Shanghai gold base abundant demonstration area

The Gemdale Fengsheng Road demonstration area sits in the EBD core of Songjiang New Town in Shanghai, across the street from a primary school and surrounded by dense housing, at a busy urban corner that previously offered nowhere to linger. With a design area of about six thousand square metres, the project is developed by Gemdale East China and Shanghai Gemdale, with landscape by Instinct Fabrication and interiors by Matrix. It responds to Shanghai's Fifteen-Minute Community Life Circle initiative and to a broader shift from closed, single-use residential compounds toward open, shared and mixed public space. The office frames its approach as New Refinedism, using the physical space to catalyse a future community life that fuses everyday warmth with spiritual quality. The triangular site is left deliberately porous: its northern edge will eventually be defined by a future community centre and retail street, while its southern edge faces a municipal road, producing a highly permeable corner. After repeated joint workshops across architecture, landscape and interiors, three small retail boxes were placed along the two short sides of the triangle, creating two comfortable lanes that extend the city street into the community and stabilise the triangular geometry. Between the small and large volumes, landscape spaces interweave, and the main entrance's landscape steps become an informal amphitheatre where residents can sit, talk and watch children. The heart is an oval, half-sunken plaza roughly twenty-five by thirty-five metres, a size at which strangers can still recognise one another while feeling relatively secure. Along the municipal road, a planted garden wraps the hard plaza as a green, soft barrier, producing shaded seats that overlook the central gathering. A dry-jets interactive play feature lets children splash while parents sit on wooden benches at the plaza edge. Freely placed outdoor furniture and rich borders animate the gathering, and a romantic under-canopy garden threads beneath the three retail boxes, inviting visitors to stop for coffee or conversation. The project is presented as a community in which behaviour happens naturally and by design, and where the street, the garden and the square are one shared room.