Alex Pellizer, born in 1988, is a master’s degree student in architecture at Università iuav di Venezia In 2014 he participated at the International Workshop “Public Realm as City Welfare - Citizen Wellbeing” in Shanghai, a joint collaboration between Tongji University of Shanghai and Università iuav di Venezia.

 

abstract

 

Lessons learnt from the street: the case of Caoyang village public spaces

Shanghai is a charming city.

During the last ten years, five hundred thousand people moved permanently in Shanghai’s districts. Shanghai is also a hypothetically endlessly-growing metropolis. For these reasons, Shanghai is a a shining example of a hyper-city, perfect for analysis: we can study how the internal links in the metropolitan’s large and important functions influence very specific aspects of the inhabitant’s lives.

In regard to Shanghai’s quick growth, it is very important to design a citizen oriented city with an appropriate public space system, capable of facilitating human’s activities without spatial limitations.

It is important to mention that my work focused on the Caoyang village, located in the Putuo district. Caoyang village is one of the first planned urban development for Shanghaiese workers, designed and built in the Fifties. These typical villages were an attempt to create a new model town.

Today, the municipality is searching for the perfect urban layout: there are a lot of new towns under construction in the surrounding areas of Shanghai.

My observations attempt to analyse the existing public realm in Shanghai, the activities of its inhabitants and also the relations between buildings and infrastructures. Following this, I will try to find some actions and strategies for urban development that can easily adopted all over Shanghai.

The starting point was an international workshop called “Public Realm as City Welfare – Citizen Wellbeing”. The workshop took place in Shanghai during September 2014 and was the result of a cooperation between Tongji University of Shanghai and Università Iuav di Venezia. We had the opportunity to study the typologies of public spaces in China through surveys,field observations and data collections. At the end we were able to have an insightful vision of the public space in China and to underline its powerful strong points and various critical situations.

The main purpose of the workshop was to define the main issues that had to be faced, subsequently, appropriate observations were made using hypothetical scenarios. During the construction of the scenarios, we were able to find appropriate strategies and to lay the foundation for a public space’s design which meets the local needs.

Our target, instead of devising a simple master plan, was to define a series of bottom-up strategies, in order to create a flexible and organic urbanistic system able to support and contain continuous changes and constant alteration of the hyper-city.

This work tries to make the link of invisible relations and evanescent connections tangible, as this often escapes from analysis.

In conclusion, it is possible to concretely empower the inner structure of the contemporary hyper-city and accordingly, the everyday human life within it. This is achieved through an appropriate urban project for the public spaces which is capable of intercepting these imaginary but strategical hidden urban relations.