On the 58th International Society of City and Regional Planners (ISOCARP) World Planning Congress, the Action Plan of the 15-minute Community Life Circle in Xinhua Street Sub-district, by Shanghai Yingyi Urban Planning Design Co.Ltd., China won the Merit Award of the ISOCARP Award for Excellence. The sub-district planning case perfectly represents Shanghai’s practice of building “15-minute community life circles.” Within a 15-minute walk, citizens are expected to have access to various services related to living, working, studying, traveling and elderly care.
The ISOCARP Award for Excellence (AfE) started in 2005, is one of the top international awards for urban planning projects. It rewards plans in design phase as well as projects in progress or already implemented and is open to a wide range of professionals and institutions operating in the domain of urban and regional planning. Participants are invited to submit different tools used in planners’ daily practice: normative plans, strategic plans, urban projects, programmes, policies, research works, software, smart tools facilitating planners, etc. This prestigious award is bestowed in two categories: Grand Award and Merit Award.
The Xinhua Street 15-minute Community Life Circle is a people-centered and implementation-oriented action plan that established a collaborative decision-making process amongst a variety of stakeholders. The project leveraged intelligent technology application and allowed for residents’ participation, including the construction phase. The plan established a set of cooperative paths that serve as a main action paradigm for a 15-minute community life circle in Shanghai.
With the progress of urban renewal of Shanghai central city, Changning District has been actively planning the district’s “15-minute community life circles” and implementing many projects to improve the building environment at the community level. Xinhua Road Sub-district, around the historic road in Changning, was listed as a demonstration case for Shanghai’s plan for the 15-minute community life circle. It first published and implemented the action plan of the 15-minute community life circle in September 2019.
Until August 2021, Changning district had completed planning works of its 10 sub-districts’ 15-minute community life circles and it became Shanghai’s first downtown district to complete the planning. It aims to make the 15-minute community life circles cover all areas in the district before 2025. During the Shanghai Urban Space Art Season 2021, public activities were held and the activity centers were opened to the public inside Xinhua Road neighborhood, showing the fruitful results of the “15-minute community life circles.”
Source: <https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/GXt7Ydpg5jlSrEI2PRQMTA>, <https://isocarp.org/activities/awards/awards-for-excellence/call-2022/>,
<https://www.shcn.gov.cn/english/col1140/20221102/1224923.html>
Edited by: Mengyuan Jia