Redevelopment strives to juggle often conflictingurban elements
Print Edition
SHANGHAI and many other Chinese cities face many challenges as they attempt to make urban areas environmentally friendly on a sustainable basis, according to urban planning officials, real estate companies and academics who attended a recent forum.
“Urban regeneration, or urban renewal, should be conducted with more attention being paid to five aspects,” Wu Jiang, vice president and professor at Tongji University, told the fourth annual Shui On Land Sustainable Development Forum. “Good cities, in general, should be people-friendly, vibrant, sustainable, culturally enticing and capable of offering equality to everyone living in them.”
To achieve these goals, he said, there needs to be more intensive planning to make daily life more convenient, to improve public open spaces, to make streets more friendly to walkers and cyclists, to reduce the number of residential communities deploying access-control systems, to raise the efficiency of land use, to accelerate the development of underground space, to host more events like Expo and to expand renovation projects such as the successful Waitanyuan and Xuhui Riverside.
The trick is to strike a balance between preserving the unique history and culture of a city and the need for urban renewal projects, the forum participants said.
Preservation, innovation and sustainability are of vital importance to urban regeneration, according to Wang Lin, a professor of Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
Real estate developers, who play a key role in urban renewal, said they often find the situation confusing.
“One problem we often encounter is the lack of clearly stated rules and regulations telling us developers what kind of old buildings should be renovated,” said Ju Peicheng, chief architect with the Shanghai operation of China Vanke Corp, the country’s largest homebuilder.
“Secondly,” he added, “we haven’t established a successful business model yet for urban renewal projects. For smaller and medium-sized developers in particular, it is very hard for them to make profit out of such projects, which therefore has hindered many of them from entering this field. And thirdly, commercial real estate master planning always remains very difficult.”
The annual forum organized by Shui On Land aims to bring together industry experts, academics and developers to discuss the opportunities and challenges inherent in ongoing urban redevelopment. Shui On Land is the developer of Xintiandi, a large-scale, mixed-use redevelopment project adjacent to Shanghai’s downtown Huaihai Road.
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