Nowadays China is undergoing an unprecedented process of urbanization and millions of people move every year from the countryside to the more developed coastal regions. In order to release the pressure of such migration on the already saturated metropolitan areas, the central government has planned to create as many as twenty new cities every year. This drastic transformation of the territory offers a unique combination of problems and opportunities. Refusing a mediation with the forces that drive the urbanization would be quite a conservative and unproductive form of resistance. The capitalist logic of profit cannot be totally denied, but the social and environmental effects of the urban transformation should be put into the picture and evaluated as part of the overall balance. Through a systematic analysis of the costs of urbanization, this project aims to demonstrate that a design based on the specificity of the local morphology, the optimization of the natural systems and a resilient phasing strategy can be a viable economic investment while avoiding at the same time the total annihilation of the local identity, so often associated to globalized market-driven developments.

Lingang was planned as part of the 1966 plan for the regional expansion of Shanghai, on an area of reclaimed land on the head of the Yangtze River Delta, with the goal of housing up to 800,000 inhabitants by 2020. The original masterplan, organized in a very rigid geometrical fashion, does not take into account two important elements of the site: the existence of a consolidated pattern of linear villages along agricultural canals - which are very valuable not only for their architectural and environmental beauty, but also for their strong social identity - and the presence of the sea, with its ecology based on tidal dynamics. The creation of big mono-functional blocks and a low-density urban fabric produce high costs of urbanization and force the full implementation of the infrastructure at first, making the project functionally and economically inefficient. Furthermore, the newly reclaimed area lacks any topographic differentiation that could help its drainage and dangerously relies only on underground piping to expel the water that comes from the canals, creating potential problems of stormwater flooding during the wet season.

By reconsidering all the economic and ecological variables of the original masterplan, our design aims to create a more dynamic system based on a new coastline that reconciles the natural ecologies with the new urban activities and the creation of multifunctional clusters that can more efficiently adjust to the future changes in the growth of the city. On the one hand, a higher density scheme meets the goals of the original masterplan while allowing the preservation of the existing linear villages, on the other hand, the solution to the insufficient draining capacity of the terrain gives the opportunity to create a new network of canals and water bodies that organize and structure the urban fabric, becoming a crucial element of the public space. Finally, the new design maximizes the coastline and creates a multifunctional water interface, generating a higher land value that can at least partially compensate the costs of the dredging and earthwork needed, making the project economically sound.