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Self-healing city

Tsinghua University | Beijing City Lab
Second Shanghai Urban Design Challenge - November 2019

Associate Professor Ying Long
Enjia Zhang | Hanting Xie | Hongyu Zhou | Jianting Zhao | Jingxuan Hou | Wanting Xu | Yunyi Zhang | Zhidian Jiang | Zhaoxi Zhang (Team leader) 
Awards: Second-Pride Design

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Healthy environment for healthy life

What is a healthy city? In our design, we imagine that a healthy city is not only a good environment with harmony between nature and built elements, but it can also be a self-immune and resilient system, like the human body, which has a self-healing function to cope with environmental risks. The design is based on five dimensions of indicators: built environment, natural elements, history and culture, human behavioural activities and human sensory experience. 

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Through the use of various sensors in the built environment, the design forms a ‘network of intelligence’ for the site to collect intelligent feedback from the urban infrastructure, enabling it to improve the quality of the built environment, adapt the micro-level environment to coordinate people’s activities, and enhance people’s perception of public life. We aim to automatically adapt to different climatic and event conditions to address the pressing global challenges of climate change, environmental risk and health equity. We hope to achieve a healthy, sustainable and smart urban future.

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Contexts

The design site is located at Minsheng Pier in Shanghai’s Pudong district, which is an integral part of the Huangpu River waterfront. This site is significant as it is a critical component of the slow/transport system, ecosystem and social system along the Huangpu River. In the last century, Minsheng Pier played a pivotal role in Shanghai’s maritime trade, connecting the city to the rest of the world. Today, Minsheng Pier is an important part of the city’s skyline and the overall landscape along the Huangpu River.

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In order to gain a comprehensive understanding of the context of the area, we selected six key riverside areas along the Huangpu River for comparative analysis. The design site belonged to area number three. We considered their differences in terms of walkability, landscape and urban vitality. In this way, we can better understand the unique characteristics of each site and how they relate to the design of Minsheng Pier.

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The comparison showed that the quality and vitality of the public open spaces on the design site needed to be improved in order to attract people and provide ongoing enjoyment along the Huangpu River. In particular, more public open space is needed to improve walkability, cycleability and connectivity to the city centre and other riverfront areas.

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Sites

A detailed site visit showed us the existing problems and we believed that the main problems were the deterioration of the facades of the historic buildings, the deterioration of the road surface and the presence of litter.  We then carried out a spatial analysis to assess the relationship between attractiveness and accessibility for pedestrians, cyclists and vehicles. The results showed that the overall level of attractiveness was lower than accessibility, indicating low use of the streets. 

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Our further analysis also showed that people are less willing to visit places near the river because of the lack of transport links near the river. We also looked at the distribution of POIs and human physical activity (i.e. running) on the site and the figures showed that human activity is mostly concentrated and dense during weekends and holidays, suggesting that people come to the site mainly for recreation.

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Concept

We proposed that a healthy city is similar to the human body, which should be self-healing physically and mentally. Like the human body, different urban elements are closely related to each other and form the health of urban systems. Considering the site situation, we developed an urban self-healing system consisting of five dimensions: built environment, natural elements, history and culture, human behavioural activities and human sensory experience.

 

Rethinking the direct visual impact of these elements on people, we studied the theory of colour therapy and believed that the energy of colour is absorbed by cells and affects the whole body, affecting people's health on multiple levels: physical, emotional and spiritual. Therefore, this design focused on the colour characteristics of urban space at the micro scale of public open space and aimed to expand its healing effect on mental and emotional well-being during daily practice, summarizing a colour therapy system with 16 levels.

 

There are 31 public spaces on the site, we used the urban self-healing system to evaluate the site situation and applied the colour therapy system to improve the quality of the site, ultimately benefiting human well-being.

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Urban design is the key to a healthy environment for all

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