• LINKS
  • BELAB WEBSITE
  • SICHUAN UNIVERSITY
  • CENTER OF BUILT ENVIRONMENTS, UW
• CONTENTS
  • BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT
  • BE LAB SEQUENCE AND TIMELINE
  • PREPARATORY SEMINAR AND CHARETTE
  • SUMMER FIELD STUDIO
    • Study Tour in Sichuan and Yunnan
    • Survey and Design Work in Taoping
  • UW TAOPING DESIGN STUDIO
  • ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
  • PARTICIPANTS
  • NOTES

the central government’s planned disaster recovery and economic stimulus investments will expand highway and airport access and build a new rail line, bringing even more tourists to the park. In response, the park authorities are developing even more sophisticated systems of managing the spatio-temporal distribution of tourists, from highly technical approaches such as the use of radio-frequency monitoring, to more comprehensive ones, such as diversifying tourist routes inside and outside the park, and adjusting pricing and other policies to spread peak visitor loads over more seasons. Still, the park’s current mandate of accepting every tourist creates daunting ecological challenges.

The final stop in the study tour portion of the field studio was Dujiangyan. Near Jiuzhaigou, the BE Lab group passed the headwaters of the Min, at an elevation of 3600m. Dujiangyan marks the point, at less than 800m above sea level and 337km downstream, where the Upper Min River leaves its arid narrow mountain valleys and enters the broad and fertile Chengdu plain of central Sichuan (Figure 17).⁸ Dujiangyan also was the first city visited by the studio to have suffered severe damage in the 2008 earthquake; it marks the entry point to the disaster zone traveling from Chengdu towards the epicenter at Yingxiu, further up the Min River valley, on the way to Wenchuan and Taoping.