SWA Group | IDEAS

“Ecologistics,” the continuous and sustainable development of Rugao’s port-city interface near Shanghai the world’s busiest cargo and container port cluster, promotes a regional port-city alliance for the area and integrates global logistics with local ecology. In this three part series, we will focus on the history and evolution of ports and the specifics of Rugao…. Read more »

Posted by QiuHongTang
in Urban Ecologies
on 21 January, 2012

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Since 1978, these 30 years have been an era of rapid change for China as well as its real estate industry which has grown from non-existence to accounting for 11% of GDP and 60% of tax revenues in some municipalities. The speed and scale of change and wealth creation along the way is unprecedented, and… Read more »

I was invited to participate on a panel at the Urban Land Institute 2011 Fall Meeting discussing real estate development in China with K. B. Albert Chan (Director, Shui On Development Limited), Adam Yu Chikeung (Chairman, Beijing Winland Real Estate Co., Ltd), and Ronald A. Altoon (Partner, Altoon & Porter Architects, LLP).

Although my work here at SWA is predominantly in China during last 3 years, as an urban designer and landscape architect, I have been exposed to the development process mainly from the perspective of a designer. How do I structure a meaningful conversation with the audience mostly American developers? So in the final days leading up to the panel discussion, I happened to be traveling through China for work and I set out to expand my understanding of Chinese real estate development.

If SWA’s work history in China is an indication, the pace of development in this nation is increasing rapidly and doesn’t show any sign of slowing down. SWA began working in China in 1994, we’ve worked on 432 projects in more than 100 Chinese cities. More than 30% of this work has been done in 2011 alone, with 189 projects since the year began and 41 just since July.

Not only is there a rapid increase in new projects, but the pace of the project development cycle is also much faster than in the US. In 2007 total 2,040 million m2 gross floor space of buildings were completed in China. Construction usually begins before our design is complete. This is especially evident by the length and intensity of workdays worked in China. In the six days of my last trip to China, I traveled to Beijing, Peony River City, and Nanjing. My days began at 5am and ended at midnight with waking up in a different city every morning.

More than 35% of the 125 cities with more than 1 million residents are in China, according to the book Asia Beyond Growth (ORO editions, 2010). This is a direct result of the country’s drive for modernization around industry, defense, agriculture and science starting with Mao’s successor Deng Xiaoping in 1978. Since then, there has been a steady decrease in rural populations and increase in urban populations to supply the labor force for the nation’s industries. In 1990, less than 20% of the country’s residents, 191 million people, lived in China’s urban areas. This number grew to 502 million, more than 45%, by 2008 and this trend is projected to continue. By 2020, 60% of China’s population will live in cities. The economic spill-over of this growth: every 1% increase in the urban population feeds a 5% increase in consumption of construction and other raw materials.

Accompanying China’s modernization ambitions were a series of land reform decisions that have dramatically transformed how China’s urban landscape is developed – and the wealth of property owners. Beginning in 1982 as a part of Deng Xiaoping’s initiation of the “Socialist Market Economy”, the Fourth Constitution of the People’s Republic of China satisfied the interests of the majority of population (peasants) by giving the agriculture land to the collective ownership of its workers. The State maintained its grip on the urban land and its attached commercial value. That is until 1986, when the “Land Law” introduced the concept of the “right of use” for properties. By the next year, some cities began experimenting with trading these rights-of-use and gave birth to China’s real estate market. These trades were permitted between private citizens and businesses nation-wide in 1990. Within the first year of “rights of use” trading, 3700 authorized developers were in operation.

The market advanced again in 1998 when the government put an end to free social housing and began selling housing at steep discounts to residents. The rate of home ownership took off. By mid 2009 the share of real estate in the scope the total investment was 25% (up from 4% in the early 1990’s).

Today, the Chinese government is trying to balance the conflicting needs – protect agriculture lands needed to nourish the nation and import the necessary labor for continued industrial growth. So, to monitor this growth, developers are required to go through many levels of authorities – and each one has the authority to stop it completely. As a result lobbying at all levels has become essential for developers working in China, which makes it a highly localized industry and very difficult for foreign developers to break into.

