Berkeley Students Working in China on the Future of a Water Village in the Pearl River Delta and on the Grand Canal in Hangzhou

Peter Bosselmann will speak about UC Berkeley students' work in Guangzhou and Hangzhou, China, in January and March of this year.

Wednesday, May 7
1-2pm

Peter Bosselmann
Professor of Urban Design, Departments of City and Regional Planning, Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, UC Berkeley; Director, Environmental Simulation Laboratory, UC Berkeley

In January, faculty and students from the Master of Urban Design program, together with Landscape Architecture/Environmental Planning students, stayed on the campus at the South China University of Technology (SCUT) in Guangzhou and worked on urban design concepts for historic water villages that will be absorbed into the rapidly growing cities of the Pearl River Delta.

In March, a team from Berkeley's Master of Urban Design program joined students from Tokyo's Waseda University and from the University of Ferrara, Italy, for a two-week workshop at ZheJiang University in Hangzhounear Shanghai. Hangzhou is located at the terminus of the Grand Canal of China, a 1800 km long waterway that connects Beijing in the north with the Yangtze River Delta in the center of China. The canal was completed during the Sui Dynasty (581-618) and with the invention of the water level adjusting pound lock in the 10th century the Grand Canal became China's most important economic, cultural and political north south connection. Sections of the canal are still actively used for water-based transport. The workshop focused on the changes in land uses along side the canal from the formerly industrial use to residential and recreational activities. At the same time student teams worked on designs that reversed environmental degradation and made improvements to water quality and urban ecology.

Professor Bosselmann is an urban designer with international experience in planning and design of downtown areas, inner city neighborhoods and roadway projects. He has established simulation and computer visualization laboratories in New York City, Tokyo and in Milan that were modeled after the laboratory he directs at Berkeley. He lectures frequently throughout Europe, Asia and Australia. He held endowed Chairs at Tokyo University (1992), at the Sidney Institute of Technology (1994), the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen (2000), and the Milan Politecnico (2006-7). He received Progressive Architecture, AIA, ASLA and American Planning Association awards for his urban design work in San Francisco and Toronto and from the Chicago Urban Design Foundation for his work in Oakland, California.