Dynamic Density

8/14/2019 Dynamic Density

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Dynamic Density

Dynamic Density

Maps of Beijing cannot be made fast enough. The speed of its renewal dees any static representation. Thegoal is a complete metamorphosis. The city develops simultaneously outwards, inwards and upwards. Thetransformations are almost instant and omni-present, but the nal outcome of this ash urbanization is unclear.

The impact on the environment and urban society is equally ckle. It brings forth the new city, yet suffocates it inits onslaught. It achieves modernity for its citizens and makeshift villages for its migrants. It provides downtownliving and working space for an exploding population yet relocates masses to the suburbs. The new urbanfabric is very dense, yet consumes vast amounts of arable land and eats away at the historic core. The urbanexpansion of Beijing can no longer be contained by planners or politicians, but plans and policies accelerateits suburbanization.

The result is a new periphery that dees any assumption of urban quality and forces us to rethink the meaningof sprawl and suburbia. Even in the outskirts accepted grounds for sprawl, such as low density, unplanned or

haphazard development, car dependent or mono-functional neighbourhoods are one by one rejected. Plannedsatellites fail to develop and scattered shanty communities continue to ourish. The problems attributed to sprawlseem all-pervading. Still, the Western scepsis for suburbia should be abandoned {add; difference suburbia}when in introduces dense high-rise communities, that respond to a massive need for homes with modernamenities almost instantaneously and its onslaught is embraced by an entire nation. Its features should beunderstood, possibly quantied and qualied, its potential laid bare.

However, we will venture into the new Chinese suburb with caution. The knowledge that the modern metropolisis stuck in trafc and western-bred suburbia has not been able to reinvent itself should provide a warning,particularly for a city on the path of explosive motorization, with all hope to alleviate inner-city congestion basedon suburbs and satellites. It is clear the intended image of Beijing will never be achieved, at the same time

disturbing suburban hamlets prove versatile and able to quickly progress.

We have set out to describe this process and the new suburban landscape for Beijing. Here, the transitionfrom monocentric to polycentric model best exemplies the shaky shift from planned economy to a (socialist)market economy. It includes the apparent success formulas of the new towns of Shanghai and the high-techdevelopment zones (HTDZ) of the Pearl River Delta. This has become the ambiguous blueprint for hundreds ofnew cities under construction throughout the country. The intermediate state between old and new, betweenideologies and between planning models is the contemporary Chinese city.


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Trans-SprawlMaster plans for Beijing are continuously behind with reality [Map BJ 2010]. Looking at the citysdevelopment forces us to consider the compressed time quality of rapid urban transformation. Even aninstantaneous map of the city becomes irrelevant in the overall context of the city in transition. The mereassumption Beijing will continue to grow, change and partly recede has redirected our focus away from theawe-inspiring objectives for 2008 and even the existing long-term plans, to consider what direction the cityis most likely to take and how to respond.

The mind-boggling economic growth of China and the announcement of Beijings winning of the bid forthe 2008 Olympics has brought a conscious international attention upon the city. Star architects building asmall number of downtown mega-projects have aroused in the city a mesmerizing sense of advancement.These stepping stone projects, such as the CBD and the high-tech district of Tiantongyuan help authorities

to master the speed and scale of urbanization. The most prestigious projects will be nished soon, butmany will remain unattainable drawing board proposals. Simultaneously and seemingly outside the scopeof ofcial planning an entirely new city is being built. A tidal wave of residential mega-blocks is currentlyunder construction on the urban fringe. This is where Beijing has commenced on its latest and largesttransmutation. Here the problems Beijing faces and the potential solutions are amplied and meet eachother. Beijings expanding residential areas will be our focal point.

To assess the quality of such fringe developments plunges us in the ongoing and highly disseminateddiscussion of urban sprawl; a discussion that has gradually accumulated all negative effects of urbangrowth and made it part of sprawl. But one thing is agreed that sprawl occurs on the urban fringe of rapidlyexpanding areas; this makes the concept very applicable to Beijing. However the term has become soabused that it lacks precise meaning; dening urban sprawl has become a methodological quagmire(Audirac, Shermyen, & Smith, 1990). The phenomena we encounter in the Beijing fringe will add to thiscloud of meanings to point its denition would become self-contradicting. In order to describe the dynamicdevelopments of Beijing we will introduce the term [trans-sprawl] that is specic to the Beijing (or at leastthe Chinese) context. It contains many symptoms generally contributed to urban sprawl, yet its physicalmanifestation, the socio-political context and most importantly its ephemeral qualities radically differ fromits western counterpart.

