Bingxue Park (Vanke Snow and Ice Park)

Summary

Bingxue Park is a Desertification Mitigation Park with a unifying element and urban green under the shelterbelt grid, a new urban area in Baotou City of Inner Mongolia. Today, the park is an inclusive hub of Inner Mongolia’s life outdoors but for years, this was not the case. Before the completion of the park, the park was an abandoned land degradation in drylands, an uninviting and inaccessible crumbling place where garbage piled up. The new park provides an elegant sustainable soil remediation strategy, and creates connections that transform abandoned shelterbelt lands into a living ecosystem, and a new kind of urban ecological park, encouraging use throughout the day with a variety of programming.

Narrative

Project Context and Design Challenges

The Bingxue Park, located in the New Urban Area of Baotou City, covers an area of about 20,000 SQ. Meters. Adjacent to the construction road, which is the central axis of the city connecting the new and old urban areas in the East and the West. Suited one block away from the Baotou municipal government, the site was a former shelterbelt site in need of extreme remediation, which is abandoned land degradation in dryland uninviting and inaccessible crumbling place where garbage piled up. It has limited connections to neighboring communities and lacks attractions and supporting services.

Since 1978, the government has established a policy, “Three North Protective Forests Action Plan,” in Inner Mongolia to stabilize soil and water to prevent the effects of sandstorms in the development of assessment of desertification mitigation strategy to address critical forestry needs. However, many shelterbelts are old and are no longer providing the benefits that they used to. The growth and vigor of many of the trees have declined due to close spacing, age, and invasion of undesirable, short-lived trees. Thus, the remnant below the shelterbelt was abandoned, while the thinner shelterbelt with less wind speed reduction. With increased urbanization, the dryland below the shelterbelt in which biological productivity is lost due to natural processes or induced by human activities whereby fertile areas become increasingly arid.

Design Solution

The landscape architects worked closely with the clients & architects from the beginning, looking at alternative ways to organize the park that would create high-quality outdoor spaces that could bring unity to abandoned land degradation in dryland uninviting and inaccessible crumbling places where garbage piled up, connect pedestrians to a vibrant continues park and create a more sensitive approach to stormwater.

The Bingxue Park is a functioning ecological system and a bustling hub of commerce, innovation, leisure, and entertainment. The park choreographs the movement of people, water, air, soil, and wildlife while filtering pollutants and providing much-needed habitat.

  • An urban green framework as a natural block system was reestablished to mitigate urban sedimentation. Rows of a shelterbelt of fast trees as windbreaks to effectively reduce wind velocity, albeit limited depending on porosity to distances from the belt of 5-12 times the tree height, combines with improved habitat and micro-climate protection to encourage the application of this conservation practice.
  • A typical 20,000 SQ. Meters dryland under the shelterbelt established a “Modular Greenland,” which brings improved landscape and corridor habitat. Modular Greenland’s earthwork was necessary to confront some of the site’s industrial legacy, including excavation, relocation, and capping of contaminated soils. Soils were managed on-site, rather than being removed or stored elsewhere, as a long-term ecological benefit.
  • Convert the Modular Green to an integrated park, creating open space for recreation, improving site drainage, and augmenting the overall ecological health at Inner Mongolia. The park provides a sense of expansive nature in a desertified urban environment.

Trees cover 73.5% of the site, providing ample shade for the park and contributing to carbon sequestration in the region. Trees and topography landforms also define the park edges and shape the interior.

A series of interconnected spaces, combined green buffer with facultative vegetation, provide sediment control and recharge capacity. All porous paving, and donated materials, provide permeable surface aiding in storage, bodily ratio awake facultative vegetation aids in phytoremediation and pollutant removal, and offer quiet spaces within the more extensive, more active park, contributing to a variety of experience biodiversity throughout.

A Modular Vibrant Oasis of Inner Mongolia

Bingxue Park breaks the mold for many parks in Inner Mongolia. The park is a sustainable experimental project focusing on desertification mitigation, anti-sand control, and sandstorm prevention. It serves the surrounding communities and improves the inhabitants’ quality of life. The park is a popular venue for youth and adult sports. It deftly balances scale and function, creating comfortable areas not just for large gatherings but also for individuals and small groups.

Bingxue park combines and highlights desertification mitigation, soil remediation, and stormwater management. A series of interconnected spaces, combined green buffer with facultative vegetation provides sediment control and recharge capacity. All porous paving, donated materials, provide permeable surface aiding in storage. Biofiltration swale facultative vegetation aids in phytoremediation and pollutant removal, offer quiet spaces within the larger, more active park, contributes to a variety of experience biodiversity throughout.

Bingxue Park is a modular vibrant oasis in inner Mongolia, restoring the site to a sustainable shelterbelt greenway, desertification resisting greenbelt. It is a people’s park that incorporates new communities, a café, a playground, a sports field, and a flexible space with a dynamic milky-way fountain into the park. A continuous and integrated network connects retail, cultural spaces with park features and allows for smooth transactions between. A park with its level, infinitely flexible surface, improving circulations for all visitors to the park and the surrounding urban fabric.

Plant List

  • Bird cherry ‘Colorata’
  • Chinese ash
  • Chinese peach
  • Crab apple ‘Red Sentinel’
  • Flower plum
  • Hibiscus syriacus
  • Japanese ash
  • Japanese oak
  • Japanese pagoda tree
  • Lilac
  • Painted maple
  • Paper birch
  • Privet
  • Prunus armeniaca ‘Ansu’
  • Siberian elm
  • Weeping forsythia ‘Nymans’
  • White poplar
  • Wilson’s spruce

Documents and Media

Planning Docs (if applicable):