city centre. On the banks we have two different situations: while the west one, were where located the old settlements, started ideally a process of regeneration, in the east bank, especially in Pudong area, started a process of development to stimulate Shanghai’s economic development and re-centre urban development from the west side to the east side of Huangpu River (He, 2015).

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Heavy industries cluster left after the delocalization Lujiazui CDB

Industrial delocalization and establishment of the Lujiazui CDB, Pudong (1990) The designation of Shanghai as Special Economic Zone (SEZ) boosted the role of Shanghai as national industrial center. It enjoyed highly preferential policies, which attracted huge foreign development investments and catalyzed an economic boom. Shanghai regained its national dominant role in the 1990s, due to its links to political power at national level, traditionally a crucial factor influencing urban development in China (He, 2015). In 1990 the government announced the goal of restoring Shanghai’s leading role in China, to reboot its economic prosperity and to restructure its urban development (Walcott and Pannell, 2006). A series of strategies were adopted (reducing the tax burden, encouraging both foreign and domestic investments), from which the establishment of another SEZ in Shanghai became the most important one. The state positioned the Pudong District as a ‘dragon head’ that would enable China to open-up further, and to stimulate a regional economic boom along the Yangtze River Delta (State Council, 1992).

New and advanced functions moved into the Pudong District (financial institutions, high-tech parks and large housing projects), while Lujiazui, which used to be an undeveloped territory, became the new commercial and financial centre of Shanghai (He, 2015).

From now, the waterfront gained more and more importance in the debate.

29

Conservation of green spaces is thereafter a big challenge for the implementation of the Plan 1999, which proposed to conserve more green spaces and to establish a green system including various types of green spaces (e.g. a green belt, building sensitive areas, ecologic-sensitive areas, forests, vegetable protected areas and green wedges) (He, 2015). Three development axes would guide future urban developments. The west-to-east development axis highlighted the close connection between the traditional city center on the west bank of the Huangpu River and the Pudong District (Ibidem).

In the central city, tertiary industries would replace the secondary industries, which would be relocated to the periphery. Between the outer ring and the suburban ring, high-tech industries and non-polluting urban industries would be located. At the same time, the plan emphasizes the protection of the excellent modern building among which, , the Shanghai Committee of Cultural Relic Management , included 26 industrial sites along the river (Lu, n.d).

30

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Huangpu Waterfront Revitalization Masterplan, is a project initiated by the Shanghai Municipal Government started since 2002.

It has an ambition of a total transformation of 45 km of waterfront along the Huangpu River of Shanghai. After Expo 2010, the idea of implement an organic system along the west bank of the river became systematic. One of the plan, called tree hearts, five centers and one band was proposed in 2010 by the Shanghai Urban Planning and Design Research Institute for the area in between the Yangpu bridge and the Middle ring bridge . It emphasizes that the development of Yangpu Bridge area shall be accelerated, and be transformed into a vital area regenerated from traditional industrial district and into a creative area combines historical culture and fashions of the day (Shanghai Urban Planning and Design Research Institute, 2012).

31

4-8

Shanghai has stepped into a new stage of transformation and renewal. The east Bund of Huangpu River is now required to include public space quality enhancement, ecological environment optimization and cultural function clustering.

The document follows mainly three direction: a more Sustainable Eco-City, a more attractive humanistic, a more dynamic innovation city. This macro-categories work in synergism to create what is rhetorically called the rhetoric of the world class city or global city (together this two terms are used 18 times in the Shanghai master plan presentation). The plan stressed on the improvement of the landscape along both the banks of the river, together with the recover of the polluted lands (Shanghai Urban Planning and Land Resource Administration Bureau,2018).

The Government Work Report of Shanghai 2016 clearly puts forward the goal of “stretching 10 km of public space along the Huangpu River”, a focus in the first year of the “13th Five-Year Plan”. As required by Shanghai Municipal Party Committee and Municipal Government, Party Committee and Government of Pudong New Area, following the ideas of “Innovation, Coordination, Green, Open and Sharing”, started the planning of public space along the east bund of Huangpu River. In 2016, an international competition was launched, with the aim to receive inputs for the future development of the green belt along the river. Here the results, that could inspire and reshape the future identity and image of the east bank of the river. (Shanghai Municipal Administration of Planning and Land Resources, 2016). First, urban politicians aggressively

32

The world class city • Promote the vision of their city as world class when they solicit public support for controversial plans, such as urban redevelopment projects, large-scale infrastructural upgrading and hosting or bidding for high-profile international events. […]

• Second, politicians and business associations also utilize world-city rhetoric when arguing for large-scale tax incentives and business-friendly economic policies. While attempting to fulfill their ambitions, such politicians often associate the city’s world-city status with its home-grown companies’ global reputation and/or its ability to attract internationally famous businesses. […]

• Third, the world-city campaign is used to support attempts to heighten multiculturalism and, in a broader sense, cosmopolitanism among city residents. […]

• Despite all the rhetoric, it remains unclear whether world-city status can be achieved through a well-designed economic plan.

(Kim, Short 2008, 90)

From Airpocalisse to eco-civilization Over the past ten years or so China has been on a drive to reduce its carbon outputs by increasing energy efficiency (in both production and usage) and by shifting from a reliance on coal to renewable (Reuters, 2019). With President Xi taking office in 2013 progress has accelerated. As a counterpoint to liberal environmentalism, the Chinese proposal of Ecological Civilization is focused on s the symbiosis between economic development and environmental protection (Wang-Kaeding, 2018). It highlights the functional logic of profitable environmentally friendly projects. In this way, china is slowly trying to lead the global environmental regime, occupying the voids left from the other global players (ex. USA after Donald Trumph took office nda). What remains to be seen is whether Ecological Civilization is leading China and its followers toward an exit from liberal environmentalism and heralding a new era of so-called “authoritarian environmentalism” (Wang-Kaeding, 2018).

33

FUTURE VISIONS 34

Hassel concept is to create an urban forest along the river was shortlisted for an international design competition for the Huangpu waterfront.

The East Bank Urban Forest would see a continuous woodland of two million trees planted (one tree for each of Shanghai’s two million children). The urban forest would contain a multitude of different activities and places.

The same idea of the nature offer a changing image from season to season, year to year. Pathways would run the full 21 km of the site, winding along the river’s edge and through the forest.

A system of walking loops would

lengthen and heighten the promenade experience, giving people a new perspective on the river and city and overcoming existing barriers such as waterways, ferry terminals and industrial sites (Hassel, 2016).

Hassel studio

Huangpu East Bank Masterplan Proposal, Hassel, 2016 35

Agence Ter studio

36

Agence Ter and Team proposed to define the main guideline as an association between the need to create a major continuity and the need to organize the different flows and activities. A triptych of paths, orchestrating the major uses, has been defined. The Main Path, principal artery of the bank, would be a comfortable and attractive pedestrian promenade offering a range of permanent and temporary animations and services (street food, playgrounds, parks, shops‌). The Sports Path caters mainly to cyclist, joggers and fans of new urban sports. In addition to its sport field function, it would also become a new soft transport axis for

the city, connecting numerous residential and business neighborhoods. The Discovery Path invites to appreciate the richness of the river bank and it’s natural, cultural and architectural heritage.

In complement to the linear approach, the project aims to bring together the neighborhood to the river by initiating new spatial links and habits. In this context, Agence Ter and Team proposed the construction of new plazas and river perspectives, urban hubs on existing ferry stations and connections to the metro system. The river bank should become the extension of the house of Shanghai’s residents (Agenter, 2016).

For the 21 kilometer/13 mile reach, Terrain developed the idea of the living waterfront, a new generation of urban waterfronts that provides continuous light rail, biking, jogging and walking connectivity, parallel to the river, through a system of woven ecologies. The new ecological system restore and renew natural systems, integrate cultural and recreational activities for people, and provide resiliency interventions responding to potential climate change and subsidence impacts. Eight destinations were envisioned along the waterfront, each with a different set of attractions designed

Terrain studio to activate the waterfront by drawing in people of all ages at all times of the day.

The living waterfront aims to create a socially active and environmentally responsible linear park for Pudong, one that will endure in poetic contrast to the urban waterfront that defined the historic Puxi side of the Huangpu River. The living waterfront and linear park will accelerate the transition from a manufacturing-based economy into a consumer-based one, by attracting the best and brightest industries, those who will lead the way for China (Terrain, 2016).

Huangpu East Bank Masterplan Proposal, Hassel, 2016 37

West8 studio

Huangpu East Bank Masterplan Proposal, West8 studio, 2016 38

Based on the approach: ‘simple yet beautiful, relaxed and romantic’, West 8 introduces four new major city squares in this 16 kilometer waterfront: Minsheng Cultural Square in the ferry terminal area; Harbour Square at the entrance of a yacht harbor with historic industrial architecture; Baizi Square(Hundred-Sons Square) with a alcove-form seating element intergrated with a retaining wall; and the Xinhua Square which connects Pudong’s most important business area Dongfang Road, functioning as a key node.

West 8’s design for Xinhua Waterfront Park will turn the east coast of Huangpu River to a integrated waterfront corridor

with new city squares and waterfront public green space, complete with cycling tracks connecting to the city center. (West8, 2016)

“East Bund is going to be the coolest place on earth. It will be a vital urban space but also have wilderness and jungle. Ultimately we dream of creating the 21st century example of a river city, with a rainbow of 7 river parks developed within a backbone of continuity: by foot, by bike and by tram.� (Kcap, 2016)

Kcap studio

Huangpu East Bank Masterplan Proposal, West8 studio, 2016 39

The Green leap forward In contrast with the slow development of Greenwashing of Chinese the nature, the Chinese urban landscape cities growth in the last twenty years has been speed up by the central government and its planners (Stokman, 2012). As a results, nature is reduced as a decoration of the city, ignoring the primitive landscapes of the cities and the biodiversity.

In the last five years, 206 woody plant species within the green spaces in the city, of which only 64 (31.1%) were native to Shanghai and adjacent areas. Chinese urban landscapes consist of highly artificial forms and structures demanding intensities of maintenance not possible in Western countries. This green images involve 40

high water consumption and relatives high use of energy to create watering water. Water is another critical issues for what concern urban parks or green spots in Chinese cities. As already stated by former Chinese Minister Pan Yue, almost 50% of the water coming from th seven biggest rivers of the country is heavily polluted. The public debate is largely focus on industrial pollution, while the huge environmental cost of constructing metropolis and urban landscapes is usually suppressed (Stokman, 2012). If we consider the case of Huangpu river in Shanghai, where water quality ranking is of Lower Grade V

(the lowest grade on a national scale of I to V) unsafe for swimming and recreation, watering and devoid of aquatic life (Yang, 2007), is easy to affirm that each drop of water used for irrigation involve a big waste of energy, taking in account water purification and transportation.

More the plants required water, more energy is involved in the process.

Moreover,the introduction of new forms and species in the urban ecosystem, boost the destruction of the traditional landscapes. This approach treats nature as an enemy that can only be defeated by increasingly aggressive and only cosmetic and technological interventions.

The more developed the Chinese cities become, the “cleaner” and the more “beautiful” their urban environment appears, the more they destroy their natural resource bases (Beardsley et al, 2012).

Work of this type is boosting the degradation of the environment, in a already critical reality: China has 21 percent of the world’s population but only 7 percent of its land and fresh water. Two thirds of its 662 cities lack sufficient water; 70 percent of its rivers and lakes are polluted. In the past fifty years, 50 percent of China’s wetlands have disappeared (Ibidem).

41

High energy consumption Greenwashing Elements of the proposal

Recovering Landscape In recent decades, in cities with advanced as humanist ecology ecologies, there was a proliferation of glossy urban parks, urban forestry projects, brown-fields remediation intervention etc... While some of this projects performer ecological, social and educative function, most of them are only a green masquerade to cover the failure of urban politics (Hodson and Marvin, 2018).

Natural places created without designers are often what in our memories we remember as romantic, boundless, poetic, challenging. They are democratic spaces Simulation of the vision from with forms engraved deeply into people’s the Shanghai Masterplan 2017 everyday lives and memory (Yu, 2012).

- 2035, designed by the author Many large Chinese contemporary con42

structions create “landscape avenues� just for the purpose of monumentality and exhibitionism, using the Baroque model that pursues comprehensiveness, style, and the decoration of street facades to dress up the urban surroundings (Ibidem).

Using the structural shift that China is approaching now as an occasion for a paradigmatic change, it is possible to image a design a more coherent urban landscape, capable to perform ecological, social and educative functions. A great opportunity is given by the 2017 2035 Shanghai Masterplan, that already provides for a green footprint all

Ecological infrastructure Productive green Post-industrial eco-civilization Elements of the proposal

over the Huangpu river banks, avoiding all the above describe criticalities.

Another interesting aspect of the banks of the river, is the high concentration of ‘brownfield sites’ or ‘waste ground’ in the conventional sense but rather as a ‘paradise of weeds’ marked by unexpected assemblages of species and new aesthetic formations (Borasi,2012), as Gilles Clement did for his distinctive conception of landscape design.

In this way is possible to restore the ecology and preserve the historic layout of industrialism in Shanghai.

Contrary to the post-humanism contemporary tendency, both in architec-

ture and philosophy (from Stefano Boeri to Bruno Latour), disaffection with conservative strands of political ecology but to his evolving conception of humanist ecology (Clement, 2006) that remains rooted in a clearly differentiated reading of the human subject. As Clement stated, his idea can be read as an elaboration rather than a repudiation of modernity: the sciences of botany, ecology and other fields are enlisted into a synthesis that holds parallels with various strands of ‘eco-socialism’ and other environmental Simulation of the vision from ideas (Gandy, 2012). the Shanghai Masterplan 2017 - 2035, designed by the author 43

Bibliography • Anwaer Maimaitiming, Zhang Xiaolei, Cao Huhua. 2013. Urbanization in Western China. Chinese Journal of Population Resources and Environment, vol. 11, n. 1, pp. 79-86.

• Jedwab Remi, Christiaensen Luc, Gindelsky Marina. 2014. Paris.: Rural Push, Urban Pull and... Urban Push?’, working paper #15, Marron Institute of Urban Management.

• Chiri Gianmarco.2012. Complessità (senza) contraddizioni. Trento: LISt Lab Laboratorio Internazionale Editoriale.

• Jullien Francois.2012. The Book of Beginnings. Paris: Gallimard • Jullien Clement. 2015. De l’être au vivre, lexique euro-chinois de la pensée.

Paris: Gallimard.

• Logan John R. 2008. Urban China in Transition, Backwell New Jersey :Pub. Ltd. • Friedmann John. 2014. China’s Urban transition. London: University of Minnesota Press.

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• • Rossi Ugo, Vanolo Alberto. 2010. Bari: Geografia politica urbana, Editori Laterza.

• Friedmann John (2014). China’s Urban transition. London: University of Minnesota Press.

• Sha Yongjie, Wu Jiang, Yan Ji, Li Sara, Ting Chang, Lim Wei Qi (2014), Shanghai urbanism at the medium scale, Springer, Heidelberg.

• Campanella Thomas J.. 2015. The Concrete Dragon: China’s Urban Revolution and What It Means for the World. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

• Hsu Sara. 2016. China’s Urbanization Plans Need To Move Faster In 2017’. https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahsu/2016/12/28/chinas-urbanization-plansneed-to-move-faster-in-2017/#d23df5374db0, (accessed March, 2019).

• Weller Chris. 2015. Here’s China’s genius plan to move 250 million people from • farms to cities’, August 05, 2015, http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-chinasbig• plan-to-move-a-population-the-size-of-the-phillippines-from-farms-to-cities• 2015-7?IR=T, (accessed March, 2019).

• Duan Huabo, Li Jinhui. 2016). Construction and demolition waste management: China’s lessons’, Waste Management & Research, vol. 34, Issue 5, pp.

397-398.

• Zhao Bo. 2009. Land expropriation, protest, and impunity in rural China’, European Journal of Anthropology , vol. 54, pp. 97–105.

• William S Saunders, Kongjian Yu. 2012.

• Beardsley J., Hill K., Li D., Rowe P.G., Saunders S.W., Shannon K., Steiner R., Stokman A., Waldheim C., Walker P., Yu K.. 2012. Designed Ecologies. The Landscape Architecture of Kongjian Yu. Berlin: Birkhäuser • A. Carmenthesister. 2018. Salari cinesi pari o superiori ad alcuni salari europei. http://vocidallestero.it/2018/03/06/salari-cinesi-pari-o-superiori-ad-alcuni-salari-europei/, (accessed March, 2019).