Trans-sprawl suggests a large part of the negative effects of Chinese suburbanization are only temporary.Indeed they present a necessary phase in the conversion to a larger city {add birch theory?}. As such itbecomes part of our over-arching premise of [Dynamic Density] (DD). It conceives of an ideal balancebetween built up area, or the footprint of a city and its [urban density]. An ideal density to footprint ratioexists for every stage of a citys development from village to metropolis. Dynamic Density allows us tomap this evolution and denes the urban and architectural prototypes most suitable for the differentstages of development. Through this, we can make light of the regional scaled network of hierarchies andinterdependencies between the different urban nodes. We will use Dynamic Density as a visual tool formapping Beijing, not merely in terms of describing the quantity of density, but the process of it, and whatit might ultimately become.

At this point, Dynamic Density enters a second phase in the mapping process, whereby illustrationprescribes a strategy, not simply for transporting densities (people, built environment, congestion, etc.),as is the current policy of Beijing urban planners - in effect, relocating the city to the outskirts - but forrendering the existing ows more efcient. In the case of Beijing this means approximating the naturalprocess of radial expansion. In the market driven environment this represents the most sustainable form for

urbanization. Having determined the shape of the city, we will propose a growth scenario that will increasethe density of the existing city between the Second and Fifth Ring Road. Our version of relocating Beijingdescribes a new circle centre anticipating residential developments. In the third stage this new residentialzone will mature with the repositioning of the surplus of urban function of the inner-city core or the [blackhole]. An exemplary case is made for the insertion of pedestrian orientated mass transit system. As atranscendental (hypothetical?) proposal it underlines the necessity to break down the walls of the gatedcommunities and illustrates the potential to reintroduce public green space.

legenda


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Dense Suburban texture of mega blocks.

Though spread out the urban composition was highly efcient. Planning policies were engand equality in mind and executed and controlled with vigor. Space for living workingneatly compacted together in almost self-sustainable units. Eventually every facet of been perfectly attuned to the urban system and vice versa; for all and for life. And infrastructure was very poor, with such stringent measures any movement beyond the ra

made redundant. Together with the tight-knit and integrated structure of the hutongs thmost Chinese cities dense and streamlined until the early eighties. [image no.]

[up-scaling]: from hutong to hyper-building.With the introduction of the market for land use rights in the 1980s, the city rapidly expanindustrial areas for commercial use and new residential neighbourhoods. Again the buildaugmenting the contrasts of downtown Beijing; Glitzy skyscrapers align dilapidated hutocompounds are surrounded by farmland. Neighbourhoods have dramatically changed the demolition (and resurrection) of entire blocks. The move away from a planned ecolandscape, from centre to suburb, satellite to village. The current stage of this transfascinating topography, where new forms of planning and architecture seem to arise naand modern department stores, parks and parking towers, small neighbourhood conamenities are crammed inherently together. This juxtaposition of residential interspersintricate and bulky, seems if only for the moment, to present a vital mixture of plannFrom a high standpoint, however, the city gives testimony of a more straightforward devresidential buildings and ofce towers have simply added a new ring consisting of itsarchitecture. In turn, these blocks eat inwards, consuming random chunks of the neatly c

painstakingly planned dormitory neighbourhoods.

[coarseness]: Overstretchedurbantissue c

architecture andinfrastructure.Gi

hostile landscape.

In an effort to describe the different side-effects of suburbanization wewill introduce a number of derivative forms of sprawl; [Infra-sprawl][mono-sprawl]. They refer to excessive infrastructure and the ensuingreduction of accessibility, uniformity and the risk of social segregationthey occur extensively in Beijing, but could equally apply outside thiscontext. As [sprawl] has not yet been clearly dened, the verdict isstill out on its negative or positive effects, on its cost-effectiveness andthe living quality it offers. These terms aim to identify the negative side-effects of suburbanization and indeed Chinese urbanization.

