Planning
Caohai North Shore
By Diana Lind

Known as the “eternal spring city,” Kunming has a temperate climate year round, picturesque scenery, and a population of 4.5 million people. As it emerges as a gateway to western China and countries to the south such as Thailand and Vietnam, Kunming is poised for major growth. Shui On Land recognized the value of the city and hired Sasaki to design a comprehensive high-end residential, cultural, and entertainment development for the north shore of the city’s nearby Dianchi Lake. The focus of the project is not just economic benefit, but aesthetic and environmental improvements as well.

“Design is [Shui On’s] most important consideration; they’ve recognized that good design is good public relations. It gives them a name that is recognized for its quality,” says Michael Grove, senior associate and landscape architect with Sasaki. Grove isn’t the only one to praise Shui On; the company earned Best Client honors in this year’s BW/AR China Awards (see page 36).

With a forward-thinking mayor supporting their efforts, Shui On and Sasaki applied sustainable design principles to the planning, design, and construction phases of this complex project on 485 hectares. The plan integrates native vegetation and open space with an environmentally responsive transportation infrastructure connected to the city and region’s existing roadways. It dedicates about 18 percent of the total site to a mix of high, medium, and low-density housing, and 0.6 percent to cultural facilities such as museums, theaters, an amphitheater, and an artist community. It also envisions a “retail village” featuring a pedestrian street with narrow canals and small alleys lined with shops. Other uses include an office park, a research and development campus, hotels, recreational areas, and a golf course.

One of the key elements of the plan is to thoroughly clean up Dianchi Lake, which has been severely polluted by the chemical byproducts a farming-based economy. The plan calls for a short-term strategy of creating a lake “cell” isolated from the rest of the lake and filling it with clean water. The nonpermeable membrane, which will take three to five years to install, will measure almost 120 hectares. Three treatment plants will process waste water. Sasaki’s long-term strategy calls for the involvement of the city and metropolitan areas in improving larger pollution issues.

Once the lake has reached a level of recreational cleanliness, the lake cell and the lake will be combined. Similarly, it is Sasaki’s hope that the North Shore development will seamlessly merge with the rest of Kunming’s urban framework. In trying to unite the new and the old, Grove says, “We wanted to reinvent [local architectural expressions] in a contemporary way, reinterpret their scale and massing, but not recreate them.”