• China Daily Uk. 2016. Seventy percent of people in Shanghai middle-income earners. http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2016-10/13/content_27053755.

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• • • • • • • •

• •

htm, (accessed March, 2019).

Deng, Y., & Yang, G. (2013). Pollution and Protest in China: Environmental Mobilization in Context. The China Quarterly, 214, 321-336. doi:10.1017/ S0305741013000659 Yu Y., Li K., Shu S. 2012. Preservation and Reuse of Industrial Heritage Along the Banks of the Huangpu River in Shanghai (http://openarchive.icomos. org/1314/) Yao Y. (2014). Towards the Methodology for the Reuse of Industrial Heritage in China. Phd thesis, Politecnico di Torino.

Wu F. 2000. The Global and Local Dimensions of Place-making: Remaking Shanghai as a World City. In Urban Studies, Vol. 37, No. 8, 1359–1377, 2000 Lu H. 2016. Research on the Transformation of Industrial Heritage into Residential Building --Taking Barcelona as an Example. Master Thesis, UPC Zhang Q.2009. Joint urban remote sensing event, vols 1-3, New York: IEEE , 2009, p. 1022-1028 Walcott, S. and C. Parnell (2006). Metropolitan Spatial Dynamics: Shanghai Habitat International 30 (2):199-212.

Kim Y., Short J. R. .2008. Cities and Economies. New York:Routledge.

Reuters. 2018. China carbon emissions in retreat after ‘structural break’ in economy: study. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-carbon/china-carbon-emissions-in-retreat-after-structural-break-in-economy-study-idUSKBN1JS1Y4 Hassel. 2016. https://www.hassellstudio.com/en/cms-projects/featured-projects/ Agenter. 2016. http://agenceter.com/projets-agence-ter/ Terrain studio. 2016. http://www.terrain-studio.com/projects/ West8. 2016. http://www.west8.com/projects/ Kcap. 2016. https://www.kcap.eu/en/projects/ Hudson M., Marvin S. 2018. The amenable city-region: Politics in the Low Carbon City. Rethinking Urban Transitions, pp.73-88. London: Routledge Yang .2007. Water quality characteristics along the course of the Huangpu River (China). Journal of Environmental Sciences Volume 19, Issue 10, 2007, Pages 1193-1198 Borasi G.2012. De la nature à l’environnement, “en verité, il est difficile de faire une place à l’homme” ’, in Giovanna Borasi (ed.) Gilles Clément/Philippe Rahm: environ(ne)ment: manières d’agir pour demain (Montreal: Centre Canadien d’Architecture; Milan: Skira, 2006), p. 41.

Gandy M. 2012. Entropy by design: Gilles Clément, Parc Henri Matisse and the Limits to Avant-garde Urbanism. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research Clement G. 2006. Une écologie humaniste. N.d.

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46

上澡

Industrial Heritage Re-tooled Case studies along Huangpu river 47

EXPO 2010 AREA

CASE STUDY #1 48

Pudong new area masterplan is adopted, including the designation of six functional zones: free trade, export processing, high tech industrial zones, a new container shipping port, a new airport.

The first industrial settlements are established in Pudong and Puxi riverfront areas.

1897

1912-1937

Construction of the Nanshi power station on the Puxi bank.

1949

1989

Chairman Mao Zedong proclaims the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

Pudong becomes part of Shanghai.

2001

Assignation of the 2010 Expo.

The occasion of Expo 2010 became an occasion to experiment and test the Huangpu rivefront plan. A first plan of post Exporeuse is adopted.

2004

Huangpu waterfront plan is adopted. It is the watershed between the industrial conception of the waterfront and the attempt to create a new relation between the city and the river, capable to reflect the new political image of contemporary China.

After 7 years, the future of most of the area used for Expo 2010 is still not well defined, despite of the plans redacted.

2010

With the theme of “Better City, Better Life” the Shanghai Expo 2010 is hold from om 1 May to 31 October 2010.

Almost 18000 householders (encompassing almost 47,900 people) and 270 between industries and enterprises were relocated before the event.

TIMELINE 49

50

EXPO 2010, designed by the author 51

Subdivision of the area

52

With the theme of “Better City, Better Life” the Shanghai Expo 2010 has been the China’s first World Expo. The assignation of Expo 2010 immediately became the catalyst for a large-scale redevelopment and a general rethinking and upgrade of the urban structure, to constitute a new model for the contemporary Chinese urbanization (Chen, 2016).

The area, designed by the Shanghai municipal government in 1999, is a cross-river dockland in the southern edge of the city center. The heterogeneity of the two part reveals the attempt of the government to experiment different proposal for the new idea of waterfront, capable

to improve the image of Shanghai as a global city.

The total proposed area covered almost 5,4 sq.km. The Puxi site was previously mainly occupied by a shipyard established in 1865, The Nanshi power station, a coal-fired power plant, and other minor industrial sites. The Pudong site was densely occupied with steel mills, warehouses, factories and residential quarters. The site was enriched with industrial heritage (including an 1872 dockyard and a 1931 hangar). Moreover, the past urbanization waves left the area with a general lack of infrastructure, insufficient amenities, poor quality

Zone A (Pudong district site) Zone B (Puxi district site) Connection (Lupu bridge) of the old houses heavy polluted soils.

EXPO 2010, designed by the author 53

Structural analysis during Expo 2010

54

Most of all, the 2010 World Expo was a reclamation of the old brown fields, huge impetus for the test and developtogether with the construction of a ment of the Huangpu waterfront plan, new image of green city, thanks to approved in 2001 (Sha, Wu, Ji, Chan, the design of the green belt along Lim, 2014). the Pudong bank; The upgrading scheme included sub- 3. improving life quality and traffic stantially 6 different lines of intervention condition, the new connection be(Chen, 2016): tween the city and the waterfront (with the construction of Houtan 1. functional reform: it aims at delocalpark) but also the improvement of izing all docks, factories and waretwo new metro lines, serving the houses on the banks and building an new area, and the construction of integrated an open public waterfront, the new bridge that connect the viwere residence, work, leisure and brant Puxi district and the still quite tourism are integrated; isolated Pudong district; 2. environment protection: it aims at the 4. heritage protection: a campaign

Zone A (Asian countries) Permanent buildings Zone B (Southeast Asian and Oceanian countries) Zone C (European, American pavilions and African clusters) Zone D (corporate pavilions) Zone E (Urban Civilization, Urban Exploration Pavilions) Urban Best Practices Area Green corridor Metro station of survey and restauration was launched to preserve and reuse, also as facilities related to the expo event, many historical buildings hosted in the city center; 5. reconstructing the space landscape of the city. Shanghai Huangpu Riverbank Development Group was established to coordinate the waterfront development of both bank of Huangpu River in different urban districts; 6. reconsider the industrial buildings as renewable resource or reusable heritage.

The chosen strategies needed a big effort and mainly concerned changes in the hardware of the city. Generally there is a lack of flexibility and the political and economic efforts can be paid off only if the future strategy will be accepted and supported by the several stakeholders that have their interests in this area.

EXPO 2010, designed by the author 55

One of the most direct collateral effects of the organization of Expo was the general upgrading of the urban condition of the buildings along the first and second rows of streets that are facing the expo area.

Refurnishing of the facades, provisioning more green area and pedestrian facilities are constituting the attempt of integrating the urban quality to fulfill the urban needs in a long run (Wong, 2010).

As Wong (2010) stated, more generally the event became the occasion to review the Comprehensive Planning introduced in the 1999, with the aim of defining also the political direction for the future’s plans. Particularly, the attempt to apply 56

the “3 concentrated” (p.7) principles embedded in the master planning, it is quite evident in the opinion of the author.

The “3 concentrated” is separable in 3 basic concepts: 1. the repositioning and gathering of the core economy sectors, into new and well-coordinated zoning areas; 2. maximize the urbanization effort by re-organizing the land resources in a more efficient manner.

3. concentrate the urban facilities to fit various needs of the community in view of enhancing actual living quality within the city.

Except for the first principle, the success of the application of the other two is referring mostly to the post use of the area that, after 7 years, it is not well defined, despite of the plans redacted.

EXPO Area in ‘Upgrading the City Quality of Shanghai making use of the 2010 World Expo Opportunity’, Wong, 2008 57

SOE • China has approximately 150,000 SOEs (state owned enterprises), of which around 50,000 (33 percent) are owned by the central government and the remainder by local governments. The central government directly controls and manages 102 strategic SOEs through the State Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) (Export.gov 2017).

• The term ‘state-owned enterprise’ came to be used after China decided to reform state enterprises by separating ownership and management. While the state retains ownership or majority control, it gives increasingly more autonomy to SOEs’ managers to run the business. SOEs are owned by central, provincial or municipal governments (Fan,Hope, 2012).

• SOEs are still subject to orders from Party committees that sit above their corporate boards (Reuters, 2017)

Expo preparation: the Relocating factories and inhabitants beland acquisition issues came the major tasks before the development of the expo site. Almost 18000 householders (encompassing almost 47,900 people) and 270 between industries and enterprises (Chinese and international) were relocated (Chen, 2016).

Even though the direct interest and implication of the Chinese central government, the Shanghai municipal government had made great efforts in persuading and negotiating the relocation, particularly with the central SOEs that covered the 74% of the total enterprises unit (Chan and Li, 2017). Because of the easy predictable rise of the value of the land within the 58

Expo area, SOEs were reluctant to give the land ownership. The municipal government had to elevate the negotiations to the level of the central government (the vice chairman of the Shanghai Municipal Development and Reform Commission went to Beijing to report the issue) (Y. Deng et al., 2015). Even after the support of the central government, some of the SOEs refused to make room for the event without special benefits. It is the case, for example, of the Jiangnan Shipyard company, that agreed to be relocated only after the special condition of retain part of the land in the Expo site was accepted by the Municipality. It

Land ownership rights • Public ownership of both urban and rural land has remained unchanged since the pre-reform planning era. Urban land still belongs to the state, while rural land belongs to rural collectives (Huang, Huang, Zhao,Liu, 2017).

• A market in urban land use rights was introduced in the postreform era (from 1978). Urban land use rights can be transferred, and users of urban land are allowed to obtain land use rights by bidding, and through auctions and listings (Ding, Lichtenberg, 2008).

• The goverments decide how and when to develop the area (Ding, Lichtenberg, 2008) (Ibidem).

• Autonomous type of land development is illegal, but does exist, and it has contributed to China’s fast industrialization and urbanization processes (Huang et al, 2017).

• Recently it has been developed a system of long-term leases for userights that gave private investors control over land, albeit for a limited period of time (Ibidem).

is easy to imagine how, this institutional bug, will create a lock-in future development pathway for the area (Chan and Li, 2017).

59

Post-expo reuse plan

60

As already stated, a series of design competition for the master plan of the waterfront area of Huangpu river took place in 2000 and 2001, with the final assignation to the winning team SOM (Chen, 2016).

For the expo site and each of the key expo facilities, the master plan defines not only the basic principle of design but also their post-use as well as strategies for operation and management (Wu, 2009).

The area was divided two plots, one in Pudong and the other in Puxi. Each plot is again divided in 5 functional zones (classified from A to E), three on Pudong side, where five newly built exhibition venues are designed as permanent build-

ing, and other two on Puxi side, where there is the highest concentration of reused industrial buildings and where was designed the so called Urban Best Practice Area.

The plan for the Expo was released together with a plan for the post use of the site. The target was to release about 40% of the site area after the Expo in order to create a new development capable to give multi-level solutions for the needs of the new path of urbanization (Y. Deng et al., 2015) Two plans dedicated to the reuse of the area after the Expo event were approved: one in 2004 and the last one in 2011 (Y.

Under new development Deng et al., 2015).

In the last implementation of the plan, the area is divided, by a rigid zoning, in the following way: • Zone A&B convention, exhibition and business center; • Zone C designed as Houtan expansion zone (long term functions haven’t decided yet); • Zone D as cultural and museum center; • Zone E as Eco-living quarter.

To better study and criticize the future development of the area, it is more refined to split it considering each plot separately.

Permanent buildings

EXPO 2010, designed by the author 61

Pudong plot future plan

62

Deconstructing the area, it is easy to recognize the main elements that compose it: • the riverside • a green belt facing the river (Houtan park) • big size plots, now occupied by big and mega scaled building • another planned green belt facing the old perimeter of the area.

Those elements are nowadays linked with the future plans of reuse. Concerning the A&B zones, the plan provides a change of function for the 5 main buildings, property of the state and managed by central SOEs or joint venture: Expo

Center will become a convention center for high-level political events, conventions and large public events; Theme Pavilion into a commercial exhibition center; China Pavilion is transformed into China Art Museum; Expo Performing Arts Center is renamed as Mercedes-Benz Arena hosting large-scale live performances and sports events. All the other parcels are divide among 13 SOEs, that are planning to build an office headquarters (Y. Deng et al., 2015).

There are some critical issues regarding the future of the area.

The first one is the apparent isolation of the area, considering that the metro

Residence/office Convention center New green areas Houtan park Cultural center stops built in the occasion of the event are now dismissed for the temporary lack of passengers (Deng et al., 2015).

The design of the green area configures a physical border that breaks the continuity with the existing fabric.

The second one is the exclusiveness.

The actual configuration provides mega-scaled buildings, used in the limited time of events and, due to the dimensions, can be interpreted as a gated community (Deng et al., 2015), follow the principle of “no admission except on invitation� (p.11).The addition of only offices without any housing or complementary function, is strictly limiting the

use of the area during the hours of the day and the day of the week, providing a use only for the office hour time and restricting the use by the community.

Considering that the riverfront park is geometrically disposed to offer its longest side to these areas and that there are not wedges protruding into the urban fabric, the above-mentioned issues will probably discourage the use of the park by the community, ineffecting the original idea of the permanent public waterfront.

EXPO 2010, designed by the author 63

The Puxi parcel is located on the west bank of Hungpu river. The site is the former site of several industries and shipyards; among them we can find the Jiangnan Shipyard, established in 1895, the Nanshi power plant and the Shanghai No.3 Iron & Steel Works, established in 1913. Beside the temporary functional needs of the expo, some zones like the Urban Best Practice Area (UBPA), were planned for a long-life use, becoming the showcase of virtues practice in the field of reuse, sustainability and low carbon emisPuxi Plot: Urban density before sion buildings. and after the EXPO, designed by Even if the area accounts for only 5% of the author the total area at the Shanghai World Expo Puxi plot Urban Best Practices Area

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Park, it has a capital importance since it embeds the articulation of the new political visions articulated in the 13th Five-year plan 2016/2020 (Y. Deng et al., 2015). The vision is to make a world class cultural district, composed by the first state museum of contemporary art, the Power station of art, the Children’s theater and the Expo museum. Except for the Power station of art, the UBPA is generically designed as a mixed-use community, which is promoted for small businesses of creative industry and leisure functions.

The decision of reuse some of the industrial buildings while demolishing

the minor architecture, shaped the plot as typical industrial zone fabric without the original compactness, highlighting the disconnection from the context (Sha et al., 2014). One aspect it is important to point out in the discourse of industrial heritage in China: there is a functional continuity between the factories and the surroundings, due to the generative idea of the danwei (work units) where, the multi-tiered hierarchy of the organization of the society is simbolized by designing workplace and housing as a spatial unit. The disconnected partial remains are not enough to give a significant idea of functional relationships,

spatial layout, organization of production lines, and interaction with the surrounding landscape of the former industrial site.

Moreover, almost every reuse is limited to the structural elements of the building, using de facto a rhetoric concept of the adaptive reuse practice. Often, the reuse of industrial building, it is just justified as a decrease of pollution due to the act of reuse material and part of the structures.

The needs for the reuse of old building, together with the achievement of some energetic standard, it is the main reason behind this intervention.

EXPO 2010, designed by the author 65

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Power station Warehouses Steel factory Factory Warehouses

Nowadays not all the buildings are being reused, and the intention to create a “dynamic block” (Deng et al., 2015, p.7) seems still far away: the new functions are limited to institutional, restaurants and exhibition spaces. The original idea of revitalizing the area trough the addition of small commercial buildings seems now impossible due to the high cost of the rents. On the other hand, the area isn’t so attractive to attract atelier or creative businesses, as it was predicted from the planners (Deng et al., 2015, p.172) We can still consider it as a transitory solution Puxi Plot durig EXPO 2010, but, also hypothesizing the implementadesigned by the author tion of small retails seems not a successful 66

alternative, due to the dimension of the building, the rise of the rent prices estimated in at least at 17%, and to the lack of a consolidated market in the area.

