Five students in CRP 5076, Contemporary Urban Planning Issues in Shanghai, and CRP Associate Professor of the Practice George Frantz traveled to Shanghai over spring break. The week started off with a two-hour visit to the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Center, which featured some 120,000 sq. ft. of exhibit space dedicated to highlighting the adopted Shanghai 2035 Master Plan and its recommendations. It was followed by five days of touring neighborhoods, parks, and commercial centers in Shanghai covered by the class lectures, as well as conversations with landscape architecture and planning faculty at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Tongji University.
Students noted that the field trip provided a newfound appreciation for the complexities and challenges of urbanization in rapidly developing cities, like Shanghai.
One of the highlights for Hanqi Chai, a second-year MLA student, was visiting Wujiaochang, a vibrant commercial district in the Yangpu district of Shanghai. She was interested to see how the district evolved over time from a traditional residential area to a bustling commercial hub and found inspiration in what landscape architects can do for the community.
During the trip the team also spent a day conducting a site inventory of the semester project site for the class, Dongping Village on rural Chongming Island. The village is one of many across Shanghai and China that are the focus of a massive revitalization initiative to reverse population loss and economic decline.
This has caused a rapid pace of urban development which, Yixuan Sun, a first-year MLA student, observed the constant need to upgrade and modify urban planning standards and noted this was one of the biggest differences in planning practices in China and the United States. The field trip allowed her to “see the potential for cooperation between community and government planning departments [in China], where the model of self-management in communities has quietly begun to operate in various neighborhoods.”
The .75 sq. mi/1.9 sq. km site consists of the small village residential commercial area but is mostly abandoned agricultural fields, horticulture plantations, and an apparent former large dairy farm complex. An abandoned exhibition hall, greenhouse complex from the 2021 China National Flower Exhibition are located just outside the site, and several abandoned parking lots associated with the exhibition are located on the class site. Newer investments include a resort hotel apparently built for the flower exhibition but now hosting few visitors, and an empty corporate campus for a seed company that has been attracted to the village.
For first-year MRP student, Yawen Chen, visiting the Seeding Garden was her favorite part of the field trip. Yawen described that in the context of rapid development and urbanization, small-scale undeveloped lands in Chinese cities are common. She admired how the Seeding Garden utilized undeveloped land and transformed it into roadside green spaces for educational and agricultural use.
The assignment for the class is to create a new master plan for the site that would resuscitate the local economy through exploitation of the growing agri-tourism industry in Shanghai, as well as new agriculture-related industry and services. The Cornell students are working in parallel with students in an urban design studio at Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Design being taught by Prof. Wenjun Ma. Several joint Zoom/Tencent facilitated classes have been held where students from the two side sides of the Pacific have presented their work and exchanged information on their shared site. The Cornell student team in Shanghai also attended and participated in the final reviews of their peers’ master plans at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.