This email recently arrived from Andrew Armbruster, a graduate from our undergraduate Planning program who is now in a graduate Planning program at Tongji University in Shanghai...

Hi Professor Tyler, 

I hope everything is going well for you, your family and our program.

I've been meaning to write you for the past few weeks but it's been hard to find the time.  I want to let you know about something exciting.  I am now involved in the design of a 5 square mile site, which is part of a very old Chinese city.  For all intents and purposes this can be considered a new city, though technically it will be considered a satellite district.  The site will be home to around 100,000 people.  Our team is quite small, with four people working on the project including myself.  It's pretty fast paced, with a three month deadline for the conceptual plan, but this is normal over here.  Luckily, the design philosophy of my group closely parallels my own, and since this is a so-called 'model development', we're free from a lot of the regulatory constraints (after the conceptual plan, we might also develop the regulatory plan!).  Therefore, though perhaps there are other factors which might hinder the process, it's an opportunity to put good design theory into practice.

This basically represents the essence of why I came to China to study urban design, as it's the culmination of everything I've wanted to do since I arrived.  I feel the responsibility is enormous.  I'm going to devote all my effort to this project over the next three months.  There's not really many details to be given at this point, but I'm looking forward to sharing the results with you.

Andrew