Studio Description

Urban communities are facing many difficult challenges as they push to pursue a more sustainable future. Nowhere is this challenge more pronounced than in the rapidly growing megacities of China. Designers are acknowledging they need to transform the car-centered, use segregated modernist city into one that reintegrates nature ecologies and pursues a more mixed use, pedestrian friendly development pattern.  Further the city must explore strategies for zero net, distributed infrastructure and find ways to integrate dense urban agriculture.

Chongqing, located at the confluence of the Jialing and Yangtze River, is the municipality with the largest population in China. Possessing a pronounce topography in the mountainous terrain of western China, the studio project was located directly adjacent to the Jialing River, with a significant tributary snaking its way through the site. This post-industrial site was identified as a prime site for a dense mixed-use redevelopment. The students researched various issues related to pursing a sustainable urbanism project, developed a mixed use program and master plan and then took on various architecture projects. The architecture project displayed is a combination vertical farm and community center.