GuangMing Eco City
2010-01-19 from: author:
Award-winning architectural-urban designer and UCL Bartlett academic, CJ Lim, has made it to the final three in a competition to build a new eco-city in China. Lim has beaten off stiff competition from some of the world's largest and most prestigious firms to make it to this stage.
Seventy firms submitted entries for the competition in November 2006, which were then whittled down to five and now to three – the winner will be announced next week. The brief was to design and plan an environmentally-friendly city from scratch, in GuangMing, northwest of Shenzhen in the Guangdong Province of China. This competition is the second city-design competition in a plan by the Chinese government to create five new eco-cities.
The scale of the GuangMing project is enormous, with the proposed new town covering an area of 7.92 km2, or as Lim puts it: "The scale of the city is like walking from Shoreditch in East London to Swiss Cottage in North West London."
Currently, GuangMing is a fertile farming area that exports much of its produce to nearby Hong Kong. This focus on farming provided Lim with much of the inspiration for his competition entry and has resulted in a radical new approach to how our cities are designed and planned.
Instead of abandoning farming, Lim has incorporated it into the fabric of the city – lush grazing and arable land can be found on the roofs of the huge circular towers that make up the city. Additional land for crops is made available on a series of eighty vertical farms; 10m2 allotments cantilevered off a central spine and stacked one above the other like the branches of a giant tree, and dispersed throughout the city.
