2008 — Speech on the Design Concept for the Lishui River Scenic Belt (Part 4)
4. Taking the "Half-Side Street" project as an example, our benefit analysis of building the Lishui River Scenic Belt with "modern architecture in stilted-house style" as the dominant tone. In building the Lishui River Scenic Belt, style is the primary issue, but it is not merely a matter of architectural style. A massive, uniform yet distinctive building complex is only what attracts tourists and residents as a must-visit destination
This article has been compiled from historical materials in the "Zhangjiajie Tour Guide Network" (33519.com · City Overview section). Some administrative divisions, population, socioeconomic data, and policy information may be outdated and are for reference only; for the latest situation, please refer to official releases by the local government and scenic areas.
IV. Taking the "Banbian Street" project as an example, our benefit analysis of building the Lishui landscape belt with "modern architecture in stilted-house style" as the main tone.
In building the Lishui landscape belt, style is the primary issue, but it is not merely a matter of architectural style. A massive, "uniform," distinctive architectural complex is only the precondition for attracting tourists and citizens and making them feel they must go there. As for the overall effect of the Lishui landscape belt construction, if it can only be "viewed" and lacks tourism and leisure projects matching the distinctive architectural complex, it will be impossible to achieve the expected development and construction effect, and therefore it cannot be considered successful. We must consider its benefits in many aspects. To illustrate this issue, we take the "Banbian Street" project as an example to analyze the benefit issue of building the Lishui landscape belt with "modern architecture in stilted-house style" as the main tone:
(I) The design concept of the "Banbian Street" project is the combination of street and embankment, architecture and flood control, tradition and fashion, classicism and fashion, culture and leisure, and commerce and residential living, providing a guarantee for the project to create enormous benefits.
The planning goal of the "Banbian Street" project is: First, positioning around three major themes: human settlement, commerce, and sightseeing and leisure. Second, carefully creating the "three great unique features": ten-li "Banbian Street" on both the north and south banks; ten-li "historical and cultural corridor" and "folk customs corridor" on both banks; and the "Sanjie Street" (hanging street). Third, relying on the major theme of tourism to build an urban cultural belt, landscape belt, and economic belt. According to this approach, this is a modern, fashionable, and magnificent street model created by innovatively developing the stilted-house symbol; it is an international tourism city brand that attracts tourists' attention with a visual effect that is unique in the world, distinctive in style, extraordinary in momentum, and stunning to the heart. Here is a place where tourists gather, where popularity is strong, where one gazes at Tianmen, where one gets close to and plays with water, where one experiences folk customs, where one eats, drinks, and has fun, where one softly sings over wine, where one revels until dawn, where one shops with ease, where one buys property, where one makes a fortune and brings blessings, where one dwells poetically, and where one is so happy as not to think of returning. Bank echoes bank, bank interacts with water, boats and people rejoice together, and light and shadow shine together. Inside the buildings there is the music of string and wind instruments; on the boats there are beauties singing and dancing. The theories and diversified contents of a whole range of leisure streets—foreigner street, beer street, teahouse street, snack street, food street, performance street, antique street, calligraphy and painting street, famous shop street, women's street, men's street, folk custom street, lovers' street, Bianbian Street, time-honored brand street, and all kinds of trendy "bar" culture streets popular around the world—will all settle and make their homes in the "Banbian Street" built from ten li of stilted houses along both riverbanks. This is the tourism "core" of our city tomorrow with the greatest appeal and the greatest capacity to gather development factors.
(II) According to our planning and design, the "Banbian Street" project will create three major benefits.
