Competition / Q City Plan? Qinhuangdao International Student Design Competition / Hebei Provincial People's Government

“Q City Plan · Qinhuangdao International Student Design Competition” can be seen as a new approach to make urban public spaces more intriguing through directly intervening in the small-scale environments instead of large-scale landscape axis, key areas or nodes, in order to complement the insufficient research and design on micro spaces in cities. “Q City Plan” is a new thought of people-oriented humanistic planning through a "trivial-to-grand" mechanism, which is expected to make a remedy for the traditional urban planning of macroscopic narrative. It is a government-initiated activity that involves people to be part of urban regeneration and development, which abandons large-scale demolition and building and respects the original urban texture at its best. 

Features 

1.Design Categories are various and flexible; 

2.Low cost and high level of practicability; 

3.Architects-dominated. Architects have rights to control all aspects of projects including designs, materials, constructions, and costs. 

Competition Requirements 

Design Principles 

1) Creativity: Create diverse and interesting places for Qinhuangdao citizens and tourists. A design must be original. 2) Locality: Project should be designed with a comprehensive consideration of local history, culture, and natural environment of Qinhuangdao with its geological features highlighted; 3) Sustainability: The sustainability of design, materials, and operation should be considered. 4) Feasibility: This is not only a conceptual competition. The selection of material, the form of construction and the requirement of craftsmanship should all be feasible. 5) People-orientation: Designs should fully consider diverse needs of different groups of people and provide citizens and tourists in urban spaces for activities. 

Design Categories

There are a variety of design categories for participants to choose. Public spaces where daily activities of citizens and tourists occur, such as town square plaza, block, roadside green space, bathing beach, public toilets and food markets can be designed into art installations, street furniture & installations, and landscape scenes. Entries can be independent or in a series, however, unrelated multiple works are not allowed. It should be noticed that entry in a series is that under one certain theme, while production-oriented duplication is not encouraged (For more information about the requirements of site selection, please enter the official website http://qcityplan_qhd.uedmagazine.net/en_down.html to download). 

Site 

(1) The competition committee provides several available sites for design; participants can select one from these sites. For related basic information about the sites please download from competition website; (2) Participants are also encouraged to select sites and definite design theme by themselves, discovering and finding solutions to urban issues with a bottom-up approach. A self-selected site should be a real site in the city of Qinhuangdao. Photos, satellite images and videos of the site are required in submission materials. Participants are required to consult the organizing committee before making the final decision. Participants will be disqualified if they started design without acknowledge of the site by the organizing committee. (3) Whether the participants choose the provided site or self-selected site has no influence on the jury review. (The information of the provided site can be downloaded from the official website)