The potential of the area is clear, as the need of the implementation of a network of open and semipublic spaces, created by the addition of buildings at different scale, taking in account the possibility to call for big international design studio and small retail shop as complementary function. The most dynamic streets in the world are always packed with small shops and street life, with interesting opening and free and attractive entry. If the Expo was a tool

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MOCA Power station of art Academy of urbanisme of Shanghai Exhibition center Exhibition hall Show rooms Restaurants Skp office Conference hall M Whang Shu pavillion (monument) New pier New green areas

to make raise Shanghai as a world-class city, at which model was it pointing at?

Nowadays it is hard to find any trace of street life and local future in this places, that have more the sterile image of business centers.

On the other hand, the lack of implementation of a livelihood seems to be the major cause for the underestimate plan and, probably the sign of policy vacuum of political willingness and readiness to take concerted actions..

Affordability would become a priority for existing and new residents, potential property buyers, and tenants of smaller businesses (Deng et al., 2015, p.11).

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Power Station of Art

Plan of the site, designed by author

1Qiu Zhijie, chief curator of the Shanghai Biennale, affirmed “because it’s a former power station, by the river, you could say it’ll be the Tate Modern of Shanghai.”

Power Station of Art, powrstationofart.cn, pp. 66 - 67

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Established on Oct. 1st, 2012, the Power Station of Art (PSA) is the first state museum dedicated to contemporary art in mainland China. Renovated from the former Nanshi Power Plant, PSA was once the Pavilion of Future during the 2010 Shanghai World Expo. Formerly it was the Nanshi Light Bulb factory, erected in 1897 at the end of the Qing Dynasty. It was officially renamed in Nanshi power plan in 1955, while the huge smokestack was erected in 1985 (Li, Li, & Jiang, 2015).

It is also home to the Shanghai Biennale.

Standing tall by the Huangpu River, it now occupies an area of 42-thousand square meters. It now houses exhibition sections that add up to 15-thousand square meters, and its 165-meter chimney, is an independent exhibition space.

Developed by Original design studio, it is often indicated as a watershed in the conception of the historical industrial relict (Sun, 2012).

The reality is slightly different. The building it is a typical case of retrofitting, being the building changed in its existing spatial order and structure and in its industrial peculiarity.

The shell has being substantially changed in its articulation and materiality, as it is easily perceivable from the curtain wall that now occupies big portions of the facades, while the interior doesn’t conserve any trace of the industrial past, not even in the spatial organization or in the conservation of part of the original machinery except for the pipes on the main facade.

The intervention it is associated with the Tate Modern of London1, due to the similar past and present functions. It is evident how the similitudes it is more ideal than literal, but this sort of “duplitecture” it is, in my opinion, the expression of a city that is trying to become a world class metropolis trough the assimilation of the symbols.

For the same reason, we can affirm that also the chose of the function is not ca-

sual, but it is also drawing comparisons to major world cities, paving the way to make Shanghai a new global cultural hub.

On the other hand, it is important to state the importance of this museum in the art evolution panorama of contemporary China, especially in a city where the artistic production is one of the leader branch of the cultural sector (Connor & Gu, 2012).

Some critics are questioning the relevance of these Chinese state-run museums. Art can push the boundaries of society, and in a country where the government censors what it judges sensitive or questionable art, may be difficult to produce meaningful and provocative exhibitions (Willett, 2012). Several artists were banned from exhibiting during the editions of the Shanghai Biennale that took place here (Qin, 2014).

History of the site • 1897. The Nanshi Electric Plant lit the first light of Chinese people.

• 1935. The power station was relocated by the Huangpu River in the Nanshi area, where PSA is now.

• 1955-2007. The Power Plant witnessed the rise of an industrious era.

The body and the chiminey of the power plant were built in 1985.

• 2010. Nanshi Power Plant became China’s first three-star Green Building at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo’s Pavilion of Future and helped reveal mankind’s imaginations practices about future cities.

• 2012. On Oct. 1st, 2012, the Power Station of Art is officialy opened to the pubblich. In the same year it became the headquarter of the Shanghai biennale (powerstationofart,n.d.).

Axonometry designed by the author

上 海 当 代 艺 术 博 物 馆

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The 14 ha site is located on the southern boundary of the Expo between the east bank of the Huangpu River waterfront and Puming Road (Archdaily, 2011). A former steel manufacturer and boat repair facility remained on site when the design was initiated in early 2007; construction was completed in October 2009 and has been open to the public since May 2010 (Yu, 2015). The design, proposed by Turenscape architects, had various concatenate criticalities to solve trough the design: the first challenge was to restore the high degradated environment and contemporary create a new relation with the waterfront that, until the new plan for the use of the waterfront, was merely conPlan of the site, designed by au- sidered as a dump. Moreover, not only the land was heavily polluted, but also the thor water of the Huangpu river that lap upon the shore, classified level V in the Chinese system of classification (I to V) of the water quality (Turenscape, 2017).

The site is narrow, locked between the Huangpu River and a main city road. This thin band of land challenged the ability to effectively organize public spaces over a long distance with a water frontage over 1700m in length, while averaging only 50–80m in width, with the narrowest area being approximately 30m wide (Yu, 2015).

The park was designed as a living system with ecological services including: provisioning services (including food, water and energy), regulating services (such as phyto-purification of water, carbon sequestration and climate regulation, waste decomposition and detoxification, crop pollination, pest and disease control), supporting services (such as nutrient dispersal and nutrient cycling, seed dispersal and primary production), cultural and recreational services, especially by incorporating the Chinese garden culture and the industrial history of the site (Turenscape, 2017).

A layered design approach was used to organize the space, in order to integrate the several functions, interpret the history Houtan park

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of the site and assemble everything in a contemporary experience.

The layering of the ecological landscape combined with the regional agricultural and industrial heritage create an environmentally sensitive postindustrial landscape, that refers specifically about the past, present, and future of Shanghai. The mixture of these layers into an integrated system is a network of paths that creates an valuable experience for visitors during the Expo and, most of all, for the citizens of Shanghai (Archdaily, 2011).

Inspired by the fields of Chinese agricultural landscape, terraces were created to break down the 3-5 meter elevation change from the water’s edge to the road, and to slow the runoff directed to the stream in the constructed wetland.

Those are reminiscent of Shanghai’s agricultural heritage, vanished after the massive industrial development of the XX century. Crops and wetland plants were selected to simulate an urban farm allowing people to experience a new ecosystem and to enjoy the seasonal changes: the golden blossoms in the spring, splendid sunflowers in the summer, fragrance of the ripened rice in the fall, and green clover in the winter. It provides a premier educational opportunity for people to learn about agriculture and farming within the city (Yu, 2015).

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Images designed by the author 73

Industrial landscape

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The relics of factories and cargo piers are former steel factory running across the most important industrial trace on Puming Road, and in the original site. The design transformed the existing design, both structures were reused infrastructure using extraction, infill, and to become a unique entrance to the interspersion methods to reinvent and Expo and to Houtan Park. However recycle them to show the site’s industrial approval was only given for the repast and use, using the apology and rhettention of one half of these to be inoric of the preservation as an excuse to integrated into the ‘‘hanging garden’’. terpret the relics: • The floating garden: a terminal • The‘‘hanging garden’’:an industrial transformation. A cargo pier is locattransformation. The factory building ed in the middle section of Houtan structure have been reclaimed as a Park near the preserved existing wetmulti service center – a ‘‘hanging garland (Turenscape, 2017). Since the den’’ hosting a mix of bars and cafe pier is no longer operational, it has (Turenscape, 2017). There used to been reclaimed as a floating garden be two building structures from the known as the ‘‘reed platform’’. To-

Industrial landscape

Regenerated wetland

Phytodepuration system

Agricultural crop day the pier is an observation platform where visitors are immersed among the wetland with views of Shanghai’s skyline (Yu, 2015).

Exploded view designed by the author 75

The white elephant

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The design showcases the nostalgia of the productive earth, reconnects the urban dweller to the land, in a way that it is not dissimilar to the typical pathos of the Chinese landscape painting tradition (Richter & Weiland. 2012). Every element of the project seems to have a natural propension to isolate the park from the environment, like the terraced design of the constructed wetland, that reduces the relative elevation between the city and the river and subsequently contributes to isolate the inner part of the park from the urban context. The result create a glossy image, that contributes to the visual and physic isolation of the site. This is accen-

tuated by the aseptic image given to the industrial relics, where every patina or particular sign of the time is completely erased in favor of a fresh-painted appeal.

In this way, standing structure have a sculptural rather than preservative function.

The diversity of the landscape and the vegetation reinvigorates the waterfront (Yu, 2015). People enter the wetland through the paths traversing the fields and experience the recreated agricultural landscape nestled around an ecologically sensitive constructed wetland. At the same time, the constructed wetland acts as an additional buffer between the

Huangpu River and the city to prevent and retain flood water between the 20year and 1000-year flood event levees Richter & Weiland. 2012).

The charming appearance and the aesthetic of the design, considering the park as are stand-alone system, are undeniable, and have in the high ecology performances a huge added value. To the park considered within its neighborhood we can give the same opinion, that relentlessly brings to a reduce list of adjectives: isolated, stand-alone, unrepeatable (as a system along the waterfront), idolized.

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Shanghai Houtan Park, Turenscape Studio, 2010 78

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Bibliography • Sha, Y., Wu, J., JiY., Chan, S.L.T., & Lim, W.Q. (2014). Shanghai Urbanism at the Medium Scale. Berlin Heidelberg: Springer.

• Deng Y., Poon S.W., & Chan E.H.W. (2015). Planning mega-event built legacies e A case of Expo 2010. Habitat International 53, p. 163-177.

• Chen Y. (2014). Shanghai’s Huangpu riverbank redevelopment beyond world Expo 2010. Conference paper.

• DengY., & Poon, S. W. (2011). Mega-challenges for mega-event flagships. ArchitecturalEngineering and Design Management, 7(1), 23e37.

• Deng, Y., & Poon, S. W. (2014). Mega-event flagships in transformation e learning from Expo 2010 Shanghai China. Journal of Engineering, Design and Technology, 12(4).

• Chan C.K.R., & Li L. (2012). Entrepreneurial city and the restructuring of urban space in Shanghai Expo. Urban Geography 38, p. 666-686.

• Wu J. 2009. A rethinking of significant issuesabout Shanghai city planning and developmentadministration. Time + Architecture 110,p. 6–11.

• Wong R. (2010). Upgrading the city quality of Shanghai making use of the 2010 World Expo opportunity, available at: http://www.kenken.go.jp/japanese/ contents/cib/w101/pdf/mtg/1005salford/session01.pdf • Sun J. S. (2012). Original design studio: the power station of art, available at • https://www.designboom.com/architecture/original-design-studio-power-station-of-art/ • Li, X., Li, D., & Jiang, J. (2015). Made in Shanghai. Shanghai: Tongji University Press.

• Huang D., Huang, Y., Zhao, X., Liu Z. (2017). How do differences in land ownership types in china affect land development? A case from Beijing. Brian Deal • Ding C., & Lichtenberg, E. (2008). Using Land to Promote Urban Economic Growth in China.

• Fan G., Hope C.N. (2012). The Role of State-Owned Enterprises in the Chinese Economy. Chinausfocus.

• Richter M.,Weiland U.(2011). Applied Urban Ecology: A Global Framework.

Chichester: Blackwell’s publishing.

• Qin A. (2014, December 29). Contemporary Art Sizzles in Shanghai. New York Times. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/30/arts/design/powerstation-of-art-grows-up-with-a-10th-biennale.html (Last access 02/2018) • Willet M. (2012, November 29). Shanghai Is Finally Becoming A Serious City For Art. Business Insider. Available at http://www.businessinsider.com/shanghai-will-be-chinas-next-cultural-hub-2012-10?IR=T (Last access 12/2017) • Power station of Art (n.d.). Available at powerstationofart.com/en/.

• Archdaily (2011). Shanghai Houtan Park / Turenscape. Available at https://www. archdaily.com/131747/shanghai-houtan-park-turenscape. Last access 12/2017 • Yu, K. (2015). Resilience in Cities. Above and Beyond. CITYGREEN. Issue 10, January 2015, Pages 96-107

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WEST BUND AREA

CASE STUDY #2 82

Shanghai Nanpu Railway Station (1907-2009) founded during the Qing Dynasty, and served as one of only three stations for water-land transportation in the country.

1907

1917

Beipiao Coal Wharf (19292009) was the energy center for Eastern China after Liberation.

1929

The site of the Longhua Airport was first used as a riverside training ground for the Beiyang Army under the Republic of China. An airfield was constructed alongside the training ground and barracks, eventually developing into a large-scale airport in 1917. The birthplace of the Chinese civil aviation, became the first large-scale airport in China and the longest-servicing airport in the world.

TIMELINE

The first round of development attracted high-profile organizations and companies. he next round of development aims to leverage business clusters.

The Shanghai Aircraft Factory was the birthplace of the first large-scale, jet-propelled passenger plane to be independently developed and manufactured by China

1949

Chairman Mao Zedong proclaims the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

2012

The large scale redevelopment began in 2012 with two core projects designed to transform the area into an international cultural and financial center: “West Bund Culture Corridor” and “West Bund Media Port.”

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West Bund Area, designed by the author 85

Reinventing the industrial layout

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Shanghai West Bund is an urban branding and development, consisting in a network of different key projects, which integrated cultural, commercial and leisure functions within the Xuhui waterfront boundaries. The regeneration process of the Xuhui waterfront area next to the Xuhui sub-center and historical district is part of the Shanghai waterfront redevelopment plan: the total redeveloped area covers around 9.4 square kilometers in the southwest part of the Xuhui District, including 11.4 kilometers of waterfront (Westbund, n.d.).

In 2011, the Xuhui District 9th Party Congress decided to pursue a series of pol-

icies in favor of the cultural industry lead driven development, which determined the way for a comprehensive rethinking of the Xuhui Waterfront area. The stateowned enterprise Shanghai West Bund Development (Group) Company, Ltd, is responsible for the total development of the Xuhiu waterfront, included among the six core functional areas listed in the 12th Five-year Plan. The company was established in 2012, and currently there are nine primary subsidiaries and seventeen secondary subsidiaries under its control. The transformation of the area can be considered as “government-guided, market-based operations�, with the

Development area Cultural corridor

aim to reinvent the area and contributing to the urban and economic development (Westbund, n.d.).

The first round of development attracted high-profile organizations and companies including the Shanghai DreamCenter, Tencent, Hunan Mango Cultural Investment, Shenyin Wanguo Securities, and the West Bund Fortune National Center. Private art-and-culture-oriented institutions such as the Long Museum, the Yuz Museum, the Shanghai Center of Photography, and the ShanghART Gallery have also joined the development project. In addition, several international festivals have taken

place in the last years, such as the Biennial of Architecture and Contemporary Art, and the Art and Design Fair, helping to shape Shanghai West Bund into a center for cultural, commercial, and sport events.

West Bund Area, designed by the author 87

Further developments will be aimed to push business clusters in West Bund to strengthen the region’s presence in the areas of art, entertainment media, culture, and finance, while enriching the museum avenue with new construction projects like the West Bund Media Port, the Star Museum, Oil Tank Park, the West Bund Museum, and the Waterfront Theater (Sui, 2017). A wide variety of players are involved with the reinvention of these areas. Each of these parties has their own agenda, their own vision, and their own version of what the social should be, and architecture is used as the language by which these aspirations articulate them88

selves (Dreyer, 2015).

Historically, this waterfront area was a fringe of Shanghai central city, with some manufacturing and military uses like Longhua military airport, railway station and river port. The regeneration project includes the reuse of the industrial buildings, replacing them with contemporary residential, commercial and cultural developments and beautifying the riverfront promenade (Westbund, n.d.). The development plot is divided into three sub-areas, by two east–west running canals. From the water, the first band is comprised of large dispersed cultural facilities on a promenade (called

Museums and art centers Ateliers and studios Waterfront corridor

culture corridor); the second, high-rise commercial developments; and the third, gated residential developments (Sha, Wu, Ji, Chan, Lim, 2014). Thus, the following study will focus on the first segment. Here, the vision for Xuhui waterfront is translated into a concept of three bands.

