Amsterdam meets PRD
This is an image of Google Earth of the city of Amsterdam from a height of 7km. It shows the inner city of the Dutch capital, its canal structure and its 19th century expansions surrounding it. Vice-mayor Maarten van Poelgeest is the man who is in charge of spatial planning in this well-structured city. Last week it was our task to introduce mr Van Poelgeest to the dynamic conditions of Chinese cities by making a study trip. We traveled through the Pearl River Delta, from Hong Kong to Wuhan where mr Van Poelgeest attended the ISOCARP Conference, together with the deputy director of the urban planning department, Zef Hemel, who delivered a key note speech. In the conference, Amsterdam won the Award of Excellence for their Structural Vision 2040.
Of course, these trips are about understanding cities, but also about comparing. Let’s make a cross section of the urban areas that we visited, also from a height of 7km.
We started off on Hong Kong island (above), one of the densest built places on earth. The Floor Area Ratio in the city reaches levels of 5 to 7. This is mainly because the city decided to keep 75% of its land green. In 10 minutes from Occupy Central to Occupy Beach!
At Hong Kong University we discussed the extreme condition of the Hong Kong / Shenzhen border (above), where the city of Hong Kong still maintains the buffer zone that after 60 years of being a no-go area turned into a sort of eco-enclave between Hong Kong and Shenzhen. In stark contrast, the city of Shenzhen expanded to the absolute edges, so the two political systems meet each other represented by nature (HK) and high rise (China).
In Shenzhen, the heart of the PRD with 13 million inhabitants, we visited – amongst others – the BYD headquarters. In 16 years this company turned from a start-up to a 170.000 employee mega-company with 9.9% of its shares hold by Warren Buffet. The company has its headquarters in an industrial area in the north east of the city (above) in an urban condition that HKU researcher Joshua Bolchover described to as a ‘scrambled egg’. On the campus, 20,000 BYD employees live and work together.
The high speed train connects Shenzhen and Guangzhou in roughly an hour. In Guangzhou, we took the subway to the Xiaoguwei University Island (above), a recently developed area of 20 square kilometer with 10 universities where 100,000 students and 100,000 university employees live, study and work together in futuristic condition. The island has 3,5 million square meter of indoor space and can finally accomodate 400,000 people. On the island, some urban villages remain, that provide all kind of low profile facilities to the students. On Saturday night the villages form lively neighborhoods with restaurants and night markets being packed.
Finally we ended our trip in the city of Wuhan, the capital of Wuhan that celebrates the 100th birthday of the nationalist revolution that ended the rule of the emperors. The city used the celebrations to spend 3 billion on urban development: a 1911 museum, a monument, infrastructure and other buildings. Two years ago, the city planners were fully focused on the development of the Wangjiadun Central Business District. However, the planners of the Wuhan Planning and Development Institute (WPDI) shifted their focus southwards, to the lake area in the district of Wuchang. ‘The CBD is not developing fast enough.’
In the east part of the city we finally visited a new development area where the urban and the rural clash: this is where Le Corbusier and Mr Sun are confronted with each other…
RSS
