Ningbo has existed as a trade city on the Silk Road for over two thousand years and has been associated with textiles ever since. The city is now China’s largest clothing manufacturing base and is the origin of the country’s modern garment industry. Operating in this context, the project responds to a structural shift in the Chinese economy as it transitions from the manufacturing of goods to the production of content.

Situated Ningbo’s Eastern New Town, N+ is the first Fashion City in the world specifically designed to work as a centre for the fashion industry and creative fields in general. Our aim is to create a new urban genre that works as a creative catalyst and to conceive a city, a relatively permanent construct, for fashion, a quintessentially ephemeral pursuit.

Our main organizational strategy is based on the idea of intensifying spontaneous encounters by laminating a multiplicity of programs, colours, character and atmospheres within a continuously changing urban experience. The public realm is articulated as a civic and theatrical stage in which concomitant narratives can occur. In this suggestive dimension, every occupant becomes a protagonist and every space turns into a potential scenario, capable of encouraging social interaction, the exchange of ideas, experimentation and, consequently, the construction of a communal identity based on creativity and diversity.