Chongqing Dongyuan Insight

Dongyuan Yingyue in Chongqing is an 8,184-square-meter urban renewal landscape at Baosheng Avenue in Yubei District, developed by Chongqing Xing'an Industrial Development and designed by Shenzhen Yi'an Design Consulting, with design starting in October 2019. In China's rapid development, street communities and neighborhood parks have increasingly been swallowed by high-rises, and this time the designers and developer give urban green space back to local residents and children, creating a fully open, more childlike and more professional nature school. The team understands urban renewal as fundamentally an update of the lifestyle of the people who live there, about each individual's memory of the city and about making daily life warmer. The site itself is a simple, unadorned corner park: a not-very-clean stream, a small wetland, a large banyan tree, a slightly worn overall condition, yet every evening and weekend local residents bring children, friends and families to run, climb, talk and play. The design wants to return children to an original natural environment, compensating for what city life has taken away and preserving their memory of nature. With strong support from the client Dongyuan Real Estate, the team chooses an urban-renewal direction that supplements surrounding community functions, guarantees ecological restoration and bears social responsibility, making the building disappear and sharing the social burden among all participating firms. Under a shared model, a discarded corner park is transformed into an urban living room. Nature is treated as the best teacher: children learn in an outdoor classroom, alongside plants and animals, returning to nature. A plant classroom offers diverse ecological experiences and outdoor science interpretation through signage that matches each species and QR codes linking to further information, while a rich underwater ecosystem lets children observe submerged plants, floating plants and aquatic animals. The pond play zone is organized around the site's pond and great banyan as four themed, teaching-and-play community nature classrooms. Dongyuan contributes its years of research-and-development theme park Tongmeng Tongxiang, moving the powerful IP from inside a gated residential compound out into the city's public space so that corporate R&D can carry more social responsibility. A white horse becomes a joyful angel for children, interactive mist devices energize the site, and a small farm lets children plant seeds and wait for harvest through the turning seasons.