Shanghai Skywalks. The Walkable Multilayered City

Abstract

This research deals with the actualization of the skywalks phenomenon in evolvement a multileveled city such as Shanghai.

As in many contemporary megacities, Shanghai's generic evolution, which includes both, urban expansion, and inner densification of the city, causes the complete neglect of the relation between the individual and the urban environment. It seems that in such a context, the skyway phenomenon could offer new, unconventional, different public spaces and represent the possibility for the reinvention of humanlike spaces. The nature of the examined skyway phenomenon combines seemingly opposed ideas and concepts. These structures have extremely large dimensions, but then again, they offer spaces of human scale. Examined elevated walkways are closely connected to other city layers and they integrate a wide variety of uses, from sightseeing and meeting points to places for street vendors and traditional dance practices. At the same time skyways represent new public spaces and infrastructures of soft mobility, which points out the significance of the idea of “walkability”. The research examines if these structures could contribute to the implementation idea of "urban porosity" in the extremely dense context of Shanghai. The concept of urban porosity is seen as a possibility for the multilayered city of Shanghai to enrich its public spaces, promote walkscapes and offer new perspectives. This work considers the skywalk phenomenon within a “framework” that could be applied from the smallest up to the metropolitan scale.

Taking all this as a starting point, it is our belief that, by providing humanlike spaces in a beyond scale context, these elevated walkways could represent a mechanism for the inscription of everyday life and culture into the multilayered urban settings.