The “Green Docks” is the new green district in the city of Tongyeong (South Korea). Located on the site of a former shipyard, it celebrates its heritage by reusing several of the industrial structures on the site at the same time as introducing a range of new green areas and public buildings to create a hub for tourism, leisure, public spaces and living.
Green Docks‘s site is bordered to the north by the water and to the south by picturesque Mountains. The mountainous landscape in the south gets connected by artificial hills to the waterfront. The hills are used as huge containers for polluted materials recovered from the rehabilitation of the shipyards areas.
The reusing of the industrial structures mixed with the new artificial hills create a new landscape for the further development of the area.
The requalification project of Tongyeong Dockyards arises from its landscape characterized by green hills and luxuriant promontories overlooking the sea.
The city has developed rapidly during the last century, incorporating and sometimes destroying much of its fantastic landscape. Today some of these areas, that once housed the indusrtrial development, are no longer useful for the initial purpose.
The issue of the competition focuses on Tongyeong’s watefront and on the areas that once were used to build impossing ships, to load, unload and store goods and products. The current opportunity to imagine the socio-cultural developmentof this area allows us to propose a suggestive and captivating idea: to requalify the area not only in functional terms but also from a landscape point of view.
The creation of artificial hills made with a mixture of waste polluted materials of docks and of vegetal soil allows to realize composting mounds, that, through a slow natural process such as phytodepuration, will make possible the decontamination of the polluted areas of the docks. At the same time it’s going to recreate the natural landscape previously transformed by man during the period of industrial development.
The main objective of this intervention should be to aim at the re-naturalization of the site in reasonable time by simulating or reconstituting a natural environment, a habitat that hosts the maximum variability of organisms.
The general purpose of the intervention is to re-establish the very slow natural process of evolution towards the ecological climax without the need for subsequent actions. The human intervention must have the single purpose of accelerating the naturalization times of the disused site. Nature would be able to mitigate that wound produced by human intervention, but with very long times if compared to the biological times of man.
DECONTAMINATION
The main objective of the projet its to make Tongyeong attractive again, creating a new economy based in services like hotel trade, wellness, leisure, event management and sea-sports. A new economical center of attraction to catalyse work and investments to the city.
In addition to the social-economic objectif, there is also an ecological and historic one. This projet tries to reuse the remains of the industrial past to invent a different future, a future where nature could remedy the bad we have done.
It is important to create an area that is perfectly merged with the spirit of the place so as not to give rise to “fractures” with a strong visual impact.
It is necessary to carry out a good vegetation research that aims to classify the plants present and then lead the intervention with choices that respect the environment as much as possible. The ecological study will be carried through the application of the phytosociological method.
The principles to be adopted for the design of the site layout must simultaneously satisfy the dual requirement of the natural environment; relying above all on a large and solid knowledge of the plant species, and the creation of bushy spaces alternated with the open ones.
The use and disposition of perennial and annual shrubs and herbaceous species, the wise proportions between the evergreen and deciduous species, are the guiding principles at the base of the correct approach to the naturalistic/ ecological/ green design of a space.
The intervention for the site conditioning (is inserted/ fits in the following planning phase following the) comes after the planing phase of the construction of structures and infrastructures,( depending on the final destination that will be given to the area)
It is important to create an area that is perfectly based with the spirit of the place so as not to give rise to “fractures” with a strong visual impact.