A former industrial site in Shanghai inspires plans for regeneration.
“This is a very rare opportunity to do something big close to the center of the city,” says Weitzman's Zhongjie Lin of Fuxing Island, the workshop site in central Shanghai. (Photo: Wikimedia/Fayhoo)
China’s Fuxing Island is a manmade island in the Huangpu River, cut off from Shanghai by a canal built in the 1920s. Barely inhabited, the 1.1-square kilometer, crescent-shaped island is home to a series of former factories and warehouses and other remnants of industrial waterfront infrastructure. Its industrialization began in the late 1920s and continued into the People’s Republic era, as the island became an important base for shipbuilding, gasoline production, and fishing. Later, as Shanghai transformed into a global metropolis during China’s economic reforms, Fuxing Island was left relatively unused while most of its factories and warehouses stopped functioning.
This summer, a group of students from the Weitzman School joined dozens of other students from 24 universities in 11 countries for a summer exchange program organized by the College of Architecture and Urban Planning (CAUP) at Tongji University focused on the future of Fuxing Island, amid discussions within Shanghai’s government about redeveloping the space into a new urban district. A phase of accelerated development in the city is coming to an end, says Zhongjie Lin, the Benjamin Z. Lin Professor of City and Regional Planning at Weitzman and co-organizer of the program, and the municipal government is committed to a more carefully considered program of development for one of its only underdeveloped pieces of land.
Zhongjie Lin with David Gouveneur and Ming Zhang at the closing ceremony on Fuxing Island for the CAUP program (Photo: Jingyi Liu)
“This is a very rare opportunity to do something big close to the center of the city,” Lin says.
The seeds of the 10-day program were planted last summer, when the McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology teamed with Southeast University (SEU) to present an expanded version of the 2019 exhibition Design With Nature Now in Nanjing. It was the occasion for Associate Professor of Practice in Landscape Architecture and City Planning David Gouverneur to give a lecture at Tongji University. He was then invited by the chair of the university’s landscape architecture department, Ming Zhang, to co-organize the workshop this summer. Zhang and Professor Lan Wang, CAUP’s dean, also organized a Shanghai presentation of the exhibition Design With Nature Now in conjunction with the workshop and an international forum on landscape architecture.
Gouverneur’s signature pedagogical approach, which involves group sketching on oversized printed maps—an extension of a practice employed by Ian McHarg when he led Penn’s landscape architecture department in the mid-20th century—informed students’ work on Fuxing Island. For the Tongji program, Gouverneur and 12 other instructors formed five teams comprising 31 students from different disciplines, universities, and nations. The teams performed site analyses focused on the natural systems, urban systems, and social and cultural heritage of the island, informed by onsite lectures by Gouverneur, Lin, and local scholars and designers. The students’ charge was to develop a vision for the future of the island based on its existing assets, from defunct cranes and warehouses to piers and waterfront land.
“Working back and forth between languages was something I’ve never had to do before,” says Weitzman student Margaret Claire Balich, on floor center. (Photo: You Wu)
“It was the idea of regeneration, of reclaiming” Gouverneur says. “You’re dealing with the bones of what is there, the physicality of what is there.”
For students, it was a chance to design in an urban environment many of them were unfamiliar with. And with just six days to develop their projects, it was a uniquely compact process.
“We all had our different ideas and we went through and spoke about those and iterated really quickly, until we landed on a cohesive plan that united all of our ideas,” says Veronica Helena Raga Widell, a second-year Master of Architecture student. “It was an intense environment where everybody was speaking and everyone had good ideas. I really liked the speed of it.”
The method of design, using large printed maps, also forced a degree of collaboration that Gouverneur says doesn’t occur when students are designing on their own computers. Raga Widell, for one, says she packed a laptop for the trip but never even opened it. In addition to the time crunch, there were cultural and linguistic barriers to overcome.
“It was an intense environment where everybody was speaking and everyone had good ideas,” says Weitzman student Veronica Helena Raga Widell, seen here presenting ecological studies. (Photo: You Wu)
“Working back and forth between languages was something I’ve never had to do before,” says Margaret Claire Balich, another Master of Architecture student at Weitzman. “It helped me learn and communicate with drawing more. It was an experience that was very eye-opening.”
Students spent their early mornings and late nights exploring Shanghai. They gave their presentations on the final day to a group of scholars and local officials, an event which coincided with the Shanghai presentation of Design With Nature Now. Despite the intensity of the program, Lin says, the students’ work could help point the way to a different mode of building in Shanghai.
“They are not doing things like before,” Lin says of Shanghai officials. “They are much more patient now. They want to carefully study and use this rare piece of land to stage something really impactful.”
View Slideshow