West Bund Area, designed by the author 89

A

C

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The area was a center of transportation, logistics, and production for over 100 years.

It is characterized by vast open spaces and numerous water channels that served the industrial centers and national enterprises as the Longhua Airport, Shanghai Nanpu Railway Station, Beipiao Coal Wharf, and Shanghai Cement Factory. Nowadays the relics of the industrial past are still easily readable, and the spatial disposal partially retrace the old one. Differently from the fundamentally unifying purpose and standardized vision of the previously analyzed plan, West Bund is characterized by a network of medium scale projects, each of them leaded by a different com90

pany or association (Sui, 2017). In this way, what it was in the past an industrial dense area, today becomes a museum cluster, filled with a variety of other urban uses. The differences among the zones belonged to different state companies, became the basis for the creation of the new branding and iconic buildings sprawled in the area (Sui, 2017).

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Start museum Long museum Yaz museum West bund art center Tank museum Photography museum Water theater West bund museum (Centre Pompidou partern) C West Bund Bonded Artwork warehouse i Industrial relics Cultural corridor

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The main previous functions were (Westbund, n.d.): • Shanghai Nanpu Railway Station (1907-2009) founded during the Qing Dynasty, and served as one of only three stations for water-land transportation in the country. In the 1950s, the station was again renamed as Shanghai South Railway Station.

In the 1980s the station was rebuilt with an attached wharf, becoming the only station on the Shanghai railway system to have a wharf component at the time (Lu, 2015).

• The site of the Longhua Airport (1917-2008) was first used as a river92

side training ground for the Beiyang Army under the Republic of China beginning in 1915. An airfield was constructed alongside the training ground and barracks, eventually developing into a large-scale airport in 1917. The birthplace of the Chinese civil aviation, became the first largescale airport in China and the longest-servicing airport in the world.

In 1922, it was known as “Longhua Aviation Harbor” and served as the headquarters of Air China and the Eurasia Aviation Corporation. In the 1940s, Longhua Airport was the largest international airport in

4

1 2 3 4 East Asia, and in 1949 it was from this airport that Ms. Song Meiling, wife of the ROC leader Chiang Kaishek, fled the mainland. In 1952, Longhua Airport once again rose to historical significance, serving as the site for the Shanghai Military Commission’s Civil Aviation Administration station (Lu, 2015).

• V, it had a complete production line and was one of China’s most modern, large-scale enterprises.

The Shanghai Customs Building, and several international hotels of the time, were constructed using cement produced by the Shanghai

Former Longhua Airport tanks- Today Tank art center Former Shanghai Aircraft Factory - Today West Bund art center Former Longhua Airport hangar - Today Yuz museum Former Longhua Airport control tower - Today landmark

Cement Factory (Lu, 2015).

• Beipiao Coal Wharf (1929-2009) was the energy center for Eastern China after Liberation.

• “White Cat” washing products produced by Shanghai Synthetic Factory (1948-2009) were a household necessity for generations (Lu, 2015).

• The Shanghai Aircraft Factory (1950-2009) was the birthplace of the first large-scale, jet-propelled passenger plane to be independently developed and manufactured by China (Lu, 2015).

Almost every above-mentioned site is West Bund Area, designed by the today partially occupied by new differ- author 93

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ent private museums, institution and ateliers. Since 2010, China has entered into a second period of development, and the dynamic of founding private museums has exponentially increased. As the 2015 Private art museum report by Larry’s list pointed out, also the quality of the new private institution have done a huge leap forward, not only in terms of art collation but most of all considering the complementary functions, as the space dedicated to the research, academic and education. With a focus on the cultural and art industry through the support and mentoring of the Chinese government, accompanied by the process of economic 94

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structural transformation, the development trend and operation situation of contemporary Chinese private art museums is quite distinctive.

Having grown up in a open and internationalized environment, young collectors generally establish collections that highlight international diversity.

Under the Western scheme, private collectors can enjoy tax preferences and even tax deductions or exemptions.

However, in China no such policy of support exists (Larry’s list, 2015). For this reason, the complementarity among the function is vital for the existence of the private museums in China. For sure

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Former Beipiao Coal Wharf - Today Long museum Former Beipiao Coal Wharf - Today free climbing wall Cranes Former Nanpu Railway Station - Today Start museum

the lack of policy shaped the consumer program-related trend of the private museums in China, for which high fees, merchandising and rental of the spaces became the major sources of incomes.

Another art related business to point out, is the one of art warehouses, that, thanks to the lack of storage space of most of the museum, is dramatically increasing in Shanghai.

West Bund Area, designed by the author 95

This area needs to be read through two different issues: the first one regards the spatial and functional relationship created with the new interventions, whereas the second one strictly concerns the new model of regeneration tested here, with a deep implication in the conception of art and culture in China (Sui, 2017).

Regarding the spatial distribution of the new functions, it is evident the lack of integration with the existing urban fabric but also with the other developments in the area. The result is a segregation of the waterfront from the old area, and a disconnected urban fabric, also due to the rigid zoning of the tree bands in which is divided the plan. Even if the results explore new approaches for the waterfront by limiting it exclusively to commercial developments, the vibrancy of the area will likely be low, and the promenade would probably be underused if compared with its potential. Moreover, as Sha pointed out, “The current proposal does not give the existing Longhua Temple much consideration”, as well as it doesn’t integrate other historical site of Xuhui.

In this way there is missed potential in integrating the two greatest assets of the site – the waterfront promenade and the temple (Sha et al. 2014).

“The inclusion of art projects in mainstream real-estate developments is indicative of the middle-class ambitions of these properties (and, perhaps, Chinese development as a whole), real estate as a product, after all, is not intended to be consumed by the “oligarchy” (Peckham, 2015). This kind of development are partially considered as a political and social shift: as Jacob Augustus Dreyer stated (Dreyer, 2015), since the construction of the hard infrastructures is almost finished, the new focuses are direct to the construction of the soft infrastructure of society.

For these new public spaces to succeed, some sense of a public need to be built.

These projects became the symbol of the West Bund Area, The Economist, reconfiguration of the social space and of 2014 the stakeholders of contemporary China, Spatial analysis

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not anymore only directly connected with the Party but also to the private initiative. In this way, Shanghai clearly shows the new trend for the model of development, that is a hybrid of state and market forces.

Moreover, the policies from the National New-type Urbanization Plan (2014– 2020) are aimed to the multi sectorial integration of economy, ecology and social spheres. The cultural value, as the other mentioned in the plan, are evaluated and classified through their capability to generate new development and richness (Brombal, 2017). This key of lecture gives to the above mentioned shift a new sense, that aims to justify the creation of new independent cultural institutions (not directly subordinate to the control of the propaganda bureau) (Brombal, 2017), to shape a new class of consumers (inaccessible to the large public) and push a new model of development. “Developers have been throwing up condos all over China for the past 30 years, and the fact that such activities now are anchored around green space and cultural institutions that are open to the public bodes for a model of urbanism that is genuinely inclusive.”

(Dreyer, 2015).

Analyzing the data from the Statista statistic program, the number of museums increased from 1617 to 4109 in the decade from 2006 to 2016, In comparison, in America only 20-40 museums a year were built in the decade (Economist, 2014). The construction of new museums started in the larger cities, which already had established cultural scenes and a raft of institutions. The 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and the 2010 Shanghai Expo also sparked a consistent construction boom of cultural venues (Economist, 2014). Culture is becoming a “pillar industry”, loosely defined as one that makes up at least 5% of the country’s gross domestic product. Museums are an integral part of this policy, and they are multiplying rapidly.

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Culture and art pilot The West Bund Culture and Art Pilot for the success of all the activities that zone Zone brings together fourteen cultural take place here (Adam. 2015). organizations, including the Shanghai Center of Photography, the Shanghai DreamCenter Showroom, the ShanghART West Bund Space, the EXCEPTION de MIXMIND Design Center, Tiehai’s Studio, Dingyi’s Studio, Qiao’s Space, Aike-Dellarco, Atelier Deshaus, Atelier Z+, GaoMu’s Studio, TM Studio, and Fab-Union Space (Westbund, n.d.).

The pilot zone is expected to be a magnet for artists, architects and design organizations together, promoting the continued development of West Bund’s cultural industry (Adam, 2015).

Among those buildings, it is remarkPlan of the site, designed by the able for this research the West Bund Art Center. It was designed by Liu Yichun, author architect from Atelier Deshaus. Located in the old Shanghai aircraft is part of the West Bund Cultural Corridor, it opened in 2015, this 10,000-square-meter space boasts two stories of exhibition spaces, lecture halls, performance facilities, meeting rooms, and more (Westbund, n.d.).

The industrial features of the industrial building are still easily findable, most of all in the preserved structure. The building works as a white box, contaminated by the evident sign of the time over the original walls. The white is only interrupted by the insertion of staircases, the bar and the new additions. The result is substantially an retrofitting intervention,that left the identity of the building almost unchanged. At the same time, the characteristic features of the original building are been suppressed in function of the production of the new hip image.

On the other hand the intervention became more and more important thanks to the high level cultural events that take place here every year. Among them the West Bund Art & Design, several edition of the Shanghai Biennale and Talent, an art fair for the emerging artists.

The high density of famous design and Next page: Axonometry designed architectural firms, galleries and atelier by the author created an unique synergy, fundamental 98

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Shanghai Longhua Airport 1940, Yishutoutiao, 2017 p. 96 Current page: West Bund Art and Design Center, westbund.com, 2018

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The Long Museum was founded by esteemed collectors Liu Yiqian and Wang Wei. It was built for the Shanghai Xuhui Waterfront Development, Investment & Construction Co., Ltd. and designed by the Atelier Deshaus studio (Domusweb, 2014). The Shanghai government had offered a generous discount on the property (Fan, 2016) in an area that was once a manufacturing hub but is being transformed into a “cultural corridor” intended to rival New York’s Museum Mile and London’s South Bank. It is located on the old Beipiao Wharf site. A Coal-Hopper-Unloading-Bridge of about 110m in length, 10m in width and 8m in height, constructed in the 1950s, is remained with Plan of the site, designed by the a two-storey (Domusweb, 2014) underground parking. The primary aim of the author industrial remnant is to recall the memory of the site. It exhibit itself without a planned function, that suddenly change together with the eyes of the visitors: so it can be a shaded place for a tired man, or a unexpected playground for children that play hide-and-seek. Moreover it is used as the catalyst for the new construction, of which it is the geometrical ax. The form of the new intervention it is however inspired by the industrial structuralism, with the use of concrete cantilevered umbrella vaults (Wong, 2017).

The new design adopts the cantilever structure featuring “vault-umbrella” with independent walls while the shear walls with free layout are embedded into the original basement so as to be integrated with the original framework structure.

With the shear walls, the first underground floor of the original parking has been transformed into an exhibition space with the overground space highlighting multiple orientations because of the relative connection of the “vault-umbrella” at different directions. The technical systems are integrated in the vault structure (Domusweb, 2014).

Next page: Seven exhibition halls, with collections Axonometry designed by the auof modern art, “Red Classics,” traditionthor al Chinese art, and contemporary art Long Museum

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from Europe, the Americas, and Asia, are complemented by gift stores, cafés, snack bars, and other facilities (Thelongmuseum, n.d.). As Wang Wei, the director of the museum stated, the Long Museum has given much thought on how to promote traditional Chinese culture.

In this way, the education has a capital role in the institution (Xu, 2017).

龙 美 术 馆

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Current and previous pages: Long Museum West Bund Shanghai, Domus, 2014

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Industrial landscape

Factory ruins and abandoned mines are the product of the economic decline that has occurred in many industrial cities. Popular enthusiasm for the cultural values of abandoned industrial sites is apparent, in a ideal continuity with the eighteenth-century English picturesque gardens. Even if this can be perceive as fanatical or fetishistic, there are an existing viewpoint to help make it something enjoyable for many people Railway trails are among the most significant and popular forms of industrial ruin for hiking and discovering the testimonies of the past such as platforms, bridges, tunnels or rails. The conversion of New York’s elevated railway into the popular High Line is a spectacular example of the appeal of abandoned lines and their cultural potential.

“Abandonment is a natural and inevitable consequence of the end of industry but it leaves detritus that can speak to future generations. Offshore of Nagasaki is an abandoned coal mining island, Gunkanjima. Beyond all possibility of conservation in the conventional sense, corrosion and decomposition are its most overwhelming characteristics. Here a future as a ruin in unmanaged and continuous decay is both practical and perhaps the most ethically pure way forward. Intervention would destroy the majesty of disintegration.

This is the antithesis of adaptive reuse.”.

Neil Cossons, 2012 Understanding the aesthetics of ruins lead us to think of rich ways to show industrial heritage as even more real. ‘Ruin’ is often understood in a negative way, as something dead or decadent. However, it is also possible to think ruins in a positive and creative way: “ruin is what industrial heritage obtains as its essential characteristics through the passage of time, i.e. the revelation of history itself ”. (Ibidem).

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The passage of time is another substantial element possessed by heritage, and it’s an important element to preserve.

This emphasis can lead to the generation of different landscape values as industrial ruins.

Contemporary cities are increasingly subject to regimes of regulation and demarcation, so that spaces tend to be divided up and assigned for specific kind of activities and functions , such as shopping, playing, living or working.

Certain spaces are suitable for nothing, or rather they just display themselves, even if the lack of specific and planned functions have the character of temporality, waiting for the redevelopment. It is the case of industrial ruins, whose use value is apparently disappeared.

Those spaces have a wide range of unofficial function and, even if they are officially called wasteland, they host a multitude of “unofficial” functions and a potential variety of different social uses (Edensor, 2005). As Daniel Campo pointed out talking of the case of Brooklyn waterfront “...these same decaying sites, when appropriated for recreation, often offered intimate contact with the water. Brooklyn until relatively recently had many of these spaces, but BEDT was among the most accessible and prominent”.

Anyway they are displayed in our cities, in a unpurified and unconventional way that allow a strong relation with the context. Here memories are materialized and displayed, without the regime of the museums, without the intention of ``a program of organized walking’’ (de Certeau & Giard, 1998). Ruination produces a landscape in which the structures, formerly hidden, emerge. “The internal organs, pipes, veins, wiring and tube” now visible, are transformed from functional element to sculptural ones. Memorials are inevitably articulated based on the semiotic conventions of the era

Long Museum West Bund Shanghai, Domus, 2014

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in which they were built, but these significations can decline, so that sites are reinterpreted following a contemporary understanding of the places (Warner, 1993).

Technologies and techniques of mediation may also be utilized by individuals, giving new and personal interpretation: photography and video recording are acts of memory making which “mediate between individuality and collectivity’’ (Van Dijk, 2004, p. 270), and thanks to the system of rapid diffusion of this media, for instance Instagram or Youtube, they can rapidly build a new identity of the place, based on the personal interpretation of the author . Not all deteriorating structures can be considered ruins, and not all of them have to be preserved. The decline of the building must be representative of a change, a revolution and the ruin as to be the media that make this change. Significant transitions such as abandonment of a town, obsolete industrial site impossible to update and dramatic political changes are some examples of this type: they have to be emblematic of overall change in social patterns of historical importance.

An abandoned neighborhood, however, may indicate a change in how people live within a city or town and may be object of preservation. Simply deterioration has a depressive impact to the property values of the surrounding structures and action should be taken to prevent it, also taking in account the health and security problems that could derive from it (Okada, 2012).Shanghai Huangpu River rose a wide cultural heritage along its the banks. The Historic riverfront is a symbol of the city and heritage of its industrial past. A consistent part of the riverfront had been occupied by factory buildings of various typology and dimension, warehouses, wharf structures and shipyards that produce a new artificial landscape .

Starting from the 1990s, a period of rapid economic transformation brought a functional and spatial transformation of the structures of the Huang River riverfront. Up until now, a total of more than 108

400 buildings on 63 heritage sites along banks of the river (heritage buildings on the Bund not included) have been listed, of which more than 50% are industrial, warehouse, transportation and utility related structures. Such a percentage of industrial heritage is prominently higher than that in other areas of the city. The identification and designation of historical and cultural heritage sites along the Huangpu River, in the process of urban planning and development, is work in progress (Yu ,Li ,Shu, 2012). Since bureaucratic and planning time lasted for more than two decades, the inexorable march of time created ruins of once upon a time was the vibrant heart of the industrial production of Shanghai. The new redevelopment establish new questions about what to do with this new heritage but, at the same time, the talent of the designers that led the main projects in the redevelopment of the West Bund, gave new interesting answers in term of preservation, design and new aesthetics of the city.

