Productive Landscape - Revitalizing a Post-industrial District with Slow Economy

Increasingly, the productive use of land is being demanded by developing cities because of the continuous influx of businesses and population. Meanwhile, because of the relocation of many industries to outlying districts, for the same reason, post-industrial sites near the centers of growing cities are emerging as a highly valuable land resource. The integration of “productivity” into post-industrial sites is important to the practice of landscape architecture professionals. In some developing cities, like Guangzhou China, reprogramming post-industrial sites for new productive purposes can be problematic because of contradictory conditions: theses large cities are aging but also still expanding. In addition, Guangzhou requires productive landscape design that suits the city’s needs to expand both its cultural and economic values. This thesis proposes urban landscape design for the site of the former Guangzhou Iron and Steel Factory. Proposed design focuses first on the preservation of cultural value, and the integration of economic productivity that is most appropriate to these cultural activities. This can be a feasible action because there are precedential landscape projects with the similar goal that have been built, such as Landscape Park at Duisburg-Nord in Germany and the Highline in New York. But in the other hand it is theoretical because this kind of reprogramming and integration has not yet been fully implemented in developing cities like Guangzhou. This thesis should provide an example for how potential reprogramming might be approached from a cultural and historical perspective, for other post-industrial site in older and yet still developing cities.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.L.A.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Landscape Architecture

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2011

Author dc:creator

• Wu, Xin

Contributors dc:contributor

• Deming, Margaret E.

• Post-Industry
• productive landscape
• reprogramming design

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2011 Xin Wu

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/26140

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/26140