Industrial Nirvana reimagines the Guangzhou Steel Factory as a new urban green corridor and cultural park at the heart of the city’s redevelopment. Once a powerful symbol of Guangzhou’s industrial rise, the site now stands as a fading memory amid the city’s rapid expansion. As the factory relocates, high-rise residential and commercial developments are encroaching from all sides. The site’s future—as planned by the city—is to become both a regional park and a mixed-use urban center. This transition poses a critical question: how can landscape design preserve collective memory while adapting to new urban demands?

Our proposal treats the existing steel infrastructure not as ruins, but as spatial assets that anchor the site’s identity. Blast furnaces and industrial skeletons are retained and reinterpreted as frames for public life—hosting playgrounds, markets, exhibition spaces, and stormwater gardens. A sunken central plaza, formerly a slag cooling area, is transformed into a civic amphitheater, mediating between industrial heritage and contemporary urban culture.

The project weaves ecological and social systems together. Constructed wetlands clean runoff and support biodiversity, while an elevated network of green walkways connects neighborhood residents to the riverfront. Vertical bird habitats and plantings are integrated along the site’s edge towers to form a living facade that mitigates heat and encourages multispecies occupation.

Through careful calibration between preservation and transformation, Industrial Nirvana explores how landscape-led urbanism can stitch together history, ecology, and everyday life in high-density development zones.