AA LANDSCAPE URBANISM STUDIO WORK 2011-12:
WEAVE, RETHINKING THE URBAN SURFACE
Mentougou, Beijing China
Students: David Witte and Du Chen
WEAVE sets as its framework China’s economic boom and migration from the countryside which is boosting a high-speed urbanism that produces new cities in the shortest imaginable time, changing the faces of older towns. This directional urbanization, propelled from the coastal zones into the countryside, has brought the smallest villages face to face with the phenomenon of globalization – and its foreign capital and generic architecture.
Our course brief was based on China’s ambition to build 400 new cities by the year 2020. And we were asked to engage opportunistically with the generation of ‘proto-strategies’ for new large-scale agglomerations as a means of critically addressing the phenomenon of mass-produced urban sprawl. Our test bed is the growing sprawl of Beijing as capital of an emerging global superpower.
Explore the full project HERE
