Rural & Suburban Category
HuaMing Model Town, Tianjin, China (Tianjin Believing Development & Investment Co., Ltd)
Huaming Model Town is the first town built to the mode of “exchanging house site for house” in Tianjin. It is a new urban-rural integrated residential area in the course of Chinese urbanization, and also a successful model of peasants’ happy life which is ecological, harmonious and habitable.
HuaMing Model Town, Tianjin, China
During the process of planning and building the model town, scientific planning and designing ideas and advanced technological approaches were exploited and adopted.
Scientific planning ideas. First, the “conserved ecosystem” reserves the ridges of fields and over ten thousands of trees on both sides. Basing on that, the road system and green system of the residential area are built so that the main roads and buildings will be covered with tall trees and the raw type of surroundings can stand out. Second, “maintaining inherent qualities and peace” refers to organizing new yards between neighbors and forming a community of every four neighbors and a 3-rank structure of neighbor-community-area with the public service facilities, public greenbelt and leisure square as the center and thus to provide residents with a convenient and comfortable residential environment.
Realistic residential design ideas. Since all the residents are peasants, the residential design takes the living habits of peasants into full consideration. First, most of the apartments are small and medium sized condos with a floorage of 60-120 m2 while multi-storey buildings mix up with medium-height buildings. Second, all the multi-storey buildings have semi-basements, and every household can have a storage to dispose the mess. Third, the old will be arranged in medium-height buildings with elevators as far as possible so as to render them convenience. Fourth, non-barrier design is taken for the entrance and public space of the buildings. Fifth, the elevation design should adopt brief lines and plain materials to manifest the regional characteristics of a north town.
Advanced energy-conserving and release-reduced ideas. First, adopt the constructional technology of “3-step energy conservation”, such as heat preservation and heat insulation of outer wall, heat preservation system of insulated glass doors and windows, ventilated roof and heat preservation and insulation, which reduces energy consumption by 65%. Second, intensify the use of solar energy and install over 8000 solar energy systems and realize the integration of solar energy driven water heaters and buildings. Third, reduce the drainage of rain and sewage and adopt the separate drainage of rain and sewage to retrieve and reuse them among which the sewage is used for landscape after being collected and processed through the artificial intensified processing units such as pretreatment system, biochemical system and sedimentation tank and finally constructed wetland so as to realize the circulation of water resources.
Huaming Model Town is a successfully-built environment-friendly residential area which is ecological, harmonious and habitable. This project has been selected as the case of Urban Best Practices Area, 2010 Shanghai Expo. It is also a successful example of rapid urbanization of Chinese rural area. Being so typical and demonstrative, it also serves as a good reference of the urbanization of developing nations.