An urban design proposal for the rapidly changing identity of Shanghai's riverfront.

Shanghai was once a city of diverse coexistance with both local and international settlements sharing the resources of the Huangpu River, now Shanghai is a city of extreme dichotomies. The conflict between the local and global identity has resulted in an erasure of identity.  The South Bund Site is located at the most contentious point along the Huangpu River. It is a vestige of local waterfront identity between Shanghai’s two most iconic global identities.

In the rapid evolution of Shanghai’s identity, The Middle Way addresses the city’s current extreme attitude towards preservation versus progression. To remain relevant in the future, the development in Shanghai needs to adopt a hybrid urbanist attitude towards the old and the new. The site is the last opportunity along the riverfront to mediate the coexistance of the past and future identity of Shanghai at multiple scales.

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The Architecture of Education by Jennifer A. Wong is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.