PEOPLE MOUNTAIN PEOPLE SEA A CELEBRATION OF EVERYDAY LIFE

Cities, if anything, are a concentration of opportunities (jobs, education, health, recreation) and not a mere accumulation of houses. If we want to give as many people as possible access to these opportunities, then it is desirable to have as much city as possible. That is why we multiply the city (building in height), increase its density (concentrating in space), and expand the city (urban sprawl). For some reason, all these operations have been applied only to built space (and not to open space) and to residential use (and less so to services and amenities).
Liu Jiakun has explored a different path: to multiply, densify, and expand the open space as well as the services and amenities. The beauty and simplicity of Liu Jiakun’s proposal is that he understood that one of the attributes that defines public space is its continuity; any abrupt change in the flow immediately transforms public space into a private one (in terms of use, even if in terms of property it remains public). In the West Village project in Chengdu, China, a series of very straightforward ramps move people gently from one level to the next (without the need to introduce any kind of overacted “activated landscape”), elegantly creating something in between and standards that improve the quality of life.