A High Line for China: greenway in Qianhai, new Shenzhen CBD, to create an integrated corridor of high-end city life
Global architecture firm Hassell’s three-level platform, dubbed the Silk Road Corridor, will connect high-end offices, hotels and civic institutions in new city near Hong Kong, and create a colourful and vibrant backdrop for the area
When global architecture firm Hassell won a competition to design a 1.6km (1-mile) green corridor in Qianhai, a new financial district in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, it was a rare chance to shape the development of a city from the ground up.
“Qianhai is going to be one of the largest CBDs in China when it is all built up – and one of the largest in the world,” says Dennis Ho, principal of Hassell’s Hong Kong office. “It’s a very important location.”
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The space – dubbed the Silk Road Corridor in honour of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “Belt and Road Initiative” to link economies into a China-centred trading network – sits at the centre of one of Shenzhen’s most ambitious development projects to date.
Spanning 15 square kilometres (5.8 square miles) of newly reclaimed land on the western edge of the city where the Pearl River meets the sea, Qianhai is slated to become a cluster of high-end offices, hotels, apartments and civic institutions when its development is completed around 2020.
In many ways, it is simply a larger and glitzier version of something that is happening all over China, as cities big and small rush to build prestigious new business districts on previously rural land. For Ho and his design team, that was a challenge as much as it was an opportunity.
“We feel it lacks an identity,” he says. “It’s a large, mixed-use CBD and they have good public transportation, but everything exists on paper.”