Massive ‘medical city’ being built in Shanghai

Toronto-based Perkins Eastman Black Architects has master planned what is being billed as the biggest, “greenest” medical centre in the world: a vast, single, contiguous district devoted to health and wellness.

Architecture

Master plan done by Toronto architects

The Shanghai International Medical Zone (SIMZ) is now rising on farmland on the outskirts of the city. When fully built out, the complex will occupy 11.5 square kilometres.

“This is an order of magnitude bigger than anything that has come before. You just don’t see this scale as new build-out in the West,” says Susan Black, principal and director of Perkins Eastman Black.

Her firm won the commission to master plan SIMZ in 2005, after two rounds of an international competition sponsored by the Shanghai municipal government and China’s Ministry of Health.

The Shanghai complex will comprise of two 1,000-bed teaching hospitals, seven specialty hospitals and clinics, a medical school for 7,000 students, a major rehabilitation centre, a centre for medical research and development, and a large medical equipment manufacturing zone with associated research and development facilities.

“In fact, SIMZ is probably the biggest P3 ever imagined, providing multinational consortiums,” says Black.

Indeed, some of the world’s leading medical equipment companies are helping to fund construction of SIMZ’s manufacturing zone. Dräger Medical, for instance, a leader in anaesthetics equipment, breathing machines and infant incubators, broke ground for its 120,000-square-foot facility in July.

The $40 million Siemens Medical Park, combining space for 1,000 staff in R&D, manufacturing, service, sales and marketing under a single roof, has already opened. “Siemens can test its prototypes in an environment that puts specialty hospitals, doctors, medical students, research and lab facilities at their fingertips,” Black says.

As of September, roads and highways for the core area, comprising healthcare, education, manufacturing and research, were complete. Core-area buildings will be completed in 2009. Construction on the rest of the site should finish by 2020.

Black said individual buildings will be designed either by large, multinational consortiums with input from local design institutes or by firms chosen from the master planning competition shortlist.

Overall construction cost estimates have not been compiled.

Although just beginning to take shape, SIMZ is already exerting an international influence.

“As one of the first conceptual medical cities in the world, our model is now being critically looked at by other countries, including Saudi Arabia and Thailand,” Black says.

“It is an ideal platform for developing nations in the Middle East and Far East that want to catch up to the Western World as quickly as possible.

“They want cutting-edge medical services in their own country. They want to reverse their medical and academic brain drain.”

Perkins Eastman Black is the Toronto studio of New York-based Perkins Eastman Architects, one of the world’s largest architecture firms, with more than 900 employees and offices in six U.S. cities as well as Dubai and Shanghai.