Landscape into Urbanism: Integrating landscape as an urban infrastructure broadening functional possibilities with reviewing the planning framework of Changxing, China:

This is a personal graduation project under the studio of Complex Cities and Regional Planning in the spatial planning chair of Urbanism track in TUD. The motivation of exploring the theme as ‘Landscape into Urbanism’ comes from the increasingly emerging environmental risks globally in urban areas. As the medium between artificial urban constructions and natural environment, urban landscape combines these two-side characters and then reflects them into the urban-landscape transformation process. Lots of recent sudden natural disasters or extreme climate condition such as the Hurricane Katrina and flooding in central Europe together with common environmental degrading from daily human activities all bring introspections to a more resilience and harmony urban-landscape relationship. Such landscape thinking is even more urgent in China, who has already suffered great environmental degrading during its fast urbanization process. Therefore, this project chooses Changxing Island in Shanghai, who could represent the spatial & operational conflicts between urban transformation and its dynamic landscape in both local and regional scales, as the research & design site. And with the general regional development and urban transformation concerns from Complex Cities studio, this project aims more than conserve the local natural & cultural landscape, but also take advantage of such uniqueness as local reflection to regional urban transformation context rather than following a tabula rasa pattern as current plan. The design & research exploration of this project is centred on the interpretation of Dutch Layer Approach model. From the inspiration of recognizing landscape’s values and integrating them with infrastructure and urban occupation layers, the proposed strategies and design guidelines proceed in reading natural & cultural landscape characters in specific site context, and also correlate such local advantages with regional urban transformation demand, with the consideration of dynamic future changes in both social-economic and environmental aspects. Through such design & research process on specific content, the exploration of integrating landscape into urbanism could be forward with more concrete definition on both spatial strategies and also retrospection on decision-making process, which directs to practical actions. What’s more, the process of answering how to integrating landscape as main research question actually lead to boarder research questions considering on the urban-rural transformation process in China, the recalling of cultural landscape values in China’s rural living & production pattern and thinking on the complexity of urban-landscape metabolism system.