This project proposes a new strategy that readapts and augments Shanghai's disappearing historic neighbourhoods with a formal and structural system that allows for autonomous adaptation. It takes Shanghai’s urban centre as its site of investigation to tackle the history, rhetoric, and discontents of rapid urban transformation.

Pressured by urban densification, the enclave that housed Shanghai’s historic neighbourhoods – lilongs – and their place memories are undergoing demolition. The design analyses and learns from the peripheral lilong buildings of Yangshupu as a typological exemplar that represents an alternative spatial culture to the homogeneous residential landscape of growth-oriented Shanghai.

An urban-scale design strategy is developed to restore the lost fluid social space of lilong-like residential neighbourhoods, in its form, material, place memory and spatial practice.

The design is carried out through a process of palimpsestuous hybrid-drawing, where the same axonometric, plan or section is worked over multiple times – as model and as drawing – to achieve a representational technique that allows navigation across analysis, strategy, construction, and inhabitation.