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Bibliography • Sha, Y., Wu, J., Ji, Y., Chan, S.L.T., Lim, W.Q. (2014). Shanghai Urbanism at the Medium Scale. Berlin Heidelberg: Springer • Sui, Y (2017). Cultural innovation – new development in Xuhui Binjiang. H+A Hua architecture, 11, 46-51.

• Dreyer, J.A. (2015). Art is the impetus for the major transformation of Shanghai and beyond. Architectural review. Available on http://www.architectural-review. com • Lu, S. (2015). Port heritage: Urban memory of harbor cities (case study of Shanghai). Envisioning architecture: image, perception and communication of heritage. Lodz University of Technology, 71-81 • Williams, A. (2014). Long Museum in Shanghai, China by Atelier Deshaus.

Architectural review. Available on http://www.architectural-review.com • Brombal, D. (2017). Urbanizzazione in Cina. I piani non mancano, le alternative sì. Orizzonte Cina, Vol. 8 N.4, 2-5.

• Lucarelli, N. (2017). Il Centre Pompidou apre una sede a Shanghai nel West Bund. Arttribune. Avallabile on http://www.artribune.com • Cosson, N. (2012). Why preserve the industrial heritage?. In Industrial Heritage Re-Tooled - The TICCIH guide to Industrial Heritage Conservation. New York, Ny: Routledge • Edensor t. (2005): Industrial Ruins, Space, Aesthetics and Materiality. Oxford: Berg.

• Campo D.(2013). The accidental playground - Brooklyn Waterfront Narratives of the Undesigned and Unplanned. Fordham University Press Publication.

• Okada M.(2009). Industrial Heritage and Ruin Landscape. JSCE Newsletter of Committee on Historical Studies in Civil Engineering, No.37, 2009 • Yu, Y., Li, K., Shu, S.. Preservation and Reuse of Industrial Heritage Along the Banks of the Huangpu River in Shanghai (http://openarchive.icomos. org/1314/) • Fan, J. (2016). The Emperor’s New Museum. The Newyorker, November 7, 2016 Issue. Available at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/07/ the-emperors-new-museum. Last access 01/2018 • Xu, C. (2017). The Long View: A Conversation with Long Museum Director Wang Wei. Sothebys. Available at http://www.sothebys.com/en/news-video/ blogs/all-blogs/eye-on-asia/2017/02/Long-Museum-and-Wang-Wei.html.

• N.d. (2014). Domusweb. Available at https://www.domusweb.it/it/architettura/2014/10/21/long_museum_westbund.html.

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M50

CASE STUDY #3 112

Originally known as the Wusong River, a reference to Wu, the historical name of the region, it began to be known as the Suzhou Creek after Shanghai became a treaty port in 1843.

1907

1917

The Chunming Slub Mil, located in 50 Moganshan Road, was established by a British company

The mill became property of a SOE in the 1951 1949

1990

Chairman Mao Zedong proclaims the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

TIMELINE

The factory was closed. The artists started to rent the old industrial warehouse and to adapt them to studio. Soon it became one of the most significant center of indipent art in Shanghai 1997

In 1997, a comprehensive environmental overhaul of the Suzhou Creek was launched.

Households and docks were removed, greenery was planted, and sewage treatment implemented.

2005

The Creative Industrial Agglomeration Zone was officialy established.

The ex mill factory became well known with the name M50.

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50 Moganshan Road, or more commonly call simply M50, it is a contemporary art district in Shanghai. It is a story to tell within the panorama of industrial reuse in Shanghai, because in the simple act of reuse are involve the evolution of the city and several political shifts of contemporary China. It is located at the middle of the southern bank of Suzhou Creek, in the site previously occupied by the Chunming Woolen Factory (M50, n.d.).

The mill was established in 1917 by a British company. It became a SOE in the 1951 and, after the reform of the late ’80, it became again a private enterprise. Due to the program of relocation of the fac114

tories launched in Shanghai in the ’90, the productive activities were shut down and the area decommissioned in 1999 (Yao, 2014). As the Chunming Woolen Factory, several industries suffered the same fate. The spatial results were a proliferation of obsolescent industrial spaces within the inner city (Wang, 2012) After terminating the production, the municipal government had to take the decision on what to do with the decaying structures. Moreover, the scarcity of lands within the boundaries of the central city, the need for preservation of part of the historic heritage of the city, pose important questions. After years

Image designed by the author

of exploration, the Technology Committee propose a program of preservation and reuse of old industrial areas, accommodating creativity-based firms, establishing the so called the Creative Industrial Agglomeration Zone. Differently from the other post-industrial development, the fragmentation and the variable dimensions made impossible to find an overall development model, as it was done previously in Pudong and Hongqiao districts. However, the proposal of the government attracted the minimal interest of the developers, due to the low profit return in comparison with the ordinal strategy of redevel-

opment. The stall ended in 2005, with the promotion of the cultural industries among the pillar industries in the 11th Five-year plan (Wang, 2012). As Wang (2012) stated, “it was a way to re-invent the real estate sector as the incubator of the cultural industry is developed”. In the same way, it was proposed the “Three no changes and Five changes” principles at municipal level (Zheng, 2011). The three no changes principles involve “ownership of Land Use Right,” “nature of land use,” and “the major structure of the building”. The first one is easily interpretable as (Wang,2012) “…informal category of rentable industrial spaces on state-owned 115

Tree no changes lands” (p.9), while the other two give a conservative idea of the transformation.

The five changes allow changes in employment structure, management, type of tenants, form of business organization and enterprise culture (Zheng, 2011).

To give a complete image of the cultural background, we must take in account that before the mid-1980s most of the artist worked for directly or indirectly for the state, while the freelancing was almost not existing. Of course, there was expected that the ideological implication of the work of arts was no contradicting the dominant ideology. The establishment of private institution, such as galleries, 116

Nature of land use

Ownership

Structure of the building

opened new frontiers (Daniels, Ho,Thomas, 2012). The first group of artists was relocated here from the abandoned warehouse called “Red house” in the early 2000s (Zhong, 2009), but the dichotomy artist-old industry was already existing in the 1990s. Before the creation of the Creative Industrial Agglomeration Zone, even if in violation with the normative, a small group of artists was already established here, place side by side with small manufacturing firms and galleries. As Daniels states (2012), at the time the rent was very cheap, approximately 0,4 Yuan per square meter/ day (8,28 RMB=1 USD).

Five changes

Tenants

After the recognition as art district, the prices of rent changed dramatically, rising to 3-5 Yuan per square meter/day. In the same way, the administration made a change on the tenants, discouraging art studios and small manufacturing firms and in favor of more profitable and market oriented galleries or design firms (Daniels et al. 2012).

The institutionalization of the art district, brought to an increasing subjection of the art works by a more consistent control by the authorities but at the same time open the city to new successful developments based on the creative economy. Moreover, albeit the natural

Employment structure Business Enterprise culture Management

condition in a market economy is to be economically self-sufficient, this pushed the artist to dedicate part of their production to tailor made object and souvenirs, more commercially profitable and attractive for the big public. To a large extent, these creative clusters were planned by the government and led by real estate developers (so-called Creative Real Estate) (Dai, 2008). It was therefore critiqued by international scholars, regarded as a “production and sale of tourist commodities�, having little to do with creativity and the learning process, and a place often facing the problems of over commercialization and loss of authenticity.

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M50, in ‘The Remaking of Shanghai local spaces’, Lu, 2004

Plan of the site designed by the author

M50 is composed of 51 buildings that are currently grouped into 26 units (numbered 0-26) which house artist studios, design offices, and small shops. The original idea for the reuse was to make an active use of the industrial heritage, combining the attractive aesthetic of the industrial site and the need for preservation with the art and design studios (M50, n.d.).

M50 kept almost its original layout, due to the lack of large economy resources during the spontaneous reuse phase and to the fact that from 2005 it entered in the listed heritage of the city of Shanghai.

At the same time, the lack of regulation until 2005, determined the absence of a 118

clear documentation able to describe as the site was in its original state.

The renovation carried out in 2005 essentially took care of the aesthetic of the building, considered one of the most attractive feature for the image of the brand (Wang,2012). In general, the new additions are generally recognizable, thanks to the different architectonic language and materials used. Internal spaces were already ideal for large paintings, sculptures and exhibition, considering also that the flexibility of the space for light-industrial use and laboratorial use are quite similar. The most important change in the layout was the partial

M50, in ‘The Remaking of Shanghai local spaces’, Lu, 2004

demolition of the bounding wall, typical element of the productive unit and in general of the Chinese urban system (Feyen, Shannon, Neville, 2008). The demolition allowed the creation of a more permeable space, not anymore gated but always controlled, with the construction of a semi-public square within the border of the district. The controlled border is one of the main structural difference between the Chinese and the western idea of creative cluster, where the border tend to vanish (He & Gebhardt, 2013). Still unsolved it is the new relation with the waterfront that suffered of the long-time implementation

of the comprehensive plan of the zone (Feyen et al., 2008).

M50 can be considered the most successful redevelopment in Moganshan district.

The 2003 campaign of demolition contributed only to the drastic diminution of the density of the area of almost the 30%, while was unable to catalyze a new development process. Other two plans were implemented in 2005 and 2007, but considering that the 60% of the area is dedicated to green areas, few developers have presented an offer. (Feyen et al., 2008). Despite this, the district is now vibrant, commercialized and quite touristic thanks to the small art district.

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Creative cluster

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Creative and cultural clusters or districts, including art production, exhibition and trade, have been one of the key elements of urban regeneration practices in contemporary China and one of the wellknown examples of this type of reuse all around the world. According to UNESCO (2006), creative clusters are the geographic concentration which “pool together resources into networks and partnerships to cross-stimulate activities, boost creativity and realize economies of scale.” This definition reveals the basic principles that shape the definition of creative clusters: “geographic concentration” means a reduced and defined area in which people can meet, interact and inspire each other. Secondly, networks and partnerships are crucial to build a vibrant vision for clusters.

The adjective “creative” is eligible to produce creativity. Finally, clusters have economic implications that contribute to the overall creative economy. This definition is inspired to Landry’s vision (2000) of “creative milieu”, defined as “a place – either a cluster of buildings, a part of a city as a whole or a region – that contains the necessary preconditions in terms of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ infrastructure to generate a flow of ideas and inventions.

As the other productive industries, the geographic concentration and proximity guarantee economic advantages, from agglomeration of creative knowledge and skills, shared resources and mutual help among other benefits. (Evans 2009; O’Connor 2007).

As stated by many studies (Howkins, 2001; Hartley, 2005) the creative industries are generally run by youth-centered and highly educated individuals, freelance-oriented, as well as small-medium sized enterprises. They are generally considered as the new economy of the inner cities, in contrast with the high technological parks of that proliferate in the suburban areas (Scott 1988, 2004; Zukin, 1994; Ley 1996). Contrary to the traditional industrial clusters, wishing to

expand or demolish the city fabric, creative clusters reuse and reconstruct the physical and social structure of cities through the processes of gentrification and redevelopment instead (Ley, 1996).

According to Hutton (2004), creative clusters gather in inner city areas because of factors such as: • reassertion of the production in the inner city, • reconstruction of the industries • the innovative milieu of the inner city, including economic agglomeration and social agglomeration.

Dismissed old downtown industrial districts and households offer affordable workspace for creative industries. Hutton (2004) categorized the types of inner city creative clusters. The categories include, mix-land-used production districts with concentrated and dispersed new industries, market-driven and policy induced new clusters (like in the case of Suzhou Creek in Shanghai), the new Economy precincts and finally the “incipient” new industry sites with pioneer new economy firms.

The main difficulty in the evaluation of the existing creative cluster is due to the hardly comparable benefits from both cultural and economic points of views (Connor & Gu, 2012). The only pursuit of economic growth without considering the base of social justice can cause several social and spatial segregation (Bell, Jayne. 2004). On the contrary, it is nowadays impossible to claim investment for places that doesn’t have the possibility of contribute to the economic growth. In this sense, the future researches have to be founded on the breaking points between social justice and profit. As Florida (2003) pointed out and describes, the attraction for creative professions coming to a city is the quality of life, or a sort of diverse and consumption-based lifestyle. He used the term “Street Level Culture” to describe the phenomena, which includes a “teeming blend of cafes, side-

The image shows the density of the creative clusters in Shanghai (Connor & Gu, 2012). The creative cluster are mainly concreted around the old industrial sites

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walk musicians, and small galleries and bistros, where it is hard to draw the line between participant and observer, or between creativity and its creators”.

Considering this, not only the pure creative industry has to be consider as beneficial of the economic growth, but also the generated economy around it. Production and consumption don’t have to be considered detached. Evans (2009) argues that the planning of cultural activities should be spatially located close to the “production chains”, entering in the same logic that guides the other industries. Universities can play an important role in the development of regional creative economy across the 3Ts (Florida, 2016), “technology”, “talent” and “tolerance”. Not only because universities can be advantages by the advantage of cutting-edge research and technology innovation (which attracts more talent and start-up companies by researchers and students), but they also help to shape an innovative environment, by attracting a variety of people with diverse backgrounds of ethnicity, race, national origin, age, social class and sexual orientation. It is interesting to point out that, the “creative cities” listed in the UNESCO Creative Cities Network are ,for the majority, old industrial cities that found new ways to express the productive vocation (for example Turin, Detroit, Shanghai, Barcelona) .

Art and creativity could be the mean for urban transformation and heritage conservation, using an holistic approach capable to responds to the need of preservation, transformation, reuse and capable to give to the citizen added values: the whole community have to take advantage of a single project, maximizing in this way the effort and the use of resources (Connor & Gu, 2012).

The role that the creative clusters and creative industry play in the process of regeneration, intended as a multi-scale and complex event, depends on the connection among the “art districts” and the 122

city around. It may be seen as a physical link, as well as a social and economical connection, depending on the concept underpinning the working principle of each creative cluster.

These ideas can be applied onto selected case studies in Shanghai, seen as places offering a wide range of spatial configurations useful to explain the different levels of social interactions. Referring to the M50 experience it is clear the relevance of keeping the cluster open to the public, but at the same time preserving the privacy of those spaces dedicated to the individual creation (Ibidem). The resulting space is a combination of open public spaces, streets as galleries, exhibition places and private units for and private use and creation purposes. The presence of art galleries and studios in the former factories and warehouses form the core, and the proximity constitute the opportunity of interaction among the different users. The M50 concept was conceived to offer appropriate spaces able to both inspire the artistic creation, and creating a multi-level interaction based on a locally based art value.

The image shows the density of cultural events, using the data from the social media website Douban, one of the largest Chinese website dedicated to cultural event. As the authors Connor and Gu (Connor & Gu, 2012) stated in the research, comparing the two maps shows clearly that in terms of the sorts of events Creative industrial clusters are only peripherally involved. CICs are almost all ‘gated’ and entry by local residents is not encouraged. Enlighiting the potential role of the creative industrial cluster, it is important to add them in a wide and strategic plan, that not only consider the single cluster as a producer of capital, but insert each activity in a more holistic and urbanistic cultural economy approach (Connor & Gu, 2012).

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Bibliography • Jun Wang. (2012). Evolution of Cultural Clusters in China: Comparative Study of Beijing and Shanghai. Architectoni.ca, 2, 148-159. doi:10.5618/arch.2012. v1.n2.6 • Yanbin Yao. (2014). Towards the Methodology for the Reuse of Industrial Heritage in China. PhD thesis.

• P. W. Daniels,Kong-Chong Ho,Thomas A. Hutton. (2012). New Economic Spaces in Asian Cities: from Industrial Restructuring to the Cultural Turn.

Abingdon: Routledge.

• Sheng Zhong (2009). From Fabrics to Fine Arts: Urban Restructuring and the Formation of an Art District in Shanghai. Critical Planning, 16, 118-137.

• Jane Zheng. (2011). ‘Creative Industry Clusters’ and the ‘Entrepreneurial City’ of Shanghai. Urban Studies, 48, 3561-3582 • Jan Feyen, Kelly Shannon, Matthew Neville. (2008). Water and Urban Development Paradigms: Towards an Integration of Engineering, Design and Management Approaches. New York: CRC Pres, Taylor & Francis Group • O’Connor, J. (2004) ‘A Special Kind of City Knowledge’: Innovative Cluster, Tacit Knowledge and the ‘Creative City’”, Media International Australia, special issues on Creative Networks, No. 112, pp.131-149 • O’Connor, J. (2007) The cultural and creative industries: a review of the literature, London: Arts Council England • O’Connor, J. and Gu, X. (2010) ‘Developing a Creative Cluster in a Postindustrial City: CIDS and Manchester’, The Information Society, 26: 2, 124-136 • Shiling Z. & Bugatti A. (2015). Regeneration & Re-use in China Transforming the Existing. Ravenna: Maggioli Editore.

