Chinese-partnered team reconstructs land habitat, urban economy through co-existence model

A Chinese student-partnered team at Columbia University in the United States is promoting an innovative integration of urban land economy and ecological value, offering a novel paradigm for reutilizing underutilized urban land and activating community economy.

The "Permeable City" project — crafted by the GSAPP team at Columbia — has garnered the Architecture Master Prize 2025 Student Winners in Urban Design Category Best of Best, due to its innovative arrangement.

Du Ruonan, a member of the team, said that — in terms of community economic activation — the project constructs a shared infrastructure system with the ground as the core, transforming spatial redundancy into economic resources.

The project site, located in Rothneusiedl, Vienna, faces a problem of urban expansion and land carrying capacity, and sits in one of the lower-income districts in Austria. It also needs to face issues such as the accessibility of fresh food, the conditions for daily outdoor activities, and community-scale care infrastructure.

Originating from Otto Wagner's vision of a "Great City", which binds the idea of "neatness-cleanliness" with the aesthetic of modernity, and accomplishing this binding through "smooth surfaces", traditional urban planning sees hardened ground as the core standard for hygiene and order. However, Austria is relatively scarce in arable land compared to other European countries.

Du said their "Permeable City" project aims to restructure the land use logic and tap into the economic potential of idle land by reversing the proportion of hard and permeable surfaces in the city. The core of the project lies in a network of 200 shared courtyards — flexibly planning uses through a neighborhood co-governance model as well as breaking the boundaries between traditional farmland and urban space.

Meanwhile, large courtyards near transportation nodes serve as specialized farmland, producing directly for the local market and reducing circulation cost. Rented courtyards are open to residents — satisfying their farming needs while driving income growth for local farmers through cooperation — forming a small, closed loop agricultural economy.

Du stressed that the project adhered to low-cost and sustainable economic principles at the construction level, utilizing local materials such as bricks, straw bales, and wooden frames.

From an economic perspective, the "Infiltration City" broke through the traditional model of "single development" of urban land, maximizing land value through the symbiotic design of ecology and economy.

"It proved that urban health and economic vitality can develop synergistically through spatial reconstruction — providing a replicable path for solving the economic difficulties of low-efficiency land use and low-income communities — and injecting new economic momentum into future urban renewal," Du added.

Du remarked that from the perspective of the relationship between people and land, the "Permeable City" reopened the logic of "hardening-isolation-disinfection-style security" that modern cities have long relied on, allowing soil, rainwater, plants, and microorganisms to return to daily living as manageable living media.

"Health is no longer defined solely by closed boundaries and distance control, but generated by the accessible, adjustable, and maintainable relationship between people and land," Du said, noting that courtyards and permeable surfaces form a continuous ecological interface, where rainwater is absorbed and purified, heat islands and dust haze are mitigated, and daily walking paths and shared food systems integrate nutrition, activity, and community mutual assistance into the living structure.

"Modern healthy living thus emerges as a symbiotic system with land as the infrastructure, continuously rebuilt through perceivable natural processes and participatory community mechanisms," Du said.