The New Silk Road

Abstract

At times of political unrest and dynamic changes in the world, China puts forward a proposal for global collaboration towards peace and prosperity - the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Faced with critique, distrust and questions from the global community, the plan to revive the ancient Silk Road can fail just as easily as it can succeed, depending on the way it is executed spatially one the local scale.

The research takes the first BRI-development, Khorgos Gateway, at the border of China and Kazakhstan, as a case to study how the global developments and the local context interact with each other.

The main objective of the design is to facilitate interaction between the global and local contexts. The design proposal builds upon the existing International Centre of Border Cooperation (ICBC), an element of the Khorgos Gateway programme. In the first place, the design aim is to embed the ICBC functionally and spatially in the local context creating a symbiosis between the new development and its surrounding. To do so five development goals are set for the ICBC and are translated into strategies and implementations across local, regional and trans-territorial scales. Secondly, this thesis proposes to establish
an international network of ICBC’s as places where local and global communities can meet to exchange culture and share knowledge. An evaluation and assessment framework is presented as a tool to assist the process of transferring and adapting the ICBC concept to other locations.

The aim of this work is to spark interest, discussion and further research within the urbanism community. This thesis is of explorative nature, aimed to sketch a socio-spatial frame of reference on the Belt and Road as a phenomenon, and
serves as a starting point of a more systematic and theoretical research.