Like many others of my generation, growing up in free social housing, we witnessed our parents’ owning their first home with deep discount from the State and many friends’ becoming millionaires through souring real estate investments. Since 1978, these 30 years have been an era of rapid change for China as well as its real estate industry which has grown from non-existence to accounting for 11% of GDP and 60% of tax revenues in some municipalities. The speed and scale of change and wealth creation along the way is unprecedented, and is the result of a strong, deliberate public policy aiming at modernizing China.

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Posted by QiuHongTang
in Urban Ecologies
on 21 January, 2012

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In recent posts we’ve been discussing art and science as related to ecology. Art and science are two concepts that are generally considered to be binaries-terms in opposition to one another. Yet we are interested in creating hybrids between these two, exploring relationships in which art and science are fused together in our design methodology…. Read more »

Hybridity refers to a mixture in which the constituting parts are not just combined but thoroughly distributed amongst one another. Hybrids maintain characteristics from their original elements yet form distinctly unique conditions and relationships. Initially a biological or agricultural term, hybridity has also become a philosophical term espoused to linguistics and more broadly, globalization—not just referencing recent forms of globalization but focused on the way in which civilizations have mixed throughout human development. (See Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Globalization and Culture: global mélange, 2004). Hybridity itself has become a mix of both science and culture.

The hybridization of art and science within an ecological design methodology has the potential to create innovative relationships not otherwise possible when starting from either condition on its own. Akin to the classic form versus function tug-of-war that permeated design methodologies throughout the 20th century, hybridity suggests form AND function, creating no distinction between the successes of one ideal versus the other.

In our design methodology of built environments, we strive to create as little distinction between the art and science of our proposals, believing that one is integrally tied to the other—beauty is analogous to the organization of natural processes. Just as art is a process of creation through the properties of its medium, design of the built environment can use properties of natural processes as the medium for formal expression. Not only does this fuse the performative characteristics of design to the formal characteristics, it also suggests that the design process may be more closely linked to the actual construction process. Just as art is the creation—the final product, a hybridized design methodology may move beyond just an a priori representation to become the actual final creation. As form and performance are more closely tied together, design becomes less focused on the final form than on a process, constructed and natural.

Thus, we seek to combine the scientific understanding of natural processes with their formal exhibition into an artistic composition that reflects an intentional vision. This is the form of ecology.

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Posted by Andrew Watkins
in Urban Ecologies
on 21 January, 2012

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As designers, we have the responsibility to intentionally form the urban environment, to “paint the city in bold strokes, as O’Malley writes in “The Art of Ecology, the Art of Urbanism,” inspired by the way natural processes create beautiful patterns at a large scale. O’Malley’s post triggered some critical ideas about our intentionality as designers, specifically in relation to the method or process by which we transfer design inspirations into our own formal concepts. Ecological design inspiration from natural patterns brings up an interesting problem: we find inexplicable beauty in the form of nature, forms that we desire to emulate both for their formal beauty and for their ecological performance, yet nature does not rely on the intention of a designer for its form but rather on a set of natural laws and processes—gravity, erosion, climate—that have acted upon the earth based upon rules set in place long ago.

Several questions arise: In the same manner that natural patterns do not rely directly on a designer for their formal expression, should designers focus their design intention on forms or processes—that is, static descriptions or flexible guidelines? How much can we control the formal product of a design in a flexible, ever-changing environment? Should we think of ‘form’ as an initial intervention, subject to change over time, or as a fixed entity, such that the landscape never changes? Increasingly in our work, we strive to create places that change over time – that bend and yield with the processes and systems of the landscape. How do we draw this? How do we design this? In the end, how do we communicate our vision for an ecological city – something that is always changing over time? The subject of our intention—the agency with which we design and communicate our ideas—continues to be a topic of critical discussion.