Beijing offers an environment that is still highly monocentric. Theurbanization of the city region, even of the satellite cities take form in

relation to the larger urban body of Beijing. This gives its suburbanizationan unambiguous direction outwards; unlike Pearl River Delta styleurbanization that has resulted in entirely new cities such as Shenzhenor the countless new urban settlements that spread the nation. Evenwithin the municipality of Beijing we see a unrelated form of urbanization;[Speed Sprawl]. Where [Trans-Sprawl] describes a transitory suburbandevelopment that has the potential to become efcient and even centralurban tissue, [Speed Sprawl] is a discontiguous expansion beyond theeld of [urban gravity] as a result of accelerated (sub-) urbanization.

No sprawlHaving introduced so many descendants of the sprawl concept in the nalsection of this chapter we will propose there is no sprawl. Beijing presentsthe unique feature of suburbanization that is for a large part extremelydense. In this lies the potential for the disenfranchised districts to purgethemselves of virtually all the drawbacks of sprawl. As the ultimatesurprise make-over an elaborate Beijing can emerge from this process ofrapid expansion and reveal a rich and seasoned identity; the last minute

escape from a otherwise generic modernization.

Towards Chinese Modernism: Beijing Ringing.

As the nations capital for nearly 800 years, pre-Communist Beijingis the textbook example of a carefully planned Chinese city; a cleargrid of courts and single storey hutongs surround the central palace,emphasizing the celestial order, the balance between heaven and earth,the emperor and its subjects. When in 1949 Mao proclaimed the birthof the Peoples Republic from Tiananmen Square a period of equallyclear-cut urban layout was to begin. Its blueprint consisted of an evenlyspaced plane of work and living units [danwei]. These neighbourhoodswere spread out so far they reached the current borders of the city. Atthis same time, post-war America was also making its move beyond thecentre. Propelled towards the outskirts with the support of the car anda ourishing consumer driven economy, an entirely new form of living

was engenderedsuburbia. Conversely in China, an all-encompassingcleaning operation deconstructed the existing civic society and replacedit with a production society. Soon, concentric zones of identical ve storydormitory style buildings surrounded the historic centre. In line with theModernist tradition, blocks were designed in fty meter long segments,facing perfectly south, with small open courtyards. [image no.]

Socio-urban alignment.

Infated

Market

legenda


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[infrasprawl]i. Excesses of infrastructure creating

disruptions of spatial patterns and causinginaccessibility

ii. Infrastructure that consumes more spacethan it can serve or generates more trafcmore than it can process. Comparableto the height of an ofce tower, the sizeof a city is nite. After a certain buildingheight, to accommodate the top oorswith elevators, space will be sacriced atthe bottom. Infrasprawl suggest a similaroptimum applies to the footprint of the cityand its road network.

[infrasprawl] Comparable to the height of aof a city is nite. After a certain building hethe top oors with elevators, space will be saInfrasprawl suggest a similar optimum appliecity and its road network.

A certain trait of [coarseness] can be used to qualify the urban texture of Beijing. It refers to the crude, uneven qualityof urban dispersion, moving the discussion beyond the mere form of the city to describing the movements that stretchand enlarge public space, architecture and infrastructure. It produces a hostile urbanity and introduces a rst symptomof sprawl; inaccessibility. Sprawl aimed simultaneously at the suburb and the centre.

Moved one paragraph up..{socialist market graphic}Big economy, big towersThe exploding urban scale and accelerated construction correlates with the arrival of inner-city highways. Though theconcept of a ring and radial road system was created in the 1950s and the construction of the second ring road startedas early as the 1960s, rings 2 to 6 were in reality all built in the last twenty years. The layout was thought to be an idealtransportation system to support the planned urban pattern. New highway orientated building typologies were developedtypical of the late communist era?? and massive glass and concrete slabs and box towers were erected alongside the

new roads. The Fourth Ring Road would be the edge of the city center, the Fifth Ring Road would link the suburbs andthe Sixth Ring Road should connect the satellite towns. Like most proposals concerning Beijing, reality would quicklysurpass the objectives for efcient transport. Today the city centre spills well over the Fifth Ring Road in all directions.

