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The Global Schindler Award 2015, Shenzhen, China
Endless Belt
Endless Belt
The Global Schindler Award 2015 /
Shenzhen, China
The strategic position of Shenzhen on local geographic context is to be considered as the primary factor to manage solutions and strategies to define urban scale as this factor plays an important role in both regional and district scale.
The role and purpose of this city is to become another important development district in southern China, providing attractive services and a new urban image, as it takes part along their neighbors in the Perl river delta of a massive
process of urbanization. The river delta has just overpass Tokyo as the largest metropolitan area in the planet, with over
42 million inhabitants. Shenzhen is one of four cities in the delta, and nowadays it plays a more supportive role as platform for business between Hong Kong and Guangzhou.
This city's crisis is a result of urban expansion in the region; lack of land to build, and a primary industry development area related to factory and storage warehouses, becoming a more static urban center than their neighbors. The city claims for a dynamical distinct financial center that can hold and reflex the will of becoming a modern sustainable city, and so, put the name of Shenzhen in the world map.
The proposal encourages a high-density mix - commercial land development using the existing urban frame, and attempts to achieve three mayor goals.
First one is to give back to the city the control of their public
space and link it with transport systems serving the new developments and not the transit between their neighbor economic zones as it is today.
Second goal of this proposal is to integrate this part of the city with its context by softing its thresholds given by the existing highway frame and the train network.
The third goal is to provide flexibility of expansion along with attractive and unique spaces as this new urban core is created based on the city purpose to become a new business platform in the region, converting the GIVEN area into a pole of investment in the city.
We understand the city as a resource waiting to be exploited. In our global history, the city had suffered many changes and pressures that come in hand with new technologies. It has reinvented itself and evolved into new forms. We have seen many strategies through the pass of time and the city now, the modern city, is a very complex machine and it configures and shapes its own ecosystem. Any urban renewal strategy must be able to exploit this valuable resource, make itself a stronger ecosystem, a resilient system, and therefore a powerful system. Each city has his advantages and weaknesses. A good proposal must know what to prioritize in order to maximize the strengths of each urban settlement.