Jiading Mini Block, An Urban Experiment
The Challenge

The size of the typical block in new Chinese cities starts from approximately 500×500 square meters. Such largeness, compared to the range of standard blocks in European cities, is a result of scaling city for cars over people as well as accelerating the development. The problem of the Mega Block is two-fold: 1. It is anti-urban ? it does not produce a walkable city and at the same time diminishes the quality of urban spaces. 2. It is high-carbon ? its dependence on cars pollutes the air while produces traffic congestions. Once a city is built based on such inhuman spatial scale, it would be very difficult to remodel it into a livable environment.
It is urgent then to reconsider the size of a block before more Mega Blocks are realized in the on-going urbanization. In other words, block size has to be reduced to make city both human and clean again. an elevation of an edge street. Image © Fangfang Tian
The Project

While our practice Atelier FCJZ have not yet had the opportunity to plan an entire town or city, we were given the task to design a R&D park outside of Shanghai in the satellite town of Jiading, the Industry 4.0 Demonstration Base, in 2008. The urban dimensions of this district for high-tech companies, total 24.67 hectares of land in question, prompted us to treat it as a project to experiment a smaller than usual block size.
A specific question: How small can a block be" We are aware that a b...