Line 13 – Superlinearity

By Moving Cities (Bert De Muynck & Mónica Carriço) and Adrian Blackwell

Students: Gary Chien, Maya Desai, Hayley Imerman, Holly Jordan, Safora Khoylou, Esmond Lee, Timothy Lee, Antoine Morris, Matthew Spremulli, Sando Thordarson, Sandy Wong, Joseph Yau.

Beijing’s Line13 was built in the late 1990s as a speculative infrastructure in order to stimulate the development of the countryside north of the city. At the time it was built, only line 1 and line 2 existed. So Line 13, as unlikely a route as its number suggests, sat as an anomalous form, designed to irrigate the periphery for real estate speculation. This process has allowed strange new cities like Huilongguan, a commuter suburb of monotonous slabs, to grow up surrounding the line, creating zones of uneven development, where the messy vitality of existing uses meets the overbearing coherence of new subdivisions. Despite its urban character as infrastructure, the areas that line 13 traverses are in between sites; housing blocks, universities, office and business parks, share space with golf courses, farms, villages and desolate wastelands.

However the unevenness of the line opens up potentials, in the gaps between overdeveloped space. This workshop examined the northern leg of Line 13; the area between Longze and Beiyuan, studying three systems to see how each might be redesigned to create opportunities within this socially polarized, ecologically degraded, and culturally empty landscape. These interventions work to render the peripheral system more complex, breaking the linear system and uni-directional system of line 13 into a superlinear system that creates multiple connections between its parts.

Moving Cities is a Shanghai-based think-thank investigating the role that architecture and urbanism play in shaping the contemporary city. Established in Beijing, 2007, by Bert de Muynck (BE) and Mónica Carriço (PT), Moving Cities publishes, collaborates, research, interacts, talks and walks, and operate as embedded architects.

Adrian Blackwell is an artist and urbanist who teaches architecture at the University of Toronto.