The William Cooper Mack Thesis Fellowship allowed me to travel to China. Through my research of the city Macau, I was able to understand the city and broader questions of urbanism in a much more nuanced way. I explored two neighborhoods–the North Area and Camoes Garden.

Like many other Asian cities, Macau is on the cusp of great change. In the North Area of Macau Peninsula, the answer to the need for development has been generic housing blocks. The North Area is a catalog of how the city has grown, with 8-story buildings from the 1970s and 16-story housing estates from the late 1980s and early 1990s, where each block measured 125 meters by 125 meters. The newer 40-story luxury apartment buildings adjacent to the water’s edge pose a marked juxtaposition to the older buildings with lower income tenants.

Camoes Garden is located in the mid-west zone of Macau Peninsula. It is an older area of the city that tourists seldom visit, but it exhibits a real sense of character and history. There is a diversity of architectural scale in this neighborhood; 6-story residential buildings, temples, structures dating back to the Qing Dynasty and the occasional 40-story building.

The Venetian Casino and the luxury high-rise buildings in the North Area demonstrate the new amount of wealth and the enormous growth that Macau is undertaking. Yet, they both deny the history of the city and what it already has to offer. The housing estates in the North Area feel like any other Asian city. Through my primary research of this condition, I saw the need to resist this generic approach to building, which seems to plague many growing cities. 

The scale of the blocks in the North Area offer some advantages in that they have more organized streets that allow for ease of transportation, although the attempt to bring a local character to these housing estates through street level storefronts was not successful. The North Area and Camoes Garden seem to stand in opposition to each other, but in traversing these parts of the city, and, upon further reflection, I realized that there could be a hybridization of the two. Macau should be able to grow while retaining its cultural history.

My thesis project provides an alternative to the conditions I found in Macau through the introduction of 125 meter by 125 meter housing blocks, grafted onto the urban fabric of Camoes Garden. This proposal breaks the isolating nature of these blocks creates continuity with the smaller streets, while at the same time maintaining the density of an enclosed housing block.