Taopu Central Park

2021-06-14

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ASLA Professional Awards General Design --- Honor Award（2020）

By James Corner Field Operations

评审委员会评语Jury Citation

Once a home to industry and its contaminated soils, a new central park for a northwest Shanghai district becomes a lush multi-ecosystem environment that brings biodiversity into the dense city. Achieving 70 percent tree coverage within the site, Taopu Central Park becomes a healing lung for the city while providing ample space for universally accessible recreation and pedestrian activity spread across 237 acres, with multiple transit-proximate entrances. Flood mitigating strategies built into the park around its wetlands—including permeable pavement at roadways—lead to a massive underground pool capable of storing nearly 8 million gallons of water per day. Islands, bridges, and pavilions provide a variety of experiences for visitors to the park to re-engage with sculpted aquatic habitats.

作品介绍 Introduction

Over the past 30 years, Shanghai has been forced to confront the pressures of unprecedented urban growth by shifting from a concentric model of metropolitan form to a polycentric model. The result is a series of hyper-connected urban hubs with distinct identities, strongly linked to the city center via transit. As Shanghai has grown, it has repurposed industrial sites at its outskirts, including Taopu. The 4.2-square-kilometer “Taopu Smart City” is a new science and technology hub in northwest Shanghai with an expected population of 29,000 people.

Taopu has gone through a number of transformations in a short time. From 1950–1997, it was primarily a site for chemical, pharmaceutical, textile, and light industry uses, and was known to be one of the most heavily polluted areas of the city. From 1997–2000, Taopu was one of the first urban industrial parks in Shanghai, reflecting the municipal government’s shift to printing and packaging industries within its most polluted areas. In 2009, Taopu’s economy began shifting again, this time into the productive service and high tech industries, in line with a growing desire to create a city that is both industrial and livable. In 2014, the district government launched Taopu Smart City to complete the transformation of the Taopu region from polluted industrial lands into a hub for science and technology. Today, Taopu Central Park has become the defining and unifying element of Taopu Smart City, reflecting its ethos as a green eco-city and actively participating in its remediation and reclamation.

核心价值 Main Value

核心价值1：The new Taopu Central Park is a functioning ecological system and a bustling hub of commerce, innovation, leisure, and entertainment. The park choreographs the movement of people, water, air, soil, and wildlife while filtering pollutants and providing much needed habitat. A primary aim of Taopu Smart City is to fuel economic growth and innovation by offering a well-connected and exceptional public space as a catalyst for high-quality urban development. This “Park-City Symbiosis” distinguishes Taopu from other territories in Shanghai and identifies Taopu as a benchmark for technological, cultural, and environmental innovation.

核心价值2：Large-scale earthwork was necessary to confront some of the site’s industrial legacy, including excavation, relocation, and capping of contaminated soils. Soils were managed on site, rather than being removed or stored elsewhere, as a long-term ecological benefit. In contrast with Shanghai’s flat topography, this rough earthwork provided a topographic base upon which the park’s sculpted landforms can create vistas and valleys with incredible views of the city and the park itself. Watchtowers set within the forest leverage new views and allow for an experience of immersion within nature and the city simultaneously.

核心价值3：Taopu Central Park breaks the mold for many parks in China. Land bridges and tunnels allow for needed road infrastructure while still creating a large continuous park, which prioritizes pedestrian safety, strengthens neighborhood connections, and creates habitat and wildlife corridors. In the central portion of the park, Taopu Hill & Overlook—a mound built over Gulang Road—creates a viewing deck from the top, with a tunnel connecting west-east traffic below. As the highest elevation in downtown Taopu, this opens up new views and vistas of Shanghai.

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