Moving Centers, Shared Lines: there is no post-industrial city

Beijing periphery, China

In collaboration with landscape architect Daia Paco Stutz

There is no post-industrial city.

In October 1949, Mao Zedong stood in Tiananmen Square to announce the formation of the People’s Republic of China, saying: “We will see a forest of chimneys from here.” With this, he presented his vision of

Beijing as a productive, anti-bourgeois city where industry is included within the city fabric in factory-dominated work units. As a result, heavy industry operated extensively in the center of Beijing throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Large industrial corporations like the Capital

Steel Corporation (one of the country’s largest steel manufacturer) established plants in different parts of the central city. The essence of this productive era can be grounded in contemporary pressing issues in China. 

Structured along the main existing rail lines of the Qinglonghu district, a transition hybrid-economy of mining and remediation is introduced. Mobility and resource extraction sets the stage for multiple educational and research campuses to activate an urban transformation that aspires to increase “mobility, income, and leisure.” Destructive practices will evolve into constructive ones, setting the stage for an urbanization rooted in both traditional and new industries.

Along the rail, a linear city will be used to cross mobility infrastructure and mediate topography. These “urban bands” and “ecological corridors” will be phased with strategic campus-catalysts centered on alternative energy and material research & development.

 

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