The Heart of the city: the case of the new city of Pujiang (Shanghai)

THE HEART OF THE CITY. The case of The New City of Pujiang (Shanghai). ARC405 students will be presented with a selection of speculative “Urban Projects” that can be traced back to what can be called the “Morpho-Typological Approach” of the Italian school. This body of theories and operational models will be tested by the students, who will be asked to interpret, actualise and apply them to a specific local condition based on their own creative theoretical speculations. According to this approach, ARC405 will deal with an emblematic case study by confronting the New City of PuJiang, south of Shanghai, designed in 2001 by the Italian architecture studio GregottiAssociati for 100,000 inhabitants along the Huangpu River. The city was partially realised, and in particular, the central spine of public services, which, developing in an EastWest direction, should have been the qualitative pivot of the project, constituting the heart of the new city, was not realised. Students will be asked to develop their own design proposal for this area. The students will be invited to think in structural, relational and not stylistic terms; in this way, they will be able to deepen, through personal design, their understanding of urban phenomena by comparing abstract theorisations with the physical conditions of places, maturing and testing their own ‘idea of city’ by reasoning on the principles of physical proximity, on the civic and collective value of open spaces, on the importance of public buildings as symbols of the community, on the applications of social and functional mix, considering with them the concepts of historical and environmental permanence as traces capable of holding together past, present and future.