Chongqing Oct Riverside leisure zone

The OCT Riverside Leisure Belt is a 1,500-metre ecological park fronting the Jialing River in Chongqing, developed by OCT as part of its cultural-tourism masterplan and designed by WTD Landscape Architecture. The site drops roughly forty metres from Binjiang Avenue down to the water in a series of mountain terraces typical of Chongqing, and sits inside the planned Jialing River ecological corridor. When WTD was commissioned, the existing promenade was narrow and eroded by seasonal water-level fluctuations, silted up with weeds, and functionally dead as a public riverside. The brief was to restore it as a back garden for neighbouring communities while reconnecting the Lijia and Yuelai riverside belts and stitching together the larger Liangjiang New Area corridor. The team's first move was low intervention: the original terraced fields and bamboo groves were retained, and existing grades were left largely untouched. Because the central strip lies inside the flood drawdown zone, paths and the riverside running track were built from low-maintenance, flood-tolerant natural materials, and amphibious flowers and shrubs were sown across the terraces so that plants recover quickly after inundation. The bamboo was thinned and replanted, floating-leaved and submerged species were added to the tidal mudflats to protect bird and fish habitat, and higher, drier slopes were planted with dawn redwood, ginkgo and flowering trees. At the Binjiang Avenue entrance, a zigzag cycling track winds down the slope to the river and then branches east and west to join the Lijia and Yuelai networks. Because the site faces west over the water, a sequence of viewing decks is tucked along the ride: a cantilevered observation corridor, a concealed corner at the cliff edge, and shaded seating under the trees, each framing the sunset. The children's area draws on a local memory of farmers grazing cattle on the riverbank, where hooves left a pockmarked ground; designers kept the uneven terrain and modelled it on milk spilling from an overturned bottle and flowing downhill, giving the play zone its rolling, liquid character. The result is a riverside that treats ecology, memory and recreation as inseparable, restoring public life to a stretch of bank that had been written off.