Shougang: From industrial base to attraction in Beijing

Particularly with the run-up toward the 2008 Beijing Olympics, major environmental projects were initiated to clean the city’s air while also promoting a general greening of open spaces. This is witnessed today with blue skies increasingly the norm along with extensive areas of new parklands and tree planting. However, with Beijing expanding rapidly, its built up area was increasingly encroaching onto that older industrial area of steel and coal.

A decision was reached that Shougang would be relocated from its suburban location to an extensive site at Caofeidian bordering the Bohai Sea east of Tianjin. Production was drastically scaled back before the Olympics, finally shutting down entirely by early January 2011. With closure, an uncanny silence descended over the area, and smoke and gases no longer rose into the atmosphere. Incredibly, wildlife and birds started reappearing particularly where vegetation was reestablishing around ponds and water channels. It became an abandoned landscape, offering in some ways an aesthetic feel that could be excellent for photo shoots and indeed movie sets, as other such locations have proven. Indeed sections of the Yongding River valley through Mentougou have been rejuvenated into wetland parks.

What to do with such a vast, redundant area of what is regarded today as industrial archaeology? With the relentless urban expansion, would the site be cleared and transformed into almost a mini-city of towering apartment blocks?