Fluid City

Feng Xu
Design & Research For Qinzhou Masterplan

Hereby the link for chinese version:
Entry:163

Taking 3.4 sqkm masterplan in East of Qinzhou as an example of design & research, XWG Studio tries to look at the urban development from a new angle. Using computational technique like scripting and maya fluid dynamics, we propose a new mode of urban development: parametric urbanism --- fluid city.

Qinzhou, as the central city of Northern Gulf Economic Circle in Guangxi Province, has a long history of 1,400 years. In May 2008, the State Council formally approved the founding of “Guangxi Qinzhou Bonded Port”, which is China’s sixth Bonded Port, also the only Bonded Port in central- western area in China. This will bring great development opportunity to Qinzhou. How will Qinzhou develop accordingly?

New thinking for Qinzhou Masterplan
The new Qinzhou Urban Plan (2008-2025), which is now being edited by Jiangsu City Panning Institute, proposed the “eastward and southward development” idea of Qinzhou, but the specific plan will still follow the grid system. Through road grid the city is divided into street blocks with similar size, forming homogenous and repetitive urban pattern. Such examples could be found everywhere in modern urban design. People living in such grid are just like stream in the canyon, flowing and colliding in a strictly-divided container, breaking the boundary of the grid system. Facts and history have proved that the rapid increase of urban population causes many problems such as traffic jam, the irrational architectural layout and insufficient use of architectural resource. Meanwhile the economic boom during the 1980s and 1990s brings abundant living ways and flexible working ways. These phenomenon and problems greatly inspired the demand for design diversity and complexity. The monotonous organization of modernism begins to be questioned, the grid system being used for decades is losing its luster and facing severe challenge.

Could Modernist urban construction adapt other ways except being divided into blocks with similar size and road network?

Vector Field and Fluid Dynamics
Qinzhou Masterplan site is located in the 3.4 sqkm area between the Port Railway and Secondary Road, with “Karst Landform” unique to southern China. Many small hills convolute, subtly react with the water system in the lower area, forming special dynamics in this field. This provided us an initial starting point and research direction, to study the fluidity formed after tens of millions of years.

When you examine the city at macro-level, the crowd --- urban fluid, is flowing day and night, sometimes fast and sometimes slow; somewhere dense and somewhere sparse; toward here or there. Just like large river, full of swirls and riffles. Then what is “fluid” in the concept of “urban fluid”? Similar fluid media include: for example, material fluid, information fluid, crowd, cars, financial fluid, etc. What we concern is user in the city --- flowing of people. If we take everybody as molecule of water, crowd behavior would share surprising similarity with the flowing of water. Crowd movement is just the urban fluid.
The urban fluid exerts impact on itself and outside environment, which behavior can be extracted and abstracted with the concept of “vector field” in physics. We can establish a model of “vector field” of urban fluid, which is easy to design. In this model numerous and various urban elements are controlled by a invisible “hand”, connected with each other, following certain rules of evolution and transformation.

The urban space and program distribution will not be isolated and static. It will be time based, in state of constant changing, dynamic communication. The modernism spatial organization principle and simple road grid system will not be necessary and efficient, for vector field can only be divided as “global and local”. In such vector field some extremely small elements assemble according to certain rules, with its amount continually increasing and decreasing. Numerous small “bead” in the part will concentrate, aggregate and conglutinate, showing departure, flow, grads, swirls … This is the unique feature of vector field.
For the city as vector field, the formation and outline of architecture don’t need to be divided with grid, maintaining clear division state. Because we have already found out the new way to setup the urban space and the boundary of architecture logically and continuously merged together.

Parametric system of Qinzhou Masterplan
For the dynamic equilibrium organization driven by urban forces, how could we deal with these complex tremendous data and take it as the starting point of materplan design? That is to say, through certain programming techniques to treat series of design parameters so as to create a design system which is sensitive to form, program and environment parameters. The concept of parametric design means enlarging the scope and type of parameter during design process. Besides common geometry parameter, the environment parameter and the observer himself are also brought into consideration as a kind of input, merging together and forming a parametric system. While the concept of fluid city, it will rely on some different parameters: density, intensity, orientation, degree of blending and control point, etc, to differentiate the massing and the programs.

Urban Organizations

By using maya fluid dynamics as a technique, program distribution is driven by crowd movement to generate density differentiation, orientation within urban forces. Then it forms the intial state of the urban inputs. In such a state we can add more inputs by urban context, such as the connectivity of Qinzhou port area, the extension of old city, the links with green belt and other relative urban context, to generate further time based urban organization.

The programs will depart, fused, solidated and dissolved based on urban forces. Commerce building will merge with office building, then dissolve into commercial and residential complex gradually, then blend into landscape green area. According to the vector logic, the geometry differentiation also be setup as gradient transformation --- from tall buildings into small villa, at the same time its structure and space will also merge accordingly.