Baotou Steel Boulevard Vision Planning

Baotou, China

Architects: META-Project

Any: 2010

This project is in collaboration with OPEN Architecture.

Steel Boulevard, a street planned in 1955 by the soviet planner to be the public spine of the new garden city of Baotou, was a clear statement for the historical moment when the country is determined to build a new idealistic society for the people. 55 years later, we are in a very different world than what the Marxist has envisioned. The city of Baotou, with the garden city structure of the 1955 has successfully built its image as a uniquely happy and livable example of an industrial city. However the agenda behind the original intent of steel blvd still hasn’t been fulfilled for its function as a cultural and public spine.

With this historical context, we envisioned a different Steel Boulevard for the future, which reinforces its function for cultural and public services, yet also introduce natural landscape as the medium to thread through the cultural, services, commercial and sport functions networked along the 7km space.

With the network of these excitements, and one of the longest and largest urban landscape…Baotou Steel Boulevard will serve as the social/economic/cultural energizer that invigorate the area around it, and the garden city beyond…