Ground Ecologies

TYPE Cultural, Infrastructure, Public space, Landscape Urbanism Planning
STATUS Competition 1st Prize
LOCATION Jiading, PR China
YEAR 2010
CLIENT Jiading Government

DESIGN TEAM Jorge Ayala, Cris­tina Barrios, Eva Castro, Ulla Hell, Holger Kehne, Tobias Krauth, Ales­sandra Laiso, Sohail Qandili, Eduardo Rico, Federico Ruperto, Ayami Takada, Wenwen Wang
COLLABORATORS GroundLab

The site is located in the outer area of Shanghai City and is part of the greater master plan of the city to develop peripheral new districts that can cope with the rapid urban de­velopment and the need to provide residential zones with direct access to the centre.

The competition called for the transfor­mation of the industrial site into a high dense residential area boost by the newly open metro line station in the border of the site and a highway that ensure direct and close connections to the centre of Shanghai, allowing Jia Ding to become an important local centre in the near future.

The project inception is based on the local ground conditions and its transi­tion from being a heavy industrial site into a new high dense residential dis­trict which includes business and com­mercial zones. The challenge was to integrate the necessary techniques a methods to prepare the ground for the future development with the resi­dential, commercial and business pro­grammes.

The structure of the project was lay out using 3 different engineering tech­niques: Soil remediation, water treat­ment and traffic and street system.

This 3 different techniques were inter­twine in order to create a basic frame­work from where the new programme can be introduce. The potentials and possibilities that a new a clean canal system, a new ground configuration, and the reorganisation of the street layout, were used to generate a pro­ject with a new ecology that can cre­ate a sustainable diverse and inclusive community.