Vanke Olympic Park (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, 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.
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 main 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.
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 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.
Vanke Olympic Park | Baotou, Inner Mongolia, China | ZAP Associates
Location: Baotou, Inner Mongolia, China
Landscape Architect: ZAP Associates LLC
Lead Landscape Architects: Jun Zhou
Photo credits: Ren Yi / Qiu Ripei