China is undergoing the greatest urbanization in the history of mankind. More than half of China’s population of 1.39 billion people now lives in cities, up from 20% at the start of China’s economic reforms in the late 1970s. The movement of hundreds of millions of people has brought a boom in real estate prices and a demand for new thinking in urbanism and architecture among property owners, developers and the Chinese public.

For thousands of years the people of China lived in homes, villages, and towns they built for themselves using local materials and following local traditions. Today they do not. The Great Urbanization following the Cultural Revolution has changed all that. Today we may begin to find ourselves living in cities that belong less to a world of environmental and communal evolution and more to a world of trendy ideas. For better or worse, these ideas come not from the people who live in our cities but from government officials, professional planners, architects, landscape architects, traffic engineers, the construction materials industry and the marketing departments of real estate development companies. Today our cities are becoming designed and built “for us, not by us.” As cities continue to evolve, we do not always get the things we need but rather the things developers and marketing specialists think we want. Today a “promise of happiness” is on sale at flashy “show flat” sales offices in new super-block apartment complexes.

We deserve better. We owe it to ourselves and the ground we build on to create something more humane. We should live in a city where every block is a city within a city. Where on every block people live, work, and play, where the traditional urban fabric of a human-scaled-tree-lined street is dominated by social interaction. Our firm reinforces this dream in our work. It is our hope that in the future we will see our built environment evolve into a more truly walk-able city; a city where ring roads are less important than pedestrian promenades. A city where regardless of the neighborhood’s location, people have access to localized cultural and social amenities, great restaurants, bookstores, cafes, cinemas, theatres, opera houses, art galleries, parks, museums, schools, libraries, health clubs, excellent health care, and open air shopping streets that deliver what we need most: social and cultural inclusiveness.

By understanding these challenges within this fast-paced environment, our team devotes our energy towards design solutions that help generate a positive sense of place and encourage human interaction, recreation and community. But this can be very daunting. In this new age of development, many clients in China lack experience or the knowledge and vision to understand design process and rely instead on glossy magazine photos to portray a vision they may have. A fair amount of time is taken to educate our clients about the layers needed to reach their goals begin with building a healthy relationship through communication, both on a personal and professional level.

We are only as good as our clients, without their understanding and support from early design vision through construction quality problems, a project can easily fail. We understand that at times good urban design need not be subordinate to the demands of expedient infrastructure and traffic management but instead should evoke a sense of discovery and promote healthy communities, quality of life, education and curiosity within everyday experiences at the heart of an evolving city. We celebrate cities and their complexities, contradictions and constraints and promote their continued evolution.

We are not preservationists so much as we are futurists. Our firm’s work is grounded in craft and detail inspired by the days when people of China lived in homes, villages, and towns they built for themselves using local materials and following local traditions. We are inspired by the practice of landscape architecture as a natural, balanced, poetic and whimsical expression of urban life and we carefully consider the distinguishing spatial characteristics of a site, its connections to surrounding areas, the natural environment, cultural conditions and its history. We work towards ‘trends’ as less concerned with creating something iconic and strive instead towards creating a design language that are based on modern patterns of cultural behavior as a catalyst for human interaction, recreation and community.

People live in cities to be in close contact with other people. They want a high quality environment in which to maximize that contact. They want to walk out of their home onto a street teeming with life and to identify with a place that has both visual and visceral beauty, security, privacy and tranquility. Most of all people in cities want to be around people who love people and who want to use the same things that other people use to enjoy a better life. We attempt within our work to demonstrate what we believe modern metropolitan China can be: pedestrian streets full of quirks and life defined by the aesthetics of our time and place.