• Landry, C. (2000) The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators, London: Earthscan

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Next pages: Axonometry designed by the author pp. 122 - 123

Minsheng wharf Shanghai, in Minsheng wharf Report, Shanghai Design Institute, 2016 Image designed by the author pp. 124 - 125

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In search of a place: Minsheng wharf

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128

The research of the site followed the following criteria:

Minsheng wharf

• be located along the banks of the Huangpu river • Be interested by the green redevelopment described in the Shanghai 2017-2035 masterplan • Be an old industrial site • Have industrial heritage buildings still recognizable • In order to narrow the search, i added extra criteria, in order to be able to face a more complex and realistic situation: • Usufruct on and around the site fragmented, possibly by different Soes.

Along the banks there are still several sites that correspond to the given criteria. Some of them is being redevelop by international firms (OMA, Kengo Kuma to name a few), while others are completely recognized due to heavy demolitions occurred.

At the end the decision lies with Minsheng wharf area. Located in Pudong, the site is located along the lower reaches of the Huangpu between Shanghai’s financial district and a number of active traditional industrial areas further down the river with culminate in the main import and export ports as Huangpu pours into the Yangtze River. The site is quite centrally located within a number of new developments in Shanghai and Shanghai Lujiazui financial center .

Minsheng Wharf ’s location also places it in the crossroad of Shanghai’s transition from a manufacturing to a service-based economy. This meeting point of both the old and new world economies gives Minsheng Wharf the potential to harness the new industrious energy from the Financial District while becoming a paradigm for industrial preservation and reuse.

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The wharf, located at the end of Minsheng Road, was the largest and most advanced wharf in Asia. It history started in the beginning of the 20th century when British investments allowed the foundation of the company named Blue Funnel Line (Yu, Li & Shu, 2012). The wharf was initially called Swire Pier. In the first phase of construction two berths were build (n.

1 and 2) and, in 1924 other two (number 3 and 4). After this transformation, it became the big¬gest wharf in Asia. During the Japanese occupation, it was renamed as the Eight continents wharf and, afImage re-elaborated by the au- ter the lib¬eration it became the “Holts thor wharf ” (Shanghai Cultural Relics Protec-

Minsheng warf area

130

tion Unit Minsheng Road No.3, 2015).

In 1956 the property was transferred to the Shanghai port authority, that finally named it with the actual name, Minsheng wharf. Two large scale reconstruction have occurred: one in 1974, one the 40.000 tons silos warehouse were built, and another in 1982, when four building were replaced (Ibidem).

The function (mainly storage, housing, offices and transportations) are sprawl on the site: loads of the goods along the banks (cranes), transportations of the goods to the warehouse (railways), storage of sugar (buildings C1,C2, C3) silos for the grain (buildings B1 and

2

Buildings on the site Walled area

6 5

2

Urban connection Circulation inside the site Multilevel circulation B2), wareÂŹhouses for the grain (buildings A2,A3,A4,A5,A6) offices (building A1) and housing (buildings D1,D2,D3) (Ibidem).

Ownership on and around the site is already being fragmented as Huangpu River Group is looking for project proposals from other developers to realize the master plan. Currently, Vanke has acquired the larger block to the south and is currently constructing a highrise residential project, while Greenland Group, a state-owned developer and the largest real estate development firm in China, has acquired the smaller piece and is proposing a similar residential de-

velopment that has not started construction yet. Meanwhile, Depu group has acquired 3 buildings in the middle of the site and are finishing reuse works on all of them. The other properties have left to the Huangpu River Group and East Bank Group, two state-owned company and today a state owned enterÂŹprise. Through the decision, approved and published in 4 April 2014 to list the whole in the third class of protection of cultural relics protection unit (Ibidem), not only is guaranteed the preservation of the site but also the control by the municipal government of a so important and strategic area for Plans of the site designed by the the development of the riverside. author 131

2

Silos Warehouses (sugar) Warehouses (cereals) Offices

2

More than 100 years old More than 40 years old Less than 25 years old

Plans of the site designed by the author

Today 11 industrial buildings, built in a period of time from the first decade of 1900 to 1990, remain in the site (Yu, Li & Shu, 2012), together with a 8-meter width bridge structure for transportation of goods just outside the edge of the flood wall, and the tracks for cranes that still remain on the site. Different state of conservation, different qualities and different values are present for each building. The necessity of preserve the overall state of the wharf, a part from be the natural point for a successful preserva¬tion design, it is one of the main aim of the Shanghai Cultural Relics Protection Ordinance of 2014, basing every proposal 132

(as stated in the article) on the principles of the Guidelines for the Protection and Utilization of Industrial Heritage (Draft for the National Heritage Board, 2014), TICCIH Tajik Charter , “Wuxi recommendations” (China Industrial Heritage Protection Forum) and the Regulations on the Protection of Historical and Cultural Areas and Excellent Historic Buildings in Shanghai (2002).

Here the general rules to follow (as stated in Shanghai Cultural relics protection units Minsheng Road No. 3 Minsheng terminal cultural relics protection building renovation rules):

East Bank Group Depu Group Huangpu River Group

Level of protection 2

Plans of the site designed by the author

• the protection of the Minsheng psychological and stable role, the conwharf lies in preserving its functiontinuity of its use will help the con-tinal integrity and the authenticity of uation of urban memory (Continuity the constituent elements. Any acprinciple); tivity should be aimed to protect its • the protection design of Minsheng completeness and authenticity (InTerminal (Minsheng Road No. 3) tegrity, authenticity principle); should focus on the re-use of the orig• allows the use of new value to the inal area, construction and materials, Minsheng wharf (Minsheng Road and creatively show the historical and 3), but its new use and change cultural connotation of the industrial should be controlled to the extent of heritage and realize the sustainability minimum intervention and should of protection (principle of sustainbe reversible and identifiable (Reability) versible, identifiable minimum in- • on the people’s livelihood terminal tervention principle); (Minsheng Road 3) research, design, • the process of transition can play a repair and record should be rigorous 133

Minsheng wharf Shanghai, in Minsheng wharf Report, Shanghai Design Institute, 2016

and realistic, follow the principles of Puxi, the financial district in Pudong, science and careful (Scientific and and the more traditional active indusmeticulous principles). tries further up the Huangpu River. The new line 18 will create a new north-south Although the developer sees this portion corridor of technology and innovation,of the entire waterfront master plan as connecting rapidly developing Yangpu being heavily subsidized by the other de- Knowledge Innovation district which velopments, is clear the opportunity to contains the Knowledge Innovation create value through the program in such Community (KIC) as well as importa unique physical and historic built en- ant academic institutions such as Tongji vironment. Minsheng Wharf ’s locational and Fudan with the ZJ High-tech Park advantage not only for physical connec- in the south. Minsheng Wharf lies at the tivity but potential industry connectivi- center of this network of knowledge and ty as well. The new subway line 14 will creativity, and has massive potential to create an east-west industry corridor that become where ideas and talent meets. connects the creative industry clusters in 134

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Zoom in: buildings on General informations site Name: 40.000 tons silos Original function: Warehouse and silos for cereals Construction period: 1974 Protection class: third Structure: Cast-in-situ reinforced concrete Building height: 43 M (total height); 33,5M (Silos) Height of the different levels: 1F=7.5M; 2F=9.0M; 3F=5.5M; 4F=5.5M; 5F=6.0M; 6F=6.0M; 7F=5.7M (workfloor); 33.5M (Silos); 6.67M (Warehouse) Total surface: 7146M2 Designer: Shanghai Industrial Architectural Design Institute History of the building The building has maintained his original appearance almost unaltered; an overall renovation of the building took place during the year 1991-1996, when and elevated corridor was added in the east facade in order to connect it to the 80.000 tons silos.

Values China has a long history of using grain silos, but large-scale construction of reinforced concrete silos and related research started late. The earliest cereal silo was built is 1957 by the State Grain Reserve Bureau Zhengzhou Science Research and Design Institute designed in Beijing.

40,000 tons silo is the symbol of the biginnig of the period of large-scale transformations of the wharf and one of the most appreciated by the architects.

During the construction was adopted an advanced sliding mode technology, forming a continuous conrete facade, without any visible construction joint..

The technological system was composed by a suction hose and its machine, a system of staircases that connected the difNext page: ferent working places, and an irrigation Axonometry designed by the au- system studied to keep the humidity to an thor optimal. A belt convey system was used 136

for the transport of the goods.

Conditions Some restoration interventions have to be carried on, especially to guarantee the saefty of the new users. Most of the windows have to be replaced and the bridged suffered of serious corrosion.

The South-East facade suffered of several cracks. Water leakage and rising water related decays are afflicting several part of the building Possible reuse strategies The external appearance has to be preserved, as indicated in the law. This condition, together with the lack of natural light in the warehouses and silos, constituted the biggest challenge for the reuse of the 40.000 tons building. Three preliminary strategy can be considered: • the complete preservation of the silos, reusing them with a compatible function without any particular need of natural light.

• preserving only the borders of the silos, creating a “box in a box” that, trough the opening skylight, can provide some natural light. The possibility to have only zenithal light, together with the structural problem that can occur due to this changes, make this option difficult to be implemented and more expansive.

• Preserving the silos, opening the roof and create a continuous skylight.

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General informations Name: 80.000 tons silos Original function: Warehouse and silos for cereals Construction period: 1995 Protection class: third Structure: cast-in-situ reinforced concrete Levels: 1 basement, 8 floors above ground (work floor); 2 floors (silo and warehouse building) Building height: 55.5 M (work floor); 48M (silos and warehouse building) Height of the different levels: -1F=3f 4.5M, 4F=8.1M,5F=8.1M,6F=8.1M,7F =8.1M, 8F=8.1M Total surface: 13021 M2 Designer: Shanghai Civil Building Design Institute History of the building Built in 1995, 80,000 is the last transformation of the terminal, witnessed an unique construction process of that era.

For the construction was adopted one of the more advanced sliding technology, forming an monolitich facade without any construction joints on it. The technological system was composed by a suction hose and its machine, a system of staircases that connected the different working places, and an irrigation system studied to keep the humidity to an optimal. A belt convey system was used for the transport of the goods.

Values This building is important as a trace of the last development of the wharf. The direct comparison with the other silos, can give use an idea about the technological and structural progresses achieved during the years. The unique design make of this building the distinctive landmark of the site.

Conditions Various types of aggregate undergo Next page: chemical reactions in concrete, leading Axonometry designed by the au- to damaging expansive phenomena. The thor reinforcement steel bars are in some part 140

exposed to the aggressive atmosphere (sea water and polluted air) , due to the missing part. Water leaks are creating a continuous damage to the concrete structure and to the plasters. The roof of the last floor is damaged casing leakage, that is speeding up the decay of the bearing metal elements of it, such as beams and columns Under the normal use of the load, the current overall state of the structure allows a safe use, but the existence of several decay problems, most of all due to the water leaks, have to solved.

Possible reuse strategies The external appearance has to be preserved, as indicated in the law. This condition, together with the lack of natural light in the warehouses and silos, constituted the biggest challenge for the reuse of the 80.000 tons building. Three preliminary strategy can be considered: • the complete preservation of the silos, reusing them with a compatible function without any particular need of natural light or reusing only the already existing floors. • Keep most of the concrete silos Structure, building-in a vertical connection core using part of the tube, Wall openings are arranged at the level of traffic.

The possibility to have only zenithal light, together with the structural problem that can occur due to this changes, make this option difficult to be implemented and more expansive. • Only to retain the cylindrical wall facade part, Create an indipentent space, using the central core as skylight.

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General informations Name: building n.269,270 Original function: Warehouse (sugar) Construction period: 1915 Protection class: third Structure: cast-in-situ reinforced concrete frame structure. Courtain brick walls.

Building height: 19,7 M Height of the different levels: 1F 5,3 M 2F 5M - 3F 3,8M Total surface: 9685 M2 Designer: Somers H.Elis History of the building The 269 and 270 building were design by the English architect Somers H. Elis in 1915. They are part of the first phase of construction on the wharf. The façade is composed by a red brick curtain wall, with exposed columns and beams. This building present his original decorative elements, as well as the original steel shutters and doors. The quality of the design is very high and rich of details and refine solutions. The third floor was added during the successive construction phase.

Values It’s a important example of the transition of the period between the western classical style industrial building and the modern minimalist style. The good state of preservation of the original features make it a good study case for the history of the development of the industrial building in Shanghai. It is trace of the first phase of development of the wharf and, due to the stratification, it is possible to study here the further development and upgrades that took place during the history of the industrial site.

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Conditions The replacement of the glass is needed in all the windows. A cement plaster cover the original brick wall. Iron oxides are driven by water from the rusting steel elements, and induced the development of a brown staining on the underlying plaster. The concrete floors present several crack due to shrinkage of the structural elements. The roof present cracking and leakage Possible reuse strategies The inner space is flexible and adaptable to almost every use, even if there is a general lack of natural light. All the original features can be preserved in order to be an added value to the new use.

The height allows to use the space for exhibition, for the commercial use or for offices. The structural rhythm and the open space identity have to be preserved in order to not change the original appearance of the building.

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General informations Name: building 267 Original function: warehouse (grain) Construction period: 1920 Protection class: third Structure: cast-in-situ reinforced concrete frame structure. Brick infill walls.

Building height: 9,87 M Height of the different levels: 1F 4,8 M - 2f 3,9 M Total surface: 4430 M2 Designer: J.W.Masow History of the building It was designed by the architect J.W. Masow during the second phase of construction of the wharf. One portion of the building on the west side was demolished during the construction of the 80.000 tons silos. The original parts of the building, in queen Anne style, are an important trace of history of the wharf and of the evolution of the early model industrial style building, with the mixture of functional element and abstraction of the western classical ones. The west façade it is a replica of the old one but the intervention is easily recognizable, thank to the paint used on the new materials.

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Values It’s a important example of the transition of the period between the western classical style industrial building and the modern minimalist style. The good state of preservation of the original features make it a good study case for the history of the development of the industrial building in Shanghai. It is trace of the second phase of development of the wharf and, due to the stratification, it is possible to study here the further development and up-

grades that took place during the history of the industrial site.

Conditions The roof present cracking and leakage.

Cracking are generally diffused on the concrete elements, and in some case missing parts exposed the reinforcement steel bars. Disintegration of the outer layer of bricks is present in the south façade.

Possible reuse strategies The inner space is flexible and adaptable to almost every use, even if there is a general lack of natural light. All the original features can be preserved in order to be an added value to the new use.

The height allows to use the space for exhibition, for the commercial use or for offices. The structural rhythm and the open space identity have to be preserved in order to not change the original appearance of the building.

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General informations Name: 259 Original function: warehouse and transportation of the goods (sugar) Construction period: ‘90 Protection class: third Structure: precast concrete bearing structure, steel truss, courtain brick wall Building height: 18 M Height of the different levels: one storey building Total surface: 4152 M2 Designer: Traffic Department Shanghai Port Second Loading Area History of the building This building replaced the old ones that, at the beginning of the ‘90, were demolished because of excessive damages and the obsolescence. Even if it is recently built, it maintained the original layout of the demolished buildings: in this sense it is important for the preservation of the spatial identity of the site and for the memory.

Values Even if those buildings are relatively recent, 259 building is important because it occupy the same position of the demolished original building. In this sense it can provide an image of what the original layout of the wharf. Moreover it is important to understand the functionality of the site.

Conditions The facades show the presence of black crust due to the pollution and some efflorescence. In general are present phenomena related to the rising water and water leaks. Oxidize steel elements have to be repaired or replaced (in case of excessive damage). Mould appear where the water leakage is present.

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Possible reuse strategies The inner space is flexible and adaptable to almost every use, even if the general lack of natural light. All the original fea-

tures can be preserved in order to be an added value to the new use. The height allow to use the space for exhibition of big size objects or for commercial use.

The structural rhythm and the open space identity have to be preserved in order to not change the original appearence of the building.