First, by using the 16,000 meters of embankments on both the north and south banks that currently have only a single flood control function, we will build on a grand scale a landscape belt on both banks with strong regional characteristics and enormous visual impact—a ten-li long street of stilted houses (on the cliff section on the right side of the north end of the Lishui Bridge, the unique feature of stilted-house style will be built—the hanging street), so that tourists entering and leaving the urban area and scenic areas can remember "Banbian Street" at a glance—Zhangjiajie's "intuitive urban image." Second, by revitalizing the "idle" embankments, it can directly create very considerable economic benefits for the municipal finance. If "Banbian Street" is built on the embankment, that is, integrating street and embankment, it can provide more than 100,000 square meters of urban construction land, and there is no demolition task at all! With a principle of limiting height to three stories, hundreds of thousands of square meters of commercial housing can be built. If so, the land revenue and construction taxes and fees generated by this project alone would be a considerable income. And the economic benefits continuously generated by hundreds of thousands of square meters of commercial housing will be even more limitless in the future. Once "Banbian Street" becomes popular, it will be Zhangjiajie's "urban economic image." Third, "Banbian Street" consists of two major parts: a distinctive architectural complex in stilted-house style and a sightseeing and leisure corridor. A sightseeing and leisure corridor 6 meters wide and more than 5,000 meters long will be designed on the water-facing side. This is a major improvement on the traditional stilted-house model and, from the technical level, provides the fullest carrier for the "revealing mountains and water" that people hope for. Normally, the standpoint for "revealing mountains and water" is the riverside avenue, and green belts will more or less block part of the view, but viewing Tianmen Mountain from the 6-meter-wide sightseeing and leisure corridor is completely unobstructed. The high embankment is higher than the riverside avenue in many sections, and when people walk along the riverside avenue, the river water is hard to see in many sections. With this 6-meter-wide sightseeing and leisure corridor, pedestrians are at the place closest to the water surface, and its water-close function is unmatched by the riverside avenue. In short, with this sightseeing and leisure corridor of "Banbian Street," it can not only solve the issue of revealing mountains and water, but also, like West Street in Yangshuo and the Champs-Élysées in Paris, fully develop the theme of leisure on the corridor. Over time, just as people are accustomed to linking Sifang Street with the Old Town of Lijiang and West Street with Yangshuo, they will also link "Banbian Street" with Zhangjiajie, and it will appear frequently in the mouths of tourists and citizens, becoming a place they talk about with great relish. If so, Banbian Street will become Zhangjiajie's "urban cultural image." Therefore, this place will certainly become the image brand of Zhangjiajie's urban construction, a cultural belt with Zhangjiajie characteristics, and an economic belt formed by tourists and citizens spending on leisure, shopping, and entertainment.
(III) Building a landscape belt on the Lishui River embankment indeed involves two focal issues: flood control safety and economic benefits, but we should adopt a positive and optimistic attitude toward them.
1. The first focal issue is the flood control safety of building stilted houses on the embankment.
After all, an urban flood control embankment is different from an ordinary river embankment. It should bear a responsibility for the city's sustainable development and for improving the city's appearance. Conversely, unreasonable designs should be corrected. Correcting and changing the style of the flood control embankment does not mean violating the Flood Control Law. The essence of the Flood Control Law is to ensure that the functions of the flood control embankment are not damaged or lost, not merely to protect its external style. Although "Banbian Street" changes the appearance of the flood control embankment, it doubly strengthens its functions. It is a wise and bold move that respects, maintains, and strengthens the flood control embankment. The problem is that this creative idea is very likely to be thwarted because of different ways of interpreting the Flood Control Law. In planning any project, site safety is the first priority. Especially when building stilted houses on a flood control embankment and integrating street and embankment, it attracts even more attention. We have conducted serious and earnest research on this:
First, adhere to the "seven no's" principle. That is, do not occupy even one inch of waterway, do not damage the original style of the flood control embankment (building stilted houses precisely requires such sloped terrain), do not change the function of the flood control embankment, do not demolish the embankment, do not destroy the embankment, do not change its route, and do not change its structure.
Second, the stilts' support columns use the fixed-point piling method, pouring reinforced concrete into deep wells of strictly controlled dimensions. Driving piles into the earthen embankment wall works on the same principle as inserting rebar into concrete. The formidable resistance formed by tens of thousands of steel-concrete columns and beams is several times, even ten or a hundred times, that of pure cement or pure earthen walls!
Third, a ground beam is cast along the line of the waterside stone wall, connected to the steel-concrete stilts. This steel-concrete ground beam, stretching for over ten li, runs through and links up with tens of thousands of steel-concrete columns above and below, left and right, forming an indestructible net-like protective framework. Even a flood unseen in a thousand years could not shake this powerful protective system. This is not the same concept as a single building resisting floods on its own, nor is it on the same level as the wooden stilt houses of history.
Fourth, the construction of the Hongbiyan Dam created a calm lake, greatly slowing the flow of floodwaters. After the calm lake was formed, the river's impact force on the embankment was correspondingly reduced, and the threat to the steel-concrete stilt houses was greatly diminished. Therefore, from a technical standpoint, building a stilt-house street on the flood-control embankment is entirely possible.
