Chifeng Road

Chifeng Road (Chinese: 赤峰路; pinyin: Chìfēng Lù) is a street in Shanghai, China. It divides Tongji University, located in the north of Shanghai, into two parts: the North Campus and the South Campus. The 20-meter-(65') wide road with camber on each side witnesses the flux of the sphere of Tongji over 50 years.

For some people, Chifeng Road is definitely an obvious obstacle lying in the center of Tongji, related with the words such as inconvenience and uncomfortable. This notion, only focusing on the unity of the form of the campus, neglects a significant fact that it is the road that animates the local vigor and power. The road represents the drive.

As a fragment of the city, the campus acquires the character of complexity and continuity, which is derived from the process of local urbanism. That means due to the historical evolution the patterns of the campus and the local community was and is overlapping with each other. This phenomenon constitutes the diversity of the local activities, urban events, and the image of the road’s interface. In fact, the uniform and regular layout of the campus is little to do with the local energy; and the relationship and complexity between the campus and surroundings is crucial.

Huge market is created by the university for the local people. The basic factors of the city, such as food shops, snacks, pubs, hotels, printing centers, and banks make the road become an articulate system, which connects and integrates resources in the circumstance and has all the factors a complete city has. The road, combined with the campus, means a community. Costumers and potential ones are students of the university, who promote the Chifeng Road to a huge industry. Benefits from this industry, hundreds of jobs are provided every month for the local people.

Meanwhile, the over-population of the university can be settled more or less through "students’ immigration". Single-room apartment buildings, sited on each side of Chifeng Road, were built in 1950s to 1960s, with the low life standard according to our contemporaries. But these are the ideal housing model for current students, who are more independent than the former generations, and need more spaces for individual issues. Hence the local resources of old housing buildings can be properly reused.

Introducing the outside urban space, activities, and events into the school, Chifeng Road constitutes the hub-like center on the campus, which realized the source exchange between in and out, campus and society, and students and the local inhabitants. The road does not cut the communication between the two campuses, but creates the opportunities for the local urbanism. The road represents the boundary, and also shapes the figure and contour, which can broad people’s horizon to a more complete vision to the university. The road can help to introduce more investments to the Chifeng area, not only because it provides the more smooth transportation, not only it has already induced high volume commerce, of course they are the crucial factors, but mostly because it provides a void space in the campus to present the images of the modern university to the public. That means the name Tongji is the best and ideal resource to boom this area. The chief point is how to let the public known where it is, so the “void” did this.