James A M Smith

The Pearl River Delta megapolis in southern China singularly encompasses the hypercapitalist realm of downtown shopping malls, CBDs and megablocks alongside an endless desertified landscape of manufacturing, the humidity of sub-tropical forest, the cyclical ecosystems of aquaculture in the delta plains and the traditional cultures of rural villages caught in a wave of globalisation. It is a landscape of heterogeneous environments in unlikely adjacencies.

The project proposes re-imagining the elevated infrastructure of the PRD. The existing and soon to be completed high speed rail network is repurposed as continuous urbanism, inscribed as a circular loop through the region. The proposed endless urbanity passes through both city (Hong Kong - Shenzhen - Guangzhou - Zhongshan- Macau - Hong Kong) and the peripheral expanses of endless flux which typify the megapolis. This circle serves not only to unify this disparate region but also strengthen its multiple identities.

The undercroft of the infrastructure, between the top down authority of the state and the complex relations of the territory it passes over, is activated. This in-between realm is proposed as an energetic environment, it engages, amplifies and celebrates the particular ecologies, atmospheres and climates through which it passes. 

Each intervention is regarded as a catalyst, a strategic gesture to be appropriated and opportunistically exploited. It is not a masterplan which strives for balance and harmony between its constituent parts but should be regarded as a suggestive platform which encourages versatile occupation with maximal heterogeneity.

In the artificial desert of manufacturing monsoon rainwater is collected and aquaducts are suspended, strengthening existing and ancient water and irrigation networks. Through subtropical forest humidity reducing plants with aerial roots are cultivated creating comfortably habitable micro-climates. Across the delta plains fertile alluvial soil is aggregated, serving to erode the hard edge of land reclamation with the centuries old ecosystem of the Mulberry dyke fishpond.

Through these interventions environments are created which lend themselves to particular tendencies and reveals the latent conditions of a megapolis in a state of perpetual re-imagining through their occupation and subsequent development.