Revisiting Automobile Dominance1

text by RUAN Hao

In some cities in developing countries, urbanization is arbitrarily taken as expansion. It is true and understandable that with an increasing population and economic demands, efficiency is set as the utmost priority. This is particularly prominent in some Chinese city like Suzhou, with its well-known expansion of the Suzhou Singapore Industrial Park (SIP) area. Twelve lane expressways, sixty storey office building and luxurious gated communities unaffordable to the average are what composed the Central Business District of SIP.

Though seemingly prominent and efficient, public accessibility into the area is at large level neglected. This master plan design focuses on the solution of inaccessibility by suggesting a green grid interactive with the old part of the city. First, inaccessibility is studied through the aspect of contradiction between pedestrian and car which leads to astonishingly horrible data of death from car accidents in Suzhou, and the aspect of community being gated thus rejects public uses. A study of the grid system and its block scale was carried out as the basic cell of the new green grid. Further an ideal unity of green grid which avoid intersection with existing road grid, embedded with new branches of vehicle roads is designed. This unit is further developed into an entire green grid mapped onto the site, fragmentizing the existing huge blocks and breaks the gated communities for sharing by implementing a pedestrian scale grid with similar scale to the old city. The generation of the green grid involves the refinement of existing road grid, branching new domestic vehicle roads, demolish small part of the existing building that contradicts to the green grid and eventually allocate public spaces such as community facilities, urban and regional parks, waterfronts and sports fields within the current vacant blocks created by this green grid. The allocation of public spaces is designed with consideration of its distance to the residential areas in each unit, the overall network of commercial centers in entire Suzhou and the recalling of gardens in the new site area. Later the design goes into one particular section of the site to study the morphology and prototypes of the green grid in interacting with the existing buildings. A generation diagram, section and perspectives are made to exemplify the idea. Such a resistance to the car-dominant area is aimed at providing pedestrian with the infrastructure of their scale which they deserve, to live in a city that truly for its people.