The openness within walls : reshaping the gated campus

Abstract

Modern Chinese university campuses have traditionally been planned as walled enclosures, according to the danwei system (Bray, 2005). In 2016, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, jointly with the State Council, passed the "Opinions on Strengthening the Management of Urban and Planning Construction", which states that all existing gated compound units must be gradually planned with open boundaries. Taking this new policy into account, this thesis rethinks urban design strategies for campuses, which are commonly gated due to social, economic, and historical factors in metropolitan areas of China. This thesis investigates the relationship between university campus and city by examining a campus's design principles with the example of South China Normal University. After three decades of rapid urbanization, China has now entered a stage of urbanization where pre-planned walled urban enclosures do not provide adequate amenities within, and are too segregated from one another. Among gated communities, campuses have great potential and obligation to be transformed into open street blocks given their strategic locations, educational and entrepreneurial resources and facilities. This thesis questions the wall in two ways: 1) morphological analysis of walled cities where walls have been transformed and 2) an examination of architectures within the campus that interrogates the boundness. The proposal will utilize the strategy abstracted from these two studies into the setting of South China Normal University. This thesis is a composited research and design study of the policy, comparative examples, campus case study, concepts, tools and synthesis to use them. It begins from the gated community opening up policy as an opportunity to discuss the meaning of danwei mode's walls in the new stage of China's urbanization. Through a comparative study of walled enclosures and their approaches toward wall, this thesis also provides a broad review of the role of walls in the long process of urbanization. The following part conducts a case study of the university agglomeration in Guangzhou where danwei generally remains its original form based on its partition wall. Conceiving the danwei and residential compounds as a series of urban patchworks, this thesis establishes the concept of conduit, a framework of strategies that try to decompose, condense and diversify the mono-functional partition. Afterwards, several tools and strategies have been created to implement the concept based on aforementioned campus case study, literally transforming the wall. Figuratively, thesis demonstrates the way to use the tools and strategies by three syntheses based on the setting of South China Normal University. Eventually, the thesis summarizes the methods and procedures for academic campus units to transform their walls to accommodate new urban needs.