KCAP’s urban design vision proposes a strategy to turn Futian, Shenzhen’s City Centre into a vibrant urban city centre that can compete with the centres of other mega-cities. This challenge cannot be achieved by completely re-designing parts of the centre in a top-down way, but rather to implement customized local interventions as test-projects that can provide a direction for incremental urban transformation.
The main theme of this overall urban design is the development of Futian from border city to open city, It focuses on how to promote Futians development into a more spatially and socially inclusive urban area through the optimization of road space and green structures, resulting in a more diverse and socio-economically resilient area.
Concept Diagram
The biggest problem of Futian is that it is both very large and it consists of fragmented neighbourhoods of radically different character, separated by large car-oriented roads, that increase the segregation between districts and prevent the development of an inclusive and porous urban centre. At the same time, the larger road grid in Shenzhen forms a clear system of orientation that should not be abandoned but transformed.
Hence, our design strategy transforms the functional areas that are isolated by the main roads to cross the physical boundaries that restrict them, and to soften the very rigid borders, so that economic activity in the various characteristic areas can radiate more freely to the surrounding areas, thereby promoting urban diversification and better supporting economies of scale.
Additionally, it also proposes to create a large, comprehensive overall green & blue network of connecting public spaces, based on the current road network, that provides Futian a better base of orientation between the Mountain Ridge in the North, Shenzhen Bay and River in the South, and improve the definition towards the East and West. Source and images Courtesy of KCAP.
Master Plan 
Image © KCAP 
Image © KCAP 
Urban Diagram 
Urban Diagram 
Strategy Diagram