{intro for graphic page}Growing bigger and bigger the once all-encompassing local neighbourhood has disintegrated; social interactionand commercial space displaced outside the residential realm. In the Western context, this process has triggereda suburban, low-density, car-oriented lifestyle. In China, however, the near converse of the North American suburbappears. The large-scale residential blocks and villas located on and beyond the outer rings of the city are largelycater to the new wealth of the middle and upper middle class segments of Chinese society. The concept of suburbiais offered at tower-block density and executed with blatant [copy and paste] efciency. Large slabs built as asequence of cross-shape towers encircle a public area on top of a parking garage. Surrounded by little green andmuch infrastructure their suburban qualities are forcefully marketed on the exterior curtain of billboards. The messagerevolves around a [green illusion]; large luxurious dwellings in a green urban setting, giving promise to the xiao kangsociety pledged by the 16th Party Congress. Rents for upmarket villas (detached, single family homes) range fromUS$1,500 to US$12,000 per month, and purchase prices from US$250,000 to the millions, making Beijing one of theworlds most expensive retail markets.1 And while there is certainly no lack of shanty and low-quality developmentinltrating and contributing to sprawl formation, the butt of planned development focuses upon an up-scale suburbia,

ranging from the middle-class mega-block to the truly suburban villa parks. These are the new building blocks ofChinas urbanism. (Vacancy here??)

{inated market graphic}Inated Market Economy; ARCH=URBThe economic divide has accelerated the urge to fortify. The car-dependent middle-class is tneeding to leave the residential block for most services and facilities. The roads within the bloidyllically curving trails that converge at a single exit connecting to the freeway.Nestled geosuburbs and the centre, these residential bubbles are effectively suburbanizing the downtand modern they meet many requirements to be considered sprawl. At this scale the encloconsidered an urban element but in reality ignores its urban surroundings and can be insertedinfrastructure or urban facilities. The sum of Chinese stamps has reduced the city to a loosely ablocks, and urban planning has been diminished to bloated architecture.

The enormous imbalance between architecture and infrastructure results in a kind of [infrasprawas, on one hand, disruptions of spatial patterns created by excesses of infrastructure and onthat consumes more space than it can serve or generates more trafc more than it can proces

Large-scale urban interventions (ve rings of up to four lanes each direction) have had a numbring road system has been inserted uncompromisingly in the crammed conditions of Beijing. Eto occupy these inner-city freeways their construction pushed on. Colossal cloverleaf intersecbetween the hutongs and dormitory housing blocks; a massive 147 y-over junctions on the fhas effectively introduced hundreds of walls and inhospitable patches leaving the pedestrian smotorized transport, such as by bicycle and pedestrian, was the principal form of transport untilresidents of downtown dormitories hardly have a choice. Their blocks are encircled by highwaystransit system is not yet in place.2 Although this typology cannot accommodate cars the compquickly transforming into parking lots. To connect the different patches more infrastructure has of countless footbridges and tunnels. [numbers].

(Footnotes)1 The Real Deal Survival Guide to Beijing Real Estate, http://www.beijingscene.com/V05I0032 A comprehensive urban transport network (including subway, light rail and long distance rail)completion until 2020, when most architectural developments will have already been complete


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Density Paradox

Alain Bertaud

Large (mobile) labor markets the only raison dtre of large cities


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sprawl discussio


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Market-driven Organic Developmentdescribes an organic urbanizationpatterns as the result of anaccumulation of designed and wellorchestrated planning.

Any act of planning willinevitably contribute to theproblem...


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Oblong ratio: ratio of diameters between theshortest and longest diameters as if the citywas an oblong ellipse


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RUS


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The oating village is Chinese public-private collaborationperfected; streamlined deployment of a massive no-wages,no-demands workforce reminiscent of the communist era,constructing government endorsed urban mega-projects fora ercely competitive real-estate market.


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Up-scaling


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[Floating village]: migrating villaarchitecture moving fromto the next, offering acco300.000 people per squa

Up scalingHutong: density xxx, xxx m2/p, 1 storeyShops, facilities and social activity are allabsorbed in the integrated structure of smallalleys and homes.

Dormitory: density: xxx, xxx m2/p, 5 storeysWork and living areas in a rational layout of build-ings infrastructure and public space.

