Jumping City

The new home for Urban Jumpers-future China’s urban life style.

Jumping city, in accordance with existing urban socio-spatial structure and norms in China, presents a community-building prototype-vertical garden neighborhood building with 11 households on each floor. Moveable wooden houses can be built on the space units on the basis of the existing prefabricated infrastructure. Therefore, a new market would be formed, outside Chinese land market and Chinese construction of the real estate market. This could form a new operable market behavior for individual consumers besides the government and the real estate developers. The jumping city would separate mobility of architecture from permanency, and in accordance with Chinese unique land economic politics, this would form not only economic and social sustainability but ecological and survival sustainability.

The project jumping city, by Che Fei the principal architect from CU Office and his team, is a research on the future urban sustainability in China. After years of scientific investigation and analysis, 100 urban jumpers’ information has been collected, also come up with a future China development strategy of urban sustainability. The project is named for its predictive city research on the upcoming urbanity of Beijing. The research on the development of contemporary cities of high density and high density, with Beijing one rapid urbanization city as a model city, has developed a socio-spatial structured concept of contemporary city, which is a method to understand and decode the contemporary urban development. The jumping city is a universal urban theory as well as a specific urban development plan for Beijing. The research attempt to create a critical path between realism and idealism. It tries to explore the potential and enthusiasm of the existing socio-spatial structure. The goal is not to replace the old city but to stimulate the sustainable development of the old city. Jumping city not only gives a more clear understanding of Chinese cities, but also contributes to the development of global cities in the era of globalization.

Jumping city -- new home for urban jumpers -- future China’s urbanism: precast with customized; mass-productive with non-standard, economical with personalized; permanent with temporary; top to bottom with bottom to top, collectivism with individualism.