FLOODSCAPES
Chonshou Zhen
ALICIA HIDALGO,HIRA WASEEM, KAI FU
The city of Chongshou lies along the Hangzhou Bay (an inlet of the East China Sea) and is a product of decades of land reclamation to meet the growing demands of the city. It has dealt with various scenarios of flooding, both inland and from the sea, which have been countered by a network of canals, finally culminating along the dike that also acts as a coastal flood defense.
The ambition of this strategy is to extrapolate the boundaries within the site, to proliferate the waterfront, and structure the city such that it forms a responsive connection with the coastline.
The project, therefore, turns the issues related to water, into resources, while creating new ecologies, and responding to the different capacities of flooding.
This new urbanity aims to sustain local social-economic patterns and structural activities (such as linear villages and agriculture) to detect latent prospects and create new resources for the future. The development of alternative water corridors, based on the structuring and extension of existing infrastructure, a stronger negotiation can be made between land and water throughout the site. A new spatial environment can thus be formed, recognizing and utilizing the resources within, thereby changing the problems of the site into an opportunity.