Honor Award

Portable Herb Handbook — Therapeutic Estates of Container

Qi Xin, Student Affiliate ASLA; Zhang Panpan, Student Affiliate ASLA; Tu Xueying, Student Affiliate ASLA; Gao Yujun, Student Affiliate ASLA and Feng Jiaqi, Student Affiliate ASLA, Undergraduate, Tongji University
Faculty Advisor: Dong NanNan

This project provides a portable herb handbook for migrant families who live in containers. Based on the survey and poll of the local folk, this project is aimed to provide migrants with a timely supply of medicine, to create a seemly landscape pattern and to improve the life quality more effective. Moreover, to fit the frequent migration of those families, the herb handbook can be easily relocated with the container entity anywhere as an entirety. With this new style Portable herb handbook, the containers community where the migrant families live in becomes an animate herb yard rather than a stagnant vacant lot. Besides that, the migrant families benefit much by saving money on medicines and enjoy a lot of fun in planting activity.

Background

In Baoshan District of Shanghai, multitudes of migrant families stay in this industrial zone with abundance of land ready to be explored. What's more, Baoshan has all long been booming in shipment industry which results in a great quantity of deserted containers along the docks. So it is quite common that many migrant families chose to those containers as proper homes which they prefer to live in. When asked about their point of views, they may refer that house price in Shanghai isn't affordable and living in containers could be a preferable choice. Additionally, the characteristic of containers which is portable might suit the frequent migration of those families.

Project Location

The project is located at Yangxing Industrial Area in Baoshan District, Shanghai, with an area of 18511 square meters. Around the site, there are a number of car repair plants serving the nearby factories, some transportation company with a lot of containers and two food shop. The people living in the containers in the site mostly work in the nearby places. The total figure of the families in this site is approximately 42 or more.

Current Situation & Problems

During spot investigations we found that the condition in these poor quarters was really terrible. They are all day long wreathed by industrial mist and dust without any green in site, let along pleasant landscape. In addition, the workers are suffering from demanding work load while other family members (like worker's wife or parents) have nothing to do but do housework day after day. Moreover, children are easily scratched by the sharp objects in this site.

Design Program & Intent

In order to improve the situation, we need to reconstruct the landscape of the site. There are three pressing problems for us to solve. Firstly, the site is meant to be temporary as the site might be used for construction at any time and the migrant families will move to another place sooner or later. Secondly, we need to enhance the daily healthcare consciousness and make them have easy access to everyday medical treatment. Thirdly, we need to help the rear members of the family to find something to do during their boring daytime. Our Portable herb handbook solves these problems altogether with the following characteristics.

Portable

Due to frequent migration, traditional methods of planting won't work for the migrant families. The project makes the herb handbook integrated in the container, which allows the herb handbook to move with the families at any time to anywhere.

Rich

There are only four pages in this Portable herb handbook with each page shaped in only 2.3 meters high, 2.0 meters long and 0.35meters wide. However the handbook is pretty rich in both plant species and seasonal view. The herb handbook holds 17 plant species treating several kinds of diseases such as colds, stomachache, and bruise as well as effectively regularizing body quality. All these plants are also contributing to beautiful landscape, which gives seasonal changes to the Portable herb handbook with various functions.

Therapeutic

All these herbal medicines have their own therapeutic features. They can treat common diseases head to toes and improve our physique. Since all these herbal medicines are planted just outside the containers, they can be easily procured in time at low prices.

Enjoyable

Because of the unpleasant environment outside, there are almost no activities. The portable herb handbook creates a vibrant space for each container. For personal level, it enriches the idle life of rear members of family, provides an ideal place for people to relax outside and offers safer and interesting mini-playground for children. For community level, more communication opportunities are generated when more people are willing to active outside. They may have some common topic on herbs planting, health preserving and so on. Additionally, the portable herb handbook would change the old appearance of the vacant lot and make contribution to the whole city landscape.

Plant Selection

Our planting list is derived from rudimental traditional Chinese medicine, which is like a common sense rooted in most of Chinese people's mind, especially in rural areas. In plant selection, we trend to choose herb which is familiar to people and easy to grow. Moreover, each page of the portable herb handbook serves for a season. Different plants on different pages aim at the seasonal current disorders. For example, all the medicinal herbs on the summer page are plants maturing in the summer and helpful in dealing with several summer disorders such as eliminate excessive heat.

Orientations

Sun study was done to determine the orientation. From this study, we calculated the average angle that the sunshine irradiate while maximizing the level of radiation. Then the herb handbook allows the containers to be placed in any direction, only requiring that the double-page is placed towards the average angle. In this way, we can make sure that the other two pages are perpendicular to the double-page, and obtain the maximum level of radiation. Supposing there will be unexpected limits in practice, we calculated the range of the angle. Generally speaking, one of the other two pages which is perpendicular to the double-page should form an angle that allows the sunshine to provide the maximum level of radiation in summer, while the other one should form an angle that allows the sunshine to provide the maximum level of radiation in winter.

Application in Other Sites

Besides the analysis and research for this project was largely based on the site of Yangxing industrial zone, we also did investigation on migrant families in other vacant lots. Most of those families are living in containers which are always located in sites just like construction sites or junk file. Most of the families shared several features—living with bad environment conditions, lack access to pleasant landscape, poor daily healthcare and unstable residence. As the portable herb handbook is designed to overcome all these common problems, it can become a widespread container partner for migrant families because of its portable, therapeutic, and enjoyable.

American Society of Landscape Architects