Spaces along rivers in the city
Oct 27, 2020
- It’s human’s nature to be near water. In the past, water leads to human settlement and living. Human beings rely on rivers for agricultural production activities, which gradually formed the structure of villages and Urban Spaces.
- Nowadays, water system also provides urban residents with places for public activities, serving as urban infrastructure. In the past, with construction of water conservancy, we thought that we can guarantee the city from flooding. However, with the climate changes, it turns out that levees and dam can not resist with soft and flowing water. Also, problems left by constructing the waterfront space as infrastructure to defend people from flooding includes insufficient hydrophilicity. That is urban construction and human activities are not closely combined with water. For example, there are many levees in the Qing River flowing along the north five ring road in Beijing. Also, the water bank are mostly steep hard bulkhead and people do no have easy access to the space along the river, which have great potential to be positive space in urban environment.
- In addition to that, due to the small amount of demolition in the waterfront area and the convenience of infrastructure construction, a large number of negative spaces such as highway, high-tense corridors have been opened up in the waterfront area. And these infrastructure cut off the city, which makes it difficult to connect the water and city and greatly reduces the utilization rate of the waterfront space.
