MARS + MORE have invited eight world-renowned Chinese and international offices and experts, including OMA, McKinsey, and the Rockbund Art Museum, to produce an integrated city planning strategy, which they will present during Beijing Design Week. The firms have worked together to develop a single, comprehensive approach to initiate an architectural renaissance within China’s first grassroots art district—798. The strategy lays out short- and long-term steps for the future of 798 and provides a vision of how to plan creative clusters around China.

Chinese cities face a new, urgent issue: how to move away from the mass production of fabricated space and nurture the rise of healthy, diverse, and creative urban centers. To this end, creative clusters are a pivotal planning tool. Creative districts around the world have been able to assimilate into existing urban fabrics and effectively reinvent themselves as unique and profitable destinations. However, 798, the first district to complete this cycle of gentrification in China, has become a victim of its own success. The area now has the resources to develop and densify, but it has lost the involvement of the artistic community that can inspire new buildings and generate creative content. The challenge is, can we plan what is essentially organic and unplanned?

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