Chongqing is a famous mountain city. It is also called the 5D Magic City because of countless trend videos and reports which show the huge elevation difference of Chongqing. Chongqing is built by the Yangtze River. At the time when waterway transport and walking were the main means of urban transportation, urban life were relied on the river. Riverside areas is the important public activity space for the citizens. The riverside space was gradually occupied by roads, docks and factories as the rapid urbanization of Chongqing. However, there is a huge elevation difference between the urban living area and the riverside space. Even worse, there is a fluctuation zone formed by the seasonal 30-50 meters of water-level difference each year. As a result, Yangtze River became hard to approach. People have expressed their love and memories of the riverside space during interviews and surveys. But people can hardly get close to the riverside space and cannot stay for a long time.

MYP and Tylin have formed a joint team to participate the competition of the 109-kilometer “Two Rivers and Four Banks” upgrading project which is in the main urban area of Chongqing. The team have successfully won the competition with the design concept of “returning to the Yangtze River” and got the chance to make detail plans for the northern section of the Yangtze River. The Kowloon Bund, as the first completed node of the ten public nodes of “two rivers and four banks”, has won unanimous praise from the officials and citizens, as the first completed node of the ten public nodes of “two rivers and four banks”.

The Kowloon Bund is an important riverfront activity space in the Kowloon Slope District. It has 2.1 kilometers coastline and 46 hectares. However, the residential area and the riverfront space have been separated by the elevation difference and Chengdu-Chongqing railway. Although there are only 100 meters away from the residential area to the riverfront area, it has 30-100 meters of elevation difference between them which makes it difficult for people to reach out.The flood conditions of this section of the Yangtze River are as follows: 165m, low water level, 290 days of inundation period from April to September; 175m, high water level, 111 days of inundation period from October to March; 185m, flood stage, 14 days of inundation period from June to September; 191m, 20-year flood zone… According to these statistics, in order to re-establish the connection between human and nature, the project proposes a system which balances the public activities and ecosystem based on the different elevation differences.