New Chinese city should be completely self-sufficient
The architectural office Guallart Architects from Barcelona will build the completely self-sufficient new city of Xiong'an in China. Urban life should become circular there. Chinese President Xi Jinping describes it as the "new standard for the post-COVID era".
The Barcelona-based architectural firm Guallart Architects has won the tender for the planning of the new Chinese city of Xiong'an. It should be resilient and 100 percent self-sufficient. According to the will of the Chinese President, it should become the “new standard for the post-COVID era”.
According to an article by the Thomson Reuters Foundation , Xiong'an is being conceived as a self-sufficient city that produces its own energy, food and other resources. It will have rooftop farms and greenhouses, drone-friendly terraces and shared 3-D printers. In addition, apartments are planned with space for home offices so that their residents can work from home in the event of future pandemics. The city's eco-friendly design includes blocks of flats made from cross-laminated timber, renewable energy and streets reserved exclusively for pedestrians and cyclists.
"We can no longer design cities and buildings as if nothing had happened," Vincent Guallart, founder of Guallart Architects and former chief architect of the city of Barcelona, is quoted in the article. “Our proposal arises from the need to find solutions to the different crises that are playing out on our planet at the same time. They are supposed to create a new kind of urban life based on a biological circular economy. That will make cities and municipalities stronger. "
The present draft was strongly influenced by the experiences of the team of architects during the lockdown in Spain. “We wanted to make a case for the things that we think are important during a lockdown and in the future. If apartments enable teleworking and tele-teaching, have flexible rooms on large terraces, cities can grow food on their roofs and residents can print things in the neighborhood, we will be better prepared for the crises of the future. "
Xiong'an is being built in Hebei Province, around 130 kilometers southwest of Beijing. According to the article, China's President Xi Jinping has described it as the "new standard for the post-COVID era". He marked Xiong'an as an urban innovation zone back in 2017.