Shanghai's Twin Hills project

Why has Shanghai created hills in the city as part of a mega-project for locals, asks Matt Lamy?

The hills are alive with the sound of engines revving – or, seeing as this is Shanghai, it is more likely to be the sound of electric motors whirring.

Emerging from the soil of the city’s World Expo Park are Shanghai’s Twin Hills, part of a seven-year and 2.1bn yuan (£225m) mega-project intended to improve the lives of locals and bring the fun of hiking to the city. Recently opened to the public, the hills stand at 37m and 48m and feature walking routes, viewpoints, streams, lakes, more than 7,000 trees and even a multi-layered waterfall.

But these are not natural peaks. Underneath the spirit-lifting, surface-level greenery you will actually find a huge multi-storey car park.

Devised by French landscape architecture practice Agence Ter, the initial idea for the project – previously the site of a steel factory – was to form a mountain by piling all the land from this industrial area into one giant heap.

“We didn’t really have an idea of how high it would be,” Michel Hössler of Agence Ter told The Guardian. “It was a little crazy to propose a hill on a swampy site, but the client liked it.”

The swampy conditions ultimately meant the polluted soil was unsuitable for mountain-making, so a second plan was hatched. With 6,000 piles driven into the ground and more than 30,000 tonnes of steel and concrete used to form its structure, the 1,500-vehicle car park was created.

But the polluted and swampy conditions were not the only issue that engineers had to contend with: Shanghai is also in an active earthquake zone. To counter the risk of landslides, concrete retaining walls were placed throughout the slopes and, helping to augment the area’s green scenery, these were then packed with plants and trees.

Finally, proving this is indeed a very modern interpretation of nature – and especially one in present-day China – the hills feature a phalanx of smart lamp-posts that provide surveillance and allow hikers to contact the police immediately.

Eco focus

The Twin Hills are just one part of Shanghai’s 189ha 2010 World Expo Park, found on the banks of the river Huang Pu. Since 2017, Agence Ter has been working as lead consultant on the project, helping to transform the exhibition site into a “huge green lung” for the city.

“The Park of the Seven Forests takes the key elements of the historical landscape and reinterprets them to create a new geography, and a natural and purifying reserve in the middle of the city. The water, the rehabilitated soil, the topography and the forest compose a resilient and scalable ecosystem. The forest and lakes offer a multitude of spaces for relaxation and leisure for the people of Shanghai,” Agence Ter says.

In the case of the Twin Hills, that goal seems to have been enthusiastically supported by locals: despite typhoon conditions almost 1,000 people hiked to the hills’ summits on the opening day.

Image credit | Getty