Fifth, our ancestors already had a solution. Our forebears well understood that mountain streams and rivers "rise easily and recede easily," so they did not build "embankments" higher than the city ground as in the plains and lake regions, but only built "banks" to protect the river's edge. Although low-lying areas might be flooded for a few hours every few years, they still tenaciously erected stilt houses on the riverbanks. Zhangjiajie's ten-li riverside street of years past was built on stone retaining banks along the river, with stilt houses mostly cantilevered over the water surface—even more spectacular than the stretch visible today along the Tuo River in Fenghuang. The reason our predecessors dared to build wooden houses on the riverbank was not that they were unaware of floods, but that they knew floods all too well, and they also knew all too well how precious a riverside building is for enjoying the scenery and being close to nature. Over thousands of years of history, there are only records of riverside buildings being flooded, never of them being swept away. Investigation and research results show that Fenghuang, Zhenyuan, Gongtan, Chadong, Xichehe, and our own Yongding old city have stood firm in floods for hundreds and thousands of years, flourishing for hundreds and thousands of years, and no record has been found in historical annals of floods destroying stilt houses. This survey trip to Chongqing found that in the Hongyandong folk-custom scenic area's riverside zone, as well as along the four banks of the two rivers, many sections have bridge piers extending into the riverbed, using suspended construction to build riverside roads. The fact that the Chongqing reaches of the Yangtze and Jialing rivers can operate this way shows that it does not impede flood discharge. Taking Changsha's Xiang River scenic belt as another example, the newly built Du Fu Jiangge stands majestically on the embankment without affecting the flood-control safety of the embankment, showing that flood-control embankments can likewise play a more active role in serving urban construction. The key is that understanding must be unified; with unified will, experts absolutely have the wisdom to solve technical problems. As for our local flood-control safety issue, it can be reduced to three aspects: First, the safety of the embankment. Our creative concept is to use pile foundations and a frame-structure net to cover the embankment, making the long stretching embankment a more solid whole. This not only does not affect the safety of the embankment body but actually serves to reinforce it. Second, the safety of buildings on the embankment. The current embankment is already about 2 meters above the city ground. Even a 50-year flood poses no safety concern. Consider that the old wooden riverside stilt houses, built on riverbanks 2 meters lower than today's, were never swept away by floods; today's buildings are even more secure. Third, the flood-control issue. The "Half-Side Street" concept is based only on the riverbank and embankment, not the riverbed. It neither lowers the height of the embankment nor affects the flood cross-section; as for the function of blocking floodwaters in the river channel from inundating the city, that is not weakened in the slightest.
2. The second focal point is the economic benefit issue that we must consider in planning and building the Lishui Scenic Belt.
After repeated research and demonstration, taking the advantages and feasibility of the "Half-Side Street" project as an example, we believe that building the Lishui Scenic Belt well will yield both direct and indirect economic benefits that are highly encouraging to those who build it.
First, it fully conforms to and embodies the principles of saving land and commercial value multiplication. The ten-li "Half-Side Street," because it is built on the embankments on both banks, can secure at least 200,000 to 250,000 square meters of idle prime land. Land transfer fees alone could reach over 400 million yuan, and there is not a single household to relocate. Under a height limit of 3 to 4 stories, hundreds of thousands of square meters of commercial space can be built, with sales revenue in the tens of billions. The land revenue, construction taxes and fees, and commercial housing sales taxes and fees generated by the project alone represent a very considerable income for our city's finances. And the economic benefits that hundreds of thousands of square meters of commercial space can continuously generate are even more not to be underestimated.
Second, another value of the "Half-Side Street" concept is that it changes the original plan of demolishing a large area of residential housing to build a wide greenbelt, thereby avoiding another waste of urban land and reducing enormous construction costs that yield no return. If an innovation can create a huge fortune and enormous development space for the government, it at least proves that the project meets the city's objective needs. The "Half-Side Street" project can fully achieve this goal. This is precisely the greatest contribution this project makes to this city.
Third, the massive building complex and extensive ancillary works of the "Half-Side Street" project bring enormous business and development opportunities to this city. On the premise of introducing strategic investment, local investors and even ordinary citizens are encouraged to participate. The participation of local investors and citizens can mobilize 7 to 8 billion yuan of idle private capital, ignite the enthusiasm of citizens to love their city and build their homeland, and rapidly advance the construction speed of the "Half-Side Street" and the entire Lishui Scenic Belt.
In summary, the Lishui Scenic Belt that we are planning, designing, and that the government is organizing to build should be a cultural belt and urban tourism landscape belt that can fully display the city's character and gather popularity, and must also be a new urban economic belt that can create and concentrate wealth and help realize the dream of enriching the people and strengthening the city. As long as we follow the positioning of developing urban leisure tourism and the principle of landscaping, plan, build, and operate each project of the Lishui Scenic Belt well, highlight local ethnic cultural characteristics, and highlight cultural soft power, Zhangjiajie's goal of creating a "core" of urban tourism will surely succeed, and the urban landscape's goal of "visible change in three years, great transformation in five years" will surely be achieved.