Highway Compound; density: xxx, xxx m2/p,15-25 storeysSimultaneously with the massive road systemlarge highway compounds in slabs and cross tow-ers. Disconnected or no facilities.

Residential Mega-block: density: xxx, xxx m2/p,25-50 storeysFacilities absorbed in block. Fenced off andcar-orientated. Work and leisure in large unitsremoved from home.

Floating Village: density: xxx, xxx m2/p, storey(2000 bunk beds)Fully self-sufcient mobile village of barracksaccommodating several thousand constructionworkers.


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Towards Chinese modernity


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Towards Chinese modernityThe trend of fortication has generated a uniquely Chinese enclav

residential blocks surrounded by basic greenery on top of a parkingimmobility} With such sheltered stamps the Beijing periphery is bei

itself off and protects its residents from the urban clutter generated incityscape. Bit by bit it gobbles up and privatises communal space of pIt can connect to minimal infrastructure and hook into uncharted terr

can dress up the wasteland along the highways and market a [green

The result is a neo-lecorbusian landscape of the same cookie-cu

towers as envisaged with the Ville Radieuse, only adorned with cap

crowns. In strings they are scattered along the Fourth and Fifth Riforms consist of [dormitory] extrusions; tall elongated slabs that presof Chinas own modernist heritage.

They form a distinct new ring of urbanization; partly beyond the suqualication with sprawl derivatives), partly within the Fourth Ring Rtheir progression to a peripheral center.

Dispersion


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23c45ts

HK Suburban

Super Block

Dispersion

The problem that remains is that the bulk of the residential quarters willhave been built beforehand. Even though the transit plans exist, the newcompounds largely take shape with only road accessibility in mind. The

ideal location for up-market living is along the 4th ring road. Transportationplanning should consider land use and the urban spatial structure. But theChinese stamp can be inserted with minimum regard of infrastructure or

urban facilities. As Mayor Wang Qishan of Beijing puts it: Contradictionbetween real estate development and trafc regulations is the biggest

problem now facing Beijing.

Particularly with the maturing of internet and telecommuting (or home

working) ideas of job dispersion ourished. However, poly-nuclear cities,

specially very large ones such as Tokyo or Seoul, seem hardly able toreduce travel times, length or numbers of commutes. The freedom to move

efciently to any point becomes the success formula of the capitalist city.This is a far cry from the ideals of the urban conguration of the danwei era.

Alain Bertaud; large (mobile) labour markets are the raison detre of largecities. It makes residential-job dispersion a poor tool for trafc reduction ofa metropolis. Conversely trafc can augment with the creation of displaced

monofunctional districts such as sleeping towns.

[Monosprawl]:i. An urban extension that is not necessarily inefcient, dispersed or

suburban, but should be regarded as sprawl because of its mono-functionalnature.

ii. Spatially or socially uniform area that encourages social segregation

Shopping, recreation and public

space close to the residence doeshowever positively effect travel

behaviour. In Tokyo an effectivebalance has evolved connectingresidential and business areas with

mass transit. These commutesare predominantly dened by tripsbetween home and work. Every day

necessities such as groceries areprovided in a ne grid of convenience

stores distributed across the denseresidential areas. Dedicated retailand entertainment centres are

grouped around the transit nodesand the business districts.

The opposite model is most evolved in Hong Kong. Here public-private collaboration has enabled very tall and compacted

building typologies to move far into the new territories. Thereal-estate and railway developers work in conjunction on new

extensions making the homes well-connected and the trainsprotable. Unlike the Chinese stamp, these enclaves offer anabundance of facilities in a hotel-like setting with direct public

transport to the center. [pic cities without history].


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HK SoFOPEN NETWORK

of public spaceand LOCAL

TRANSPORT


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D-Rail


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Trans Sprawl [sprawl]:v.sprawled,sprawling,sprawls

v.intr.

To spread out in a straggling or disordered fashion.

n.

Haphazard growth or extension outward, especially th

real estate development on the outskirts of a city: urba

In urban theory:

declining of (urban density as a

i. decline popuof built up ar

ii. decline of renurban density

when incomeagricultural r

[speed sprawl]:

Self-contradisprawl; a mixdispersed, plirregular subThe result of construction.


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BRAND CITY

accomodating amodern labor force


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Dynamic Density

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