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General informations Name: buildings n.257, 258 Original function: sugar transportation (west side) and storage Construction period: ‘90 Protection class: third Structure: precast concrete bearing structure, steel truss, courtain brick wall Building height: 18 M Height of the different levels: one storey building Total surface: 4352 M2 Designer: Traffic Department Shanghai Port Second Loading Area History of the building This buildings replaced the old ones that, at the beginning of the ‘90, were demolished because of excessive damages and the obsolescence. Even if they are recently built, they maintained the original layout of the demolished buildings: in this sense are important for the preservation of the spatial identity of the site and of the memory.

Values Even if those buildings are relatively recent, they are important because they occupy the same position of the demolished original building. In this sense they can provide an image of how the original layout of the wharf was. Moreover it is important to fully understand the functionality of the site.

Conditions The facades show the presence of black crust due to the pollution and efflorescence, with the resulting loss of some part of the cement plaster. In general are present phenomena related to the rising water and water leaking. Oxidize steel elements have to be repaired replaced.

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Possible reuse strategies The inner space is flexible and adaptable to almost every use, even if the general lack of natural light. All the original features can be preserved in order to be an

added value to the new use. The height allow to use the space for exhibition of big size objects or for commericial or productive use. The structural rhythm and the open space identity have to be preserved in order to not change the original appearence of the building.

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General informations Name: building n.6 Original function: rainy day loading building Construction period: 1982 Protection class: third Structure: precast concrete bearing structure, steel truss, courtain brick wall Building height: 17,6 M Height of the different levels: 12,6 M Total surface: 2152 M2 Designer: Traffic Department Shanghai Port Second Loading Area History of the building This building was built in the ‘80, to ensure the protection during the rainy days and preserve the quality of the cereals during the operations of loading and unloading of the goods. The room consist in a huge and free span open space without any interruption, thanks to the special steel trusses used.

Values This building is functional to the 40.000 tons silos and, in order to preserve the functional layout of the site, it has to be preserved. In addition, it was built in the same position of a building present in the original layout of the wharf: in this sense it can help to understand the original plot, the context of the wharf and the evolution of itself.

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Conditions The building uses a concrete column system to support the triangular steel truss.

The structural system is in good conditions, under the normal use of the load, the overall structure of the building is safe. Moreover some concrete and steel elements need to be repaired and rein-

forced (especially in the joints). Water leakage and rising water related decays are afflicting several part of the building .

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General informations Name: 272, 273 buildings Original function: warehouse (grain) Construction period: 1915 Protection class: third Structure: cast-in-situ reinforced concrete frame structure. Courtain brick walls.

Levels: 4 Height of the different levels: 1F -4.5, 2F4F 3,6M Total surface: 23654 M2 Designer: Davies and Thomas History of the building and values Located in the eastern part of the wharf, the buildings where built in 1915 on the design of Davies and Thomas. The two parallel buildings are separated from a gap of 9 meters and connected by a bridge. Several original drawings are left.

Two lift had been installed during the other building phases, The still shutters are remains of the original building. The building shows today a lot of modification occurred during the years.

Conditions The concrete structure is quite damage and almost in every structural element are present cracks. The water leaking is created serious problem to the concrete element and efflorescence are visible in many part of the building, especially on the structural joints.

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Possible reuse strategies The inner space is flexible and adaptable to almost every use, even if the general lack of natural light. All the original features can be preserved in order to be an added value to the new use. The height allow to use the space for exhibition of big size objects or for the sale. The struc-

tural rhythm and the open space identity have to be preserved in order to not change the original appearance of the building.

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Bibliography • Shanghai Cultural Relics Protection Unit Minsheng Road No.3 Revised (2015.9) Prepared by: East China Architectural Design and Research Institute Limited Historic Building Protection Design Institute Minsheng Wharf Cultural Relics Protection Building Protection Rules.

• Regulations of Shanghai Municipality on the Protection of the Areas with Historical Cultural Features and the Excellent Historical Buildings.

• All the technical informations on the site are extracted from an interview between me and the Architect Fu Yong (Shanghai design institute) that took place in Shanghai in 05/2017

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Next page, from left to right: Lofty Mount Lu, Shen Zhou, 1467 Phantom Landscape, Yang Yongliang, 2010 Image rielaborated by the author

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Images of the Chinese landscape: a diachronic analysis 170

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Tang Dynasty (618 - 907)

Qing Dynasty (1644 - 1911)

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N. Song period (960 - 1127)

PRC (1966 -1976)

Yuan Dynasty (1279–1368)

PRC (‘80)

Ming Dynasty (1368 - 1644)

Ming Dynasty (1368 - 1644)

PRC nowadays

Time table: from dynasties to contem- Storyline: from the Empire to the PRC, in ‘Jianshu’, 2017 porary China

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Tang Dynasty (618 907) Flourishing period of gardens, arts, poetry and painting. Imitation of some features of the gardens of preceding dynasties, thus legitimizing their rule.

From left to right: Tang Gardens, comuseum.com Archaeological site, comuseum. com Tang Gardens, comuseum.com

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The concept of jing is not simply a view of the landscape, but rather an active relationship between the changing environment and the human subject. It dealt with all senses of the human experience of the surrounding world.

It became a symbolic representation between the miniature world of Tang gardens and the Nature. A qualitative usage appeared in the estate poems: the character jing was used in a combined adjective-noun structure to express a qualitative evaluation of a place. (Hui, 1967)

N. Song period (960 1127) The development of garden-making reached its first climax Introduction of the aesthetic rocks in the garden.

Imperial gardens opened to the public.

From left to right: Song Gardens, comuseum.com Image re-elaborated by the author

New-Confucianism began to dominate Chinese thought. The content of the garden scenery expanded to include cityscape and countryside scenes in addition to the exclusively natural landscape of the previous period. The adaptability of the mind became the key factor in the man-Nature relationship.

The Song writers had a broader view of the scenery of the seasons as a whole, through which they saw the Way of the universe to realize the ultimate goal of spiritual cultivation. (Hui, 1967)

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Yuan Dynasty (1279– 1368)

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Emerged some new changes in the ink landscape paintings due to the political and ideological pluralism.

Garden architecture partially decline due to economic stagnation.

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In historical surveys of Chinese gardens, the discussion on the garden-making of the Yuan is usually limited to the imperial gardens in Dadu (Beijing). In poetry, usage of the character jing followed the Tang and Song tradition without obvious innovation. (Hui, 1967)

Shi zilin Garden, Rinaldi, 2011 176

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Ming Dynasty (1368 1644) Strong centralization of power in the figure of the emperor.

Closure of the empire to outside influences.

The economic recovery boost the development of the gardens.

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Introduction of the character Jingwu, scenery with a name. The naming of the scenery reveals the poetic connotations and allusions through which people can enter an imaginary world beyond the physical limit of the environment. The experience of a garden became not only sensual and philosophical, but also intellectual, requiring a great knowledge of classic learning, which enhanced the nature of garden-making as a literati genre. The attention remains on the human experience with the scenery and focuses on the nature. the state of mind.

The character Jiejing, borrowed scenary, is introducted. Borrowing scenery is al-

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From left to right: Ming Gardens, comuseum.com Image re-elaborated by the author

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Ming Dynasty (1368 1644) Private gardens flourished in all the main cities. Complexity of gardens reached a new level marked by much greater building density in a garden

rom left to right: Ming Gardens, comuseum.com Image re-elaborated by the author

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lowing ‘the external world to meet the internal feelings of the observer when visual perception meets the heartmind.’ The theory of qing and jing, or emotion/inner experience and scene/ external world that also emphasized the leading role of human feeling by viewing scenes as the matchmaker of poetry and the emotion/inner experience as its embryo. (Hui, 1967)

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Qing Dynasty (1644 1911) Qing Dynasty is the most prosperous period in history of garden building. Garden design developed differently in the north and the south.

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From left to right: Qing Gardens, comuseum.com Image re-elaborated by the author

Garden making became more and more arbitrary, with an indulgence in delicate, petty details. Toward the end of the Qing, the naturalism in garden-making went to an extreme. People began arbitrarily to create natural-looking forms against the natural tendencies of things.

The concept of scene reached a morbid extreme in aestheticism in garden-making. (Hui, 1967)

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PRC (1966 -1976) The few newly created parks and gardens had a mainly utilitarian character. No longer considered as a cultural patrimony, some historical gardens were destroyed.

From left to right: Daqing Blossoms Along the Yangzi River, Song Wenzhi, 1975

The modern view of jing in garden-making is a natural result of that Qing development. The formalistic approach to the concept of jing in garden-making was further enhanced by social and political conditions of China. It was not possible to discuss such questions as the meaning of classic gardens; visual effects had been the only touchable topic because the monopoly of the theory of class struggle prohibited any mention of the literati culture. (Hui, 1967)

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PRC (‘80) I. M. Pei reinterpreted the typology of the Chinese garden. A symbol of this renewed interest is the small garden around the Hong Kong headquarters of the Bank of China

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From left to right: Plum Blossom, Wu Guanzhong, 1992 Image re-elaborated by the author

After terminated the traditional literati culture, China doesn’t only stopped the construction of traditional gardens, but also destroyed the intellectual basis for a meaningful appreciation of the traditional Chinese garden. The visual beauty of traditional gardens, like that of most ancient artifacts, became the most obvious and most easily perceived for contemporary people. The experience of landscape gardens has been reduced to a minimum and limited to the most basic level of perception. (Rinaldi, 2011) Fragrant Hill Hotel designed by I.M. Pay, Rinaldi, 2011 181

PRC - Nowadays Geographical and physical reconfigurations of Chinese cities and their destructive consequences become the critical subject of the contemporary Chinese. Conceptual and sometimes unsuccessful designs took place starting from the 2008 Olympics games, hosted in Beijing.

From left to right: Phantom Landscape, Yang Yongliang, 2010 Image re-elaborated by the author

Yang’s works lead towards a critical re-thinking of contemporary reality. His work is focused on digital replicas of two Song Dynasty master paintings, namely Travelers Among Mountains and Steams (Fan Kuan) and Wintery Forest in the Snow (anonymous), reassembling the element of the traditional Chinese landscape with the dramatic condition of the extensive development of China. Jing here assume the contemporary connotation of contemplation and self-examination of the various social and cultural concerns.

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PRC - Nowadays A new wave of architect inaugurate a new path of consciousness and reconsideration of the regional heritage. Turenscape introduced the agricultural landscape in big cities.

From left to right: Houtan Park designed by Turenscape, Rinaldi, 2011 Image re-elaborated by the author

Houtan park is the manifesto of a new chinese landscape sensibility. It merges some aspetct of jing, such as the seasonal cycle of life and the evocation of inner emotion through the nature, with the contemporary needs of restore the ecology and make it sustainable. The didactic attempt to connect the Shaingainese citizens with the nature is directly connected with the tradition. At the same time it is the perfect example of third landscape, reclaiming the industrial heritage and using the metropolis as borrowed scenario.

Shenyang Architectural University Campus, Rinaldi, 2011 183

A sustainable model for the future, looking to the past: the Chinese garden

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Chinese garden has been a huge influence by painting, the philosophy and literati (Ji, 1988). Traditional Chinese arts, mountain-and-water painting in particular, exerted a great influence on garden designs (Keswick, 1978). Cheng Ji summarizes the body of theories and design principles in Chinese garden design, in which design typically started with three-dimensional perspective paintings.

Designers orchestrate the space to provide diverse visual effects to manipulate the view and the storytelling in the garden (Yang, 2010). Plans, however,often follow and evolve as a result of the views that are created (Peng, 1986; Ji, 1988)

As Panzini stated (Panzini, 2011) these gardens are exemples of environmental sustainability ante litteram . Evocation of the elements and landscapes of the Chinese Garden is not merely a delicate historical note, but parallels today’s interest in environmental re-qualification and reconstruction of damaged habitats within the ancient Chinese cities. Far from being only intellectual exercise, the search for a harmonious microcosm constitutes a vigorous enunciation of the need for sustainability in all creations. Created originally by the emperors as private reserves, they became an urban element of the Chinese city

Pear Blossims, Qian Xuan, ca 271- before 268

after the Six dynasties period (Rinaldi, 2011). Private gardens, owned by aristocrats and high officials, were intended to express the Daoist tendency to evade the complexity of daily life, in a search for harmony with nature and unity with the universe. These gardens were intimate and protected places where it was possible to take temporary refuge from harsh social and political surroundings (Ibidem). ‘Trees, groups of plants, little hills and islands were poetically composed to recall real landscapes’ (Rinaldi, 2011 p.8).

The imaginative re-creation in gardens of renowned landscapes became an

usual practice, combining pleasure with pragmatism, namely the function of production of resources (this was mainly the case of private gardens): ‘The cultivated withdrawal from public life, the Confucian ideal of auto-sufficiency and the search for ancient simplicity did not exclude the possibility that aesthetic enjoyment might be accompanied by economic return on agronomical production’.

Gardens, therefore, representing a kind of ‘autarkic landscape’ provided a large number of goods for daily life together with an income and products to be sold in the city market. (Clunas, 1996.)

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Strategically buildings

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1 Sansui Hall 2 Yangshan Hall 3 Yixiu Pavilion 4 Wangjiang Pavilion 5 Yule Pavilion 6 Relaxation Store Boat 7 Wanhua Chamber 8 Liangyi Study 9 Ancient Well Pavilion 10 Relic Hall 11 Xuepu Study 12 Dianchun Hall 13 Acting and Singing Stage 14 Kuailou Pavilion 15 Hexu Hall 16 Nine Lions Study 17 Huijing Tower 18 Toasting Pavilion 19 Yuhua Hall 20 Tower of Containing Watery Jade 21 Dongtianfuo Pavilion 22 Keyi Hall 23 Biayoutian Pavilion 24 Yangqing Tower 25 Songcui Pavilion 26 Jingguang Hall

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Zhang Nanyang, Yuyuan garden. Shanghai, 1599.

Yi Yuan Garden , Rinaldi, 2011 Image re-elaborated by the author

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In a Chinese Garden, the model of spatial articulation is not clearly identifiable by the visitor and comprises a hierarchy of places and points, any one of which is characterized by specific identities that can be defined as thematic units; all of them have several scenic views which pertain to the unit’s area, including both defined viewing zone and the jing, the view enjoyed (Hunt, 1998).

The main pathway can offer different routes, alongside or intersecting the major path: ‘But all walkways have analogous characteristics: they all twist continually,with variations in gradient and paving, which, along with the succession

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of spaces and views, contribute to the sense of surprise and discovery (Rinaldi, 2011)’.

Western visitors in their descriptions of the Chinese gardens tended to observe a significant ‘alterity’ as distinctive and dissimilar from the others. According to Rinaldi (2011) their perceptions about those kind of forms and systems was of irregularity producing a sense of ‘apparent general confusion’ . What the French Jesuit missionary Pierre-Martial Cibot (Cibot, 1776) assumed is that the apparent non-regularity/disorderliness was completely deliberate and aimed at capturing and reproducing the simplic-

Natural system inside the garden

ity of a natural landscape. The purpose was to evoke the same feelings of ‘real nature’, what the author translated into the explicative slogan: ‘artificiality in nature’: ‘the Gardens of China are a studied but natural imitation of the various beauties of the countryside, in hills, valleys, gorges, pools, little plains, sheets of water, brooks, isles, rocks, grottoes, old caves, plants and flowers’ (Ibidem). Chinese Gardens show an apparent natural simplicity, an endeavor to restore, sometimes in rather tiny areas, the rhythms and diversity of nature. Occasionally this result is achieved through a concentration on a few elements, but more

often nature’s multi-faceted appearance is Yi Yuan Garden , Rinaldi, 2011 evoked through diversification of the gar- Image re-elaborated by the den’s aspects. It is significant to note that, author in spite of the illusory confusion, they are methodical and organized.

In addition, the seemingly casual winding of paths has the ability to increase and reproduce the viewing points, presenting a nonlinear sequence from one thematic unit to another one and from a scenic view to another scenic view ‘helping immerse the visitor in a kaleidoscope of situations. The process is enhanced by the strategy of mixing concealment and revelation along the path: sections of the garden first are occluded, then suggested 187

Fragmentation of the garden: units and subunits 2

Thematic Units 1 Mountain Next to a Pond 2 Rushing Stream 3 Hillside Pavilions 4 Lake Crossed by Bridges 5 Reflecting Pool with Rock Composition 6 Sequence of Paved Courts 7 Rock Labyrinth with Studios

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Yi Yuan Garden , Rinaldi, 2011 Image re-elaborated by the author

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through glimpses, and then progressively revealed according to the precise visual means selected for the appreciation of the respective portion of the garden’ (Rinaldi, 2011).

