Weiyuan – One Island, One Park

The starting point of this commission was prototypical: development planning expressed in grey infrastructures cutting across an island, and urban construction on every square meter of flat land. The leftover mountain zone in the heart of the island was still labelled in green colour, but in reality fragmented by this human-dominated approach and mutilated to the point of near loss of all its natural base. The task was to plan a mountain forest park.
The approved plan goes beyond the old-school planning approach. It focusses on how to create synergies that help to grow back ecological systems, and how to link them to old and future social systems. The location in the centre of the Pearl River Delta, between the megacities of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Zhuhai, Dongguang and Foshan makes this an exemplary project for how to regenerate a delta island under immense human development pressure.
The key move of this synergetic development is to break boundaries, and to redefine relationships. The plan widens the direct project zone to include the whole island. It analyses carefully, what are positive relationships for different zones depending on their location and current state. What emerges is a whole island biosphere. The mountain forest core is supported to grow back. And it is surrounded by a variety of human inclusive nature habitats covering the whole island, including urban and green parts.