Inhabiting the Infrastructure: an alternative urban model for ShanShui cities

This research is based on the desire to continue the work begun on the urban design of Lishui, China, going into the project proposed in the competition phase or investigating possible alternative hypotheses. The subject was then explored in depth by working alongside lecturers Mauro Berta and Edoardo Bruno during the Architecture and Urban Design Co-Run course, born of the collaboration between the South China University of Technology and the Politecnico Of Turin. During the competition, some Professors, PhD students, and students from Politecnico di Torino and the South China University of Technology had divided the area into three main systems: agricultural valley, dwelling on the mountains, and ecological reserve. So the initial intention was to investigate the approach that promoted urbanization close to the mountain landscape, and which in particular would impose itself on existing infrastructure. In the course of the research, we moved away from the initial proposal and tried to imagine different scenarios that could be universally applied in similar contexts, so as not to radicalize the project to the case study, but rather to make the devices devised generalizable. This is a taxonomic investigation that proposes customizable archetypes to resolve morphological combinations. Central to this is the presence of an infrastructure dividing the mountain landscape from the agricultural landscape, which currently acts as a barrier and whose potential is not exploited. The solutions will not be single and, like the morphologies investigated, will not even all be present in the Lishui case study. Therefore, the question turns out to be the identification of systems that propose spatial solutions, not only in terms of new construction but also in new public space. The latter aims to reactivate the non-places formed by the encounter between the different morphological patterns and the infrastructure. The research includes an initial awareness and study of the Chinese historical context and the meaning of ShanShui, considered the primary research objective. The ShanShui landscape to which reference is made will then be the discriminating factor in identifying cases, which can be considered similar to that of Lishui, to which the newly designed devices can be applied.