Since this is a real estate blog about Beijing, a few words have to be said about the urban changes that are occuring in Beijing. Keeping on with the amazing rythm of change in the Chinese capital these last decades, urbabanism is developing. Beijing is still expanding in all the directions, the ambitious Beijing CBD project is still being implemented with new skyscrapers under construction.
Inside Beijing city’s boundaries, another district is undergoing important changes: Wangjing.
Once a village in the suburbs of Beijing.
For hundreds of years, and 30 years ago, Wangjing was a scenic village close to Beijing, with its name aleedeglely given by the Qianlong Emperor of the Ming dynasty, as he went through the village that was a “view on the capital city”, hence Wangjing in Chinese. The village was especially proud of its 500 years old Pagoda tree, but this history was put to an end, as it is the case for dozens of other villages every year inside Beijing city limits. The dramatic urban developement that has taken place for the three last decades has turned Beijing into a gigantic megalopolis that went from around 10 million inhabitants in the 1980s to more than 20 millions today. The fields around the city have been integrated with, sometimes, former villages surviving inside the new urban landscape. They are disapearing the ones after the others when ambitious real estate projects are designed to replace them. Urbanism in China is turned towards future.
In 2012, the history of Wangjing village was put to an end, the legendary Pagoda tree planted again inside Wangjing park. A new urban landscape is being designed there.
A cosmopolitan district in Beijing
With the developemnt of east Beijing, the Wangjing district has become a place with a new population, a large part of it being Chinese rising young middle class, but it is as well a district with a strong foreign presence in Beijing. The reasons for this are that it is a convenient place, close to the Beijing capital airport in Shunyi and at not so far from Beijing downtown and the business hubs of Chaoyang Beijing.
The iconic foreign community in Wangjing are the South Koreans. They settled there, a Korean international school has been opened and a lot of restaurants can be found all over the area, especially around the Wangjing subway station. All the south Koreans specialities can be eaten, from the most basic to the most sophistcated. This is the ideal place to find those Korean places with rice dishes in stone pots, or Korean barbecues. Another foreign community wich is well represented is the German one, with headquarters of large German companies settled inside the district.
Actually, Wangjing is a nice district to live in, with more afordable rents than in Beijing CBD, Sanlitun or Chaoyang Park eighborhoods. This is the reason why people with families choose it, it is a place to benefit from larger apartments with a little bit less of traffic jams compared with Chaoyang. Just to make a real estate quick advertisment section and to link this article with our main website, this is a place where you can find serviced apartments or apartments to rent.
Now, Wangjing is going to change again, a real new CBD is under construction there, planned for a few years, together with the disparition of the Wangjing village last year, a page is being turned. Many international companies are already settled in Wangjing, this trend is expected to go on, with the current CBD taht is stuck on too little land, this new business hub has unlimited potential. To give an insight of what’s going on, let’s end this post by a presentation of the 3 main projects currently under way in this “Large Wangjing” new Beijing CBD.
The Greenland Center Towers
Among the main projects is the building of a group of towers monitored by Greenland Group, a real estate developer based in Shanghai. The construction has begun in 2012 and is expected to be completed at the end of 2014. Most of the projects will be Grade A offices but some retail space within shopping malls will be available. The main tower will be 280 meters high, with a beautiful irregular surface, like a kind of willow woven basket, or dragons scales? You’ll decide when it’s over. A couple of towers will be built around it, all of them in different styles.
The Poly Real Estate Wangjing Project
This is another important project in Wangjing, often referred as “Da Wangjing” or “Large Wangjing”. In the same area than the other towers, a new group of towers are being built by the Poly Real Estate Group, a gouvernemental real estate developer. The most iconic tower of this group should be the “Diamond Lantern”, a tower designed to remind of a type of Chinese traditional lantern. The architecture plays with effects about light, displaying multifaced prisms that will deviate light in beautiful effects.
The SOHO Peaks in Large Wangjing
Still, the most spectacular of these buildings might be the brand new SOHO project in Beijing, after great urban landscape changes made by the SOHO company alone in various parts of Beijing with spectacular projects like Sanlitun SOHO or Galaxy SOHO, the architect Zaha Hadid has designed a new project in Wangjing that for the moment seems to be called SOHO Peaks. It is group of three stylized mountains 200 meters high located close to the Mercedes Tower in Wangjing.
Again, this is goinbg to be mostly office space, and is well on its way. The project should be completed in 2014.
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