A New Chapter for Shanghai Waterfront: Plazas, Towers, An Island for Youth

Shanghai's riverfront is entering a new phase after years of development focused on opening up the two sides of the waterfront.

The next few years will focus on encouraging people to spend more time along the river.

After the "launch" phase in 2002, a "connection" phase in 2016, and a "transformation" phase in 2019, the fourth phase will focus less on building new space than on stitching functions, neighborhoods and daily life along the water, said Zheng Yinan, deputy director of the Shanghai Urban Planning & Design Research Institute's detailed-planning branch and lead drafter of the city's new Huangpu River special plan.

Some stretches of the Huangpu could even be allowed to look a little wilder, Zheng said, pointing to Seoul's Han River, where planners aim to return roughly 57 of its 82 kilometers of embankment to a natural, sloped state, leaving only piers and bridges untouched.

At Lujiazui, that means opening up ground now blocked by an aging harbor administration building.

Under a redesign concept, the site would become an open-air plaza large enough to hold up to 20,000 people, with the Oriental Pearl TV Tower as its backdrop.

City officials are deliberating on the design.

"People on riverboats have no interaction with those on the shore," said Liu Xian, head of French landscape firm Agence TER's Shanghai studio.

She pointed to the Seine in Paris, where boat passengers and people crossing bridges overhead wave to each other, as a model for what Lujiazui could feel like.

Liu's studio, which has worked on the Huangpu River's eastern bank in Pudong since 2016, wants to link the new plaza to elevated walkways connecting the tower's observation deck, the riverside promenade and a row of shops long hidden behind service roads.

A bigger shift is planned across the river at the former World Expo 2010 Shanghai site in Puxi.

Architect Zhang Ning, China's head of German design firm ppas, calls his centerpiece the "Ta Hong Yan" – a tower, a bridge and an eye, in Chinese wordplay.

It combines a new landmark research tower for young scientists, a revamped rainbow bridge left from the World Expo 2010, and an open plaza for public events.

"Right now, it's capital and investment flocking to the Huangpu riverfront," Zhang said. "We want the smartest people to come here, too."

Fuxing Island, Shanghai's only artificial island in downtown, is taking a different approach.

Architect Shen Lu, who has led planning studies there, said its old factory buildings will mostly stay standing, retrofitted for shared labs and startups rather than replaced with towers aimed at big companies.

"The richest people may end up on one stretch of the river, the smartest on another," Shen said. "But the youngest belong on Fuxing Island."

Shanghai has already opened more than 6 square kilometers of riverfront public space, an area roughly the size of 840 standard football pitches. The city has also restored public access along more than 110 kilometers of the Huangpu River and Suzhou Creek.

What comes next, designers said, is less about how much space opens up and more about what people actually do once they're there.