Open blog about opening the channel

The Blog

Life canal blog is now open for public! The goal of this blog is not only present the planning data of the Leokong channel opening plan made in Aalto University but also share the groups planning process with all the other people related to this project in Taiwan and Finland.

Some background

The Leokong channel project is part of a Studio Global Sustainable Technologies at Aalto University. The project is carried out in co-operation with Taiwanese JUT Foundation for Arts & Architecture and the Ruin Academy. The goal of the project is to research the possibilities to open an old irrigation channel, LeoKong, and bring clean water to Taipei city people. Nowadays the channel is underground and mainly under streets.

The group has been analyzing the city and planning area from urban, social, spatial and economical viewpoints. We have been studying water technology and exploring the academic context of the plan as a part of Taipei river urbanism and thinking how to make our project sustainable transformation project.  The sustainable attitude towards the existing city is very essential for this project because the channel goes inside the dense Taipei city center. We don’t want to destroy the city or make citizens life difficult, but create new quality in to the old city areas.

Taipei is located just between two tectonic plates.

The water cycle

At the moment we have an overall concept plan about the water cycle. We have 3 stages of water usage. Each of them relates to certain city environment. Water flows from south to north and National Taiwan University would work as filter cleaning the river water.

When the channel goes in to the dense Liuzhangl city area it gets more narrow and form channel streets. Al the commercial (and logistics) around the channel street is maintained. The channel is part of urban city, but it still has smaller cleaning and cooling effect.

We don’t want to let the cleaned water go back to the dirty river so we have a final water use. Water goes in micro-scale water systems. New housing grows from the water and maybe also the old housing would be transformed by water.

The context

The group

The group consists of master students from Finland, Sweden and Estonia. All the students are from different fields of studies, so the group should be multinational and multitalented. Architect Marco Casagrande is tutoring the group. We have also Taiwanese contact persons as Yu-chen Chiu from ruin academy who shares her local knowledge.