Regeneration Engagement Sungang Qingshuihe

There are an estimated 2.5 billion buildings on earth. Many of them have been built in the last 40 years. Their young age usually disqualifies them as protected monuments, and the same goes for entire city districts. Often the reaction is to replace all by new buildings or entire new quarters. The result: the life that has emerged over time disappears, and it takes years to achieve the same liveliness and enormous amounts of additional CO² in the atmosphere.
We believe regeneration instead of replacement often is the better option since many of these districts and buildings much still be too new to be historic, but certainly old enough to be authentic. This not only has an impact on what can be done but also how it has to take place: the design task is not an abstract one for an unknown group of people, but those owning a piece or using it are known and can be included in the process of changing it.
We developed a format of co-creation where all relevant actors are included in developing the future plans. In that way synergies can be created and conflicts avoided. In workshop sessions motivations, plans and ideas are collected and discussed collectively to get a thorough understanding of the goals of each party involved. As a next step, MLA+ drafted a plan that seeks to include as many goals of the stakeholders while meeting overall ambitions, spatial logic and programming. This plan has been fed back to the group to collect its opinions and adjust it before it was presented to the client.
The result: a form of productive participation with a result that identifies synergies and bundles them for a widely supported plan with a high chance of implementation.