This composition made up of thematic units with their own formal identity, scenic views, hidden but contiguous landscapes, are revealed to the visitor through the paths which represent the active agents of the garden, ‘organizing movement through it, establishing places to pause, to slow down or speed up, thus defining the rhythm of the garden’s unfolding’. In this scheme it can be found a correlation with the traditional hand

scroll painting, which described stories and places in different episodes on a single scroll (Lu, 2010).

Despite the partition of Chinese Gardens into thematic units generates a reproduction of feelings, it does not produce a sense of fragmentation: ‘Even the antithesis between the spatial qualities of the successive areas implies a sense of general harmony: each space contains elements which in fact may be found in successive thematic units, in a different arrangement, order or hierarchy’(Rinaldi, 2011, p.18). A specific variety of thematic unit is based on repetitions; they replicate the main charac-

Sub-gardens and poetic units B

Subgarden and its spatial structure in Yuyuan:

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A the subgarden of Sanhui Hall; B the subgarden of Wanhua Chamber; C the subgarden of Dianchun Hall; D the subgarden of Deyi Hall; E the subgarden of Yuhua Hall; F the subsection of Inner Garden; G the subgarden of HuxinTing.

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teristics of the garden in a nesting way, containing a “garden within the garden”.

A fundamental element in planning scenic views is the design of the area from which to appreciate them; through the planning of specific paths and the development of focused strategies, in fact, the visitor is invited to slow down or stop in order to enjoy a particular scene. This is often achieved through devices that explicitly invite to pause by featuring a pavilion with seats, or a rocky promontory over the water to interrupt the continuity of the walk (Lu, 2010).

‘Water and mountains represented the fertile juxtaposition between yin and

yang, the dualism of the feminine and Yi Yuan Garden , Rinaldi, 2011 masculine aspects present in all natural Image re-elaborated by the auphenomena. The robust vigor of rocks thor evinced the solid masculine element, while water’s fluidity suggested the changeable feminine’ (Rinaldi, 2011, p.2).

To these primary elements are added flora, whose changes introduce the dimension of seasonal cycles and thereby time into the garden, and architecture. The pavilions dotting the garden denote the human presence in nature and the central role of the individual in the imaginative and poetical interpretation of the landscape.

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Viewing-in-motion: circuitous route design Routes organization Thematic unit boundaries Central path Path n.1 Path n.2 Path n.3 Path n.4 Path n.5 Path n.6

Yi Yuan Garden , Rinaldi, 2011 Image re-elaborated by the author

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The designers aim at laying out a pathway along which the various components of the green space would gradually be shown to the visitor (Lu, 2010).

A series of unexpected scenes induce the visitor to explore the entire garden. The play of progressive disclosure depends on twisting and winding paths. The walkways serve the function not only of linking all the various parts of the garden, but of determining the scroll of the tales inside the garden (Chang, 2006). The system of footpaths orients the movement of the visitor toward defined spaces, and changes in the track’s paving material and elevation determine the perception of the

scenes. The paths constitute the main element in the storytelling of the garden’s story – but the composition principles behind it remain hidden.

One characteristic is common to all paths: they are never linear except for short sections (Rinaldi, 2011). Following the principles of fengshui and the inspiration of the natural environment, the paths can be twisting, zigzagging, or form a series of discontinuous curves.

Changes in height is carefully designed by adding natural slopes, ramps, steps and little bridges; changes in width is the most common strategy common to all Chinese garden’s paths. The care-

Viewing-in-still

ful planning behind all this must never show, and the paths’ variations are to seem simply an adaptation to the irregular topography of the site.

Yi Yuan Garden , Rinaldi, 2011 Image re-elaborated by the author

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Bibliography • Zou H. 1967. A Jsesuit garden in Beijing and early modern Chinese culture.

West Lafayette: Pardue University press • Lu S. 2010. Hidden orders in Chinese gardens: irregular fractal structure and its generative rules. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 2010, volume 37, pages 1076-1094 • Ji C. (1988). The Craft of Gardens – Yuan ye. Translated by Alison Hardie. New Haven, Connecticut: • Yale University Press.

• Keswick M. (2003) The Chinese Garden. History, art and architecture. London: Frances Lincoln.

• Panzini F. (2011). In The Chinese Garden: Garden Types for Contemporary Landscape Architecture.

• Rinaldi B. (2011). The Chinese Garden: Garden Types for Contemporary Landscape Architecture.

• Clunas C. (1996). Fruitful Sites. Garden Culture in Ming Dynasty China. London: Reaktion Books.

• Cibot P.M. 1776. “Mémoires concernant l’histoire, les sciences les arts, les moeurs, les usages, etc., des Chinois: par les missionaires de Pékin” (Paris, 1776– 89, 16 vols.).

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Yao Lu, Early Spring on Lake Dong Ting, 2008 194

Reinterpreting the Chinese landscape 195

Reading the landscape elements Heaven

Middleground

Foreground

Iconographic analysis Emptiness: the use of emptiness allows of Chinese painting transformation and change into a composition thereby enhancing the concept of movement and the transcendence of stasis in a composition. In landscape terms, fullness can be expressed as mountains, and emptiness as valleys.

Mountain: in the Taoist imagination, the high mountain peak is where the Taoist “mountain man� absorbs the bright yang air of heaven, and meets the constellations face to face.Yang - mountains / fullness.

Cloud/air: the first canon of Chinese painting describes its rhythmic vitality, which refers to qi, a metaphysical concept Lofty Mount Lu, Shen Zhou, of a cosmic power. The original meaning 1467 196

of qi is applied to the air we breathe or to all gaseous substances. Since air is essential for us to breathe, qi has been considered as the principle of life in painting, and if qi is lacking, a painting will appear lifeless.

Water: became an extremely important factor in the depiction of space. In the form of a winding stream it helped to establish both depth and breadth, and in the form of a waterfall it emphasized height. Yin - always flowing and changing.

Forest: the forest represents the earth element, and it is linked to the nature and its cycles of life, the human beings

In shan shui paintings, there are three basic elements that compose a painting: Mountains, rivers, and on occasion, waterfalls. Hence the Chinese name shan shui (“Mountain-water”) for landscape art.

Mountains are the “heart” of a Chinese landscape painting. They are the center point of a vast landscape, usually jutting upward toward Heaven. Or they are a steep green monolith covered with craggy rocks and ridges. Behind these surreal landscapes is a very deep, philosophical meaning. Furthermore, they are a product of the artist’s imagination. The landscape surrounding the mountain entices

the viewer to partake in its beauty and Deconstruct the Chicontemplate the meaning of the moun- nese traditional landtain - or sometimes, the vast emptiness scape surrounding it. The fog surrounding the mountain is the “spiritual void” we must fill by contemplating the painting.

According to traditional Chinese beliefs, mountains are considered sacred. They are the places where the immortals reside and are very close to Heaven, both physically and spiritually. This belief is reflected very strongly in many of these paintings.

Image re-elaborated by the author 197

Constructing the ur- The proposal start from a transposition banscape of the plastic element from the traditional landscape images to the contemporary city. The connection is not formal (as in MAD’s mountain-shaped tower complex nears completion in Beijing) but is a formal comparison between the natural, or better mineral element, in the traditional landscape and the plastic correspondence in the Chinese contemporary city.

The aim is to take advantage of the contemporary contest, exploiting the positive and, most of all, the negate aspects of the hyper fast urbanization.

Images desegned by the author 198

Reinterpreting plastic elements in contemporary cities

Phytodepuration

Regeneravive landscape

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Previous pages: View designed by the author pp. 194 - 195 Elements of Urban landscape p.196 Next pages: Plan of the site pp. 198 - 199

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Middleground

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Clouds

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Wastewater treatment and reuse in gardening

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Polluted water

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Previous pages: View designed by the author pp. 194 - 195 Elements of Urban landscape p.196

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Designed ecology

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Water pollution and shortages pose bigger threats to humankind than do future oil shortages. More than thirty years of rapid urbanization and uninformed hydrological engineering for flood control in China have severely damaged China’s water system.

Water-cleansing processes separate water from its living environment, instead to create a ecological infrastructure that can face water pollution in continuity with the nature, allowing integration with plant life and free flows between water bodies. In his view, water is central to ecosystem services that can be turned to productive, regulating, life carrying, and culturally nourishing.

The design propose a plant planning that allowed phytodepuration, using local species and preserving the culture of the Chinese garden. The aim is to create a low maintenance ecosystem, capable to restore the ecology and to create a social spae for the community.

The order of the plants planning follow the practice describe by Rinaldi (2011) for the ancient design Chinese garden: on the border high wetland plants, with the aim to create a green border that mark the area, and flowering plants in the inner space to encourage the visitors to explore the garden.

The arrangement follows practical rea-

sons: the wetland plants chosen are stronger and more suitable for the phytodepuration where the water is more polluted.

Finally, the disposal is studied to recreate a complete seasonal changes cycle: golden blossoms in the spring, sunflowers in the summer, the fragrance of ripened rice in the fall, and green clover in the winter.

1 Bolboschoenus caldwellii

2 Papyrus

3 Papyrus rush

7 Maiden grass

5 Pontederia cordata

9 Juncaceae Juss

10 Pink pons

11 Molinia caerula

12 Botomus umbellatus alba

13 Butomus ombellatus

14 Butomus umbellatus rosenrot

15 Bambusa

16 Manchurian rice

17 Calama grostis

18 Gravel

19 Sedum

20 Trollius chinesis

21 Chinese astibe

22 Arendsii

23 Chinese lotus

24 Japanease lotus

25 Nelumbo nucifera

26 Greenhousee

27 Horticulture research center

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Moisture-loving plants Plants planning scheme designed by the author 206

Marginal plants

Deep marginal

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Deep water aquatics and oxygenators

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Floating plants

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The gray water is pumped from the river to a garden with help from wind turbines. The water is filtered and comes out as clean water. In the process the filtration system (phytodepuration) provide water for the plantation. Each section of the system is characterized by the use of plants with specific depuration property.

The final aim is to store the deputed water and use it as a source of water to use for irrigation in the greenhouses and as water supply for the garden.

Phytodepuration

Phytodepuration scheme signed by the author 208

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9 Clean water impoundment

8 Sand filter for final polishing

7 Water quality stabilization and control

6 Aeration and biological purification

5 Nutrient removal 4 Pathogen removal and biological purification

3 Terraces for aeration and biological purification

2 Water settling and precipitation

1 Water intake and screening

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Purification system 209

The industrial heritage of the site is celebrated through the reclamation of industrial structures and materials. Shanghai is the birthplace of China’s modern industry, and the iconic architecture are used as pin elements for the composition of the garden and the definition of the new landscape. The industrial layer is overlapped with the new connective system (the water), the natural layout and the paths that cross the site.

As in the Chinese garden, there is a complex system of units and sub-units.

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Sub gardens

Inner connection and units

Urban connection

Industrial layout

New limits

Water layout 211

Design proposal: plan

Plans of the proposal, designed by the author 212

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Viewing-in-still

Design schemes

Viewing-in-motion

proposal:

Images designed by the author 214

Thematic Units

Sub-gardens

Productive green and functions

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Theory and aesthetic

Engaging in the physical world with the heavenly reasons in order to obtain metaphysical brightness.

Plainness. Fields and garden are managed as if the weather were under-control

Standing high while looking into distance

Brillance that comes from the reflecting water

Section designed by the author 216

Winding path: ant nest, the scene should be deep and remote(...) Journey of searching the Dao.

The meandering of the walkway is an embodiment of the mind searching remoteness

Roundness is the Dao of heaven. Condensation of the mind is nothingness

Beauty came from the changing of views...

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Design proposal: section

Section designed by the author 218

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Rethinking the architectural elements of Chinese gardens

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水榭

Shuixiè Four seasons pavilion

九曲桥

Shuixiè is the the evolution of the xiè, a panoramic terrace. The world Shuixiè can be translated as terrace on the water, adding to the panoramic terraec a specific position on the water. In the most rich private garden, the terrace was design as a place for meditation and aesthetic plesure. The position allowed the strategig positioning of plants, in order to relfect the passing of the four seasons.

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JiuQuQiao Zigzag bridge

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廊子

Lángzi Panoramic path 4

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Tíng Gazebo to rest

Zigzag bridges and winding paths are the most characteristic elements in garden design. They follow the design principles from the feng shui. The change of direction is design in order to avoid negative energy. (Rinaldi, 2011)

Lángzi is fundamental in the design of the panoramic paths. It is a covered path, where te views are designed by the architect following the sotrytelling or the present of the scenic views. In the most rich private gardens Lángzi is designed as double level covered path (Perlini, 2013).

We can translate Ting as pavilion. Usually, the word is accompanied by a verb that describe that function for which it has been design: to rest, to see etc...

It is one of the most common element in Chinese gardens, translated in many different styles (Perlini, 2013).

The common caracterist is the shelter, that provide shadow.

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Floating platfom detail

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Detail section, scale 1:50 Beam St H400x200x8x12

Girder A: BH - 1075 - 1500x400-450x14x28

Steel pipe 1400x22t

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Beam St H400x200x8x12

Light steel frame C60x30x10x1

Beam St H300x150x6x9

Teak cealing

Roof: • FRP panels, spray painted • Water resistent plywood • Light steel frame C60x30x10x1

Beam St H150x150x7x10

Bent galvanized steel sheeting

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Design proposal: section

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Rethinking the spaces of Chinese garden

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Wall as limit

Nature as limit

Wall as limit

Water spurs

Telescoping nesting

Water as border of the scene

Evoking the different kinds of nature

Meaning of the nature

Materiality as border of the scene

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Conclusion

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In the last four decades, China underwent significant political, social and economic changes. The phenomenon of rapid urbanization played a key role in the whole process, having a large impact on cities and people. These changes, together with the economic prosperity, created a large number of issues, fundamental for the future steps of development. Pollution is, undoubtedly, one of the most prominent ones.

As recent protests have shown, the Chinese middle class is not only in search of better economic conditions, but it is enlarging its awareness also for the environmental conditions. The east Bund of Huangpu River is now required to include public space quality enhancement, ecological environment optimization and cultural function clustering. It is the perfect occasion for a reflection of the redevelopment of brown fields in green fields.

The area I chose for as design site, was the perfect match of positioning and complexity that better reflects the Chinese contemporaneity. The site offers not only a reflection on the ecology and contemporary landscape of Shanghai but it also ensure a direct contact with the preservation and reuse of the industrial heritage that constitutes a big heritage within Shanghai.

The main concern was to create a positive impact and a low energy system, capable to characterize the redevelopment of the area. I tried to turn the paradigm of green engineering infrastructure in a new concept of ecological infrastructure, creating a passive system capable to recreate the relationship between the citizens and the river. Moreover, the quoted contemporary Chinese artists show a critic perception of the reality of the nowadays Chinese landscape, with a sense of nostalgia associated to a dramatic sense of resignation for the future condition.

This meant that the solution needed to be holistic, comprehending not only the area but a significant rethinking of the Chinese contemporary urban-scape.

The Chinese garden offers a valuable solution to a new stage of transformation and renewal along the banks of the Huangpu river. As a architectural type it ensures a continuity of the traditional garden looking to the future, transforming it as a catalyzer for the transformation of Shanghai. Adapting it to the micro and macro regionalism, can be a mutable modus operandi reproducible in the whole Chinese system.

Emphasizing the importance of “placeness” by considering contextual elements like scenery, historical references, and light, without falling into imitation and traditionalism, it is, in my opinion, one of the key elements for the future development of China. Together with the urgent need for an ecological improvement, it transforms the “airpocalypse” in an occasion for the developments of new strategies.

The ambition of Shanghai as world class city should pass trough a step of awareness, following similar examples of other world cities, that improved significantly their environmental conditions such as New York and Boston starting from the ‘80.

Similar projects have been completed in the recent years. Innovative architects, such a Turenscape, already connected ecological infrastructure with a critical approach toward the Chinese traditional agricultural landscape. The output is surely encouraging, most of all for the enthusiasm that they create to the visitors.

As a foreign student, I elaborated my strategy studying the economic, social and political context of contemporary China, using those conditions as a base for the construction of the proposal. In this way I tried to understand the context, not only the physical one, and to deduct a solid proposal. In this way I tried to avoid the literal application of euro-centric models, that as the past twenty years of development of Chinese architecture demonstrated, have a big

possibility to fail.

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