Author(s)/Creator(s)

Daya Zhang

Document Type

Thesis, Senior

Date

Spring 2014

Keywords

China, Population, Transportation, Infrastructure

Language

English

Disciplines

Architecture

Description/Abstract

The next stage of China’ growth and advancement rests on the assumption that its population will be more and more concentrated in cites since approximately 350 million farmers are expected to move towards the urban areas from 2005 to 2025. How to connect its population of more than 1 billion within those cites, and among them, is always an urgent issue for Chinese government to deal with. Railway is the most common mode for Chinese to travel around. However, the overcapacity has plagues China’s railway network for years, especially during the national holidays, such as Spring Festival. The emergence of the high-speed rail tends to move people in a faster pace and make China “a smaller place” to travel around. The contemporary train stations across the world are no longer simple combinations of the head building and the shed for trains but complexes consisting of various events ranging from shopping mall to office to theater to parking lot. Examples includes Kyoto Station in Japan and Eurolille in France. Instead of renovating and expanding the existing urban stations, Chinese government has been investing large amount of money to built mega-stations in the outskirt of the big cities. Most of them consist of a single giant volumn of waiting room over the train track and ohter modes of transportation in the belowing layers, implying the evolution of train station towards airport in terms of location, scale, layout, etc. The train station in China is losing its one of the primary functions as a meeting place. At the same time, the old urban station are put aside and decaying. With the rapid urban expansion, the old stations of the big cities, which were on the periphery when they were firstly built, dominate in the city center now. What I am looking for is an alternative of the rail stations as a civic complex in the urban comtext allowing for the fragmentation and disunity to create public spaces, develope green belts, promote pedestrian and bicycle mobility, and intensify the urban experience for the collective.

Additional Information

Thesis advisers: Martin Haettasch, Ryan Ludwig

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Download

Included in

Architecture Commons

COinS