An enlightening correlation to both these questions and O’Malley’s original poetic reference to the painter can be found in James Corner’s exploration of representation. In ‘Representation and Landscape’, Corner describes how an artist’s medium directly influences the formal representation of their intention—the medium, be it paint or metal or a digital tool, determines a set of possibilities in the final piece. In some regards, the final piece embodies the performative characteristics of its medium, not just the design intent. In fact, as Corner recognizes, some artists may not know the final form of the piece when they begin their work but rather rely on the properties of the medium with which they are working to lead them to the final form. [Corner]

For ecological design, our mediums are the processes—natural, social, and economic—that define a living system or an urban environment. Ecological design, as defined by Van der Ryn and Cowan, is “any form of design that minimizes environmentally destructive impacts by integrating itself with living processes.” [Van der Ryn]

Corner goes on to identify that designers are one step removed in the artist’s process—our hands do not touch the materials that will finally construct our designs. Rather, we use representations, traditionally drawings and models, to communicate our design intent to a builder—the intermediary who actually constructs the project. For Corner, the distanced condition of the designer from their medium results in an informative essay on representation, an exploration of the drawings we use as designers. For us, particularly in ecological design, this same realization allows us the opportunity to identify the medium with which we do directly interact and construct a process in which we may ‘paint’—in which we explore the relationship between medium and form. Our challenge is to understand the connection between the formal and performative characteristics of ecological processes within the strategy of our design intent.

References:

Corner, James. ‘Representation and Landscape’. Theory in Landscape Architecture: A Reader, 2002.

Van der Ryn S, Cowan S. Ecological Design. Island Press, 1996, p.18

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Posted by Andrew Watkins
in Arts and Culture, Urban Ecologies
on 21 January, 2012

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Hidden from view in our day-to-day lives there exists a pattern and beauty much larger, much more comprehensive. From space these patterns reveal themselves as deep blue braided rivers and rich green plains, wetland patches, desert reds and yellows; all moving, all seemingly going somewhere. Amongst all our deep understanding of the natural sciences, and its relationships and complexity, there exists a simple beauty to it all. A secret that can only be revealed when we take a step back, and marvel at the tremendous scale of these natural systems.

When we design at a scale comparable to the vastness of these natural systems, the need exists to express as the earth does. When we design cities of 50, 100, or 1,000 square kilometer regions, we need to think as the earth does. There is an art to her work that needs to be present in ours. I am continually inspired by this interconnected beauty; a mosaic of oils and pastel that we can only hope to emulate in a small way. And so there must be an art to our ecology, both urban and natural. The two combined can form city patterns that can strive to achieve all those civic benefits that we speak so much of; be it interconnectivity, multiplicity, sustainability, and the like. We need to paint our cities as much as we plan them, aware that there is more to life and civicness than a land use plan and orderly density tabulation.

Our most beautiful cities were not afraid of an idea; be it Paris and her grand boulevards struck across its densely populated neighborhoods, or the genius of a simple but large park providing escape for the citizens of New York. Let us plan in bold strokes, weaving the natural and man-made into new urban forms worthy of the landscape they inhabit. Let our ideas guide us at any scale, from the smallest dwelling to the largest of all, planet earth.

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Posted by SeanOMalley
in Arts and Culture, Urban Ecologies
on 21 January, 2012

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As developers strive to find a balance between profits and environmental responsibility, many are looking to water resources as more than just a way to demonstrate sustainability. A connected system that starts at the small scale and eventually returns higher quality water back to the river, lake, bay or other body of water can become… Read more »

Posted by SeanOMalley
in Urban Ecologies
on 21 January, 2012

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Posts Tagged: SWA Group

“Non-Place” Ports and “Non-Port” Places: the Sustainable Port-City Interface, Part I

Real Estate Development the Chinese Way

The Form of Ecology: Hybridity

The Form of Ecology: Art, Science and Urbanism

The Art of Ecology, the Art of Urbanism

Water Sensitive Designs for Low-impact Communities