Vibrant Old Community

Yujia Liu: Livable old community: participative approach as a tool to promote community redevelopment

Location: Chengdu, China
Mentors: Arie Romein, Gerdy Verschuure-Stuip
Keywords: Community redevelopment, public participation, scenario building

Chengdu is experiencing rapid development, and the urban area is sprawling to the south and east, leaving many old communities in the north abandoned. Most of those old communities are built before the 1980s. The aging built environment, and spatial structure cannot meet the increasing need of people anymore. The current large-scale urban regeneration focusing on demolition and reconstruction was not implemented well in some communities. To solve these problems, this project aims to explore a planning strategy in collaboration with the government, the citizens, and other public and private sectors, to promote the old community redevelopment. During this process, the locals’ voices will be heard, and they will be an essential part of the redevelopment implementation. A series of guidelines and toolbox for the community redevelopment will also be proposed and applied in several typical public and semi-public spaces to test if it works well.