walled cities within a walled city:
BAU147 Xi’an High-Tech Precinct CBD

China’s 20th century was an extraordinarily dense period of transformation: from imperialism to capitalism via communism, all within 100 years. Many aspects of life were simultaneously subjected to influences of each of these paradigms. However, the planning of new CBDs (central business districts) in China primarily reflects only the capitalist doctrines. These CBDs are mono-functional districts of sensational corporate office skyscrapers; scant regard is paid to social space, public institutions, history or context. Can positive aspects of the other ideologies be given formal and programmatic manifestations in the new city, in order to reflect the true complexity of contemporary China? Can the imperial era’s characteristics of certainty, permanence and clarity have a place in the age of curtain walls and fluid capital? Can a city’s urban design embody the CCP’s socialist tenets of liberty, fraternity and equality?

The legacies of the morphology of the ancient city of Xi’an are visible in the city centre: gridded streets, symbolic towers on axis and a massive perimeter wall. Our proposal takes the form of an array of eight super-blocks, each further divided into nine smaller blocks, with a void as their centre. Surrounding the entire CBD is another void in the form of a rectilinear loop park. Like the city wall this void stabilises the city form. As the CBD grows, its massive form emerges resulting in a landscape-scale rectilinear body. Development controls are used to achieve constant height perimeter around the super-blocks, creating walled cities within the walled city and further stabilising the city form. The figure-ground relationship of the central super-block is inverted to produce a symbolic government centre.