Mitsui Fudosan to create new station retail concept in Shanghai
The Mitsui Fudosan Group is entering into a joint project with Shanghai Metro into a new type of station retail development.
The Lianhua Road Station Building is on the Metro Line 1 in the Minhang District, the historic area of the city and this will be demolished to redevelop it into the first subway redevelopment project for Shanghai Metro.
The area is over 500,000 square feet with five stories above ground and one below and Mitsui Fudosan will take a portion of this area to operate its' first overseas retail facility. About 10,000 passengers use the station every day, making it the third busiest throughout the Shanghai Metro network.
The development theme will be called 'My favourite THIRD PLACE' positioning the station as an entity between 'my home' and 'somewhere public'. Mitsui aims to transform the place into a lively space where residents can interact to build community.
We were very pleased to have David Height, Director of Planning and Engineering, from Mitsui Fudosan UK, at our recent forum. 'Intelligent Cities' where he spoke more broadly about Japanese culture and how that informs the development of science research hubs in Japan.
David has been working on a university research hub in Tokyo, designed as a live work space for overseas academics to come to Japan. However, he says there is not a single shared wet lab space in it as the Japanese are very private about their research. This is in direct contrast to the sharing of ideas at a modern research facility like The Crick in London.
We will be looking at place-making around stations as well as the development of live/work hubs at our autumn forum.