The Dongguan District is located at Binhai Bay in China’s Pearl River Delta, strategically situated between Shenzhen’s airport and the city of Guangzhou. An international competition asked for ways to capitalize on the heavy flow of traffic between them while also addressing extreme environmental risks: the World Bank ranks the Pearl River Delta at the top of its list for expected economic losses due to climate change. The area is subjected to tropical cyclones and storm surges; 85 percent of its land is due to be inundated before 2100.
The concept of fluidity helped direct planning decisions that could connect the site’s social, environmental, and capital dispositions in this future “Delta City”. Operating from the fundamental knowledge that the area could at times be up to four meters underwater, a second public ground level was established throughout the project at that height. Plugging into the suggested walkways and bridges in that elevated grid is a landscape urbanism “kit of parts” designed to facilitate constructive interchanges between building forms and architecture. Intersecting civic and hydrological systems will facilitate knowledge transfer between the region’s social and civic realms.
Magee Ranch
The project site is a beautiful 540-acre hillside ranch in suburban Contra Costa County, California. It was slated for development by the City of Danville as a clustered planned community. The development concept was to preserve the essential beauty of the ranch and to allow some 300 homes to be built with the least possible impact. The City’s Planning C...
South Waterfront Greenway
A bold new plan for the area along the Willamette River includes a 1-1/2 mile extension of the City’s downtown’s parks and the reclamation of the river’s edge for public recreation. Working closely with the City of Portland, developers, and natural resource advocates, the design team devised a rational plan that places access and activity in targeted nodes wit...
Quail Hill
This mixed-use planned community of over 6,000 people features over 2,000 dwellings in a broad mix of single family detached dwellings, and over 500 multifamily dwellings, complemented by a retail center and 800,000 square feet of flexible development. . Prominent natural landforms such as the Southern Ridge and the three knolls have been preserved and incorpo...
Hunter's Point Shipyard and Candlestick Point
Perched on the edge of San Francisco Bay, the Hunters Point Shipyard was an important naval manufacturing center for the WWI and WWII war efforts. The abandoned shipyard and Candlestick Point were combined into a new, mixed-use residential, retail and light industry development—the largest in San Francisco since WWII. Thomas Balsley Associates collaborated wit...