Above the tracks: China's unique model for transit-oriented development

For planners facing pressure to add housing and jobs without endless outward expansion, metro depots may be among the most overlooked redevelopment opportunities in the modern city. Most cities don’t realize what they already own. Hidden in plain sight within nearly every rail system, these large facilities — where trains are inspected, cleaned, repaired and stored — typically occupy 20 to 30 hectares of valuable urban land that sits fenced off, single-purpose, and disconnected from the neighborhood around them. 

I first encountered this model more than a decade ago, and have worked on it many times since. As an urban designer and architect based in China, I have led transit-oriented developments built above active metro maintenance facilities. This may sound unusual in North America, but has become increasingly common in China.

Over the past two decades, Chinese cities have built housing, schools, parks, offices, and retail directly above operating depots. The model is technically proven, commercially tested, and full of lessons, including some hard-earned ones. For Western planners, the relevance is straightforward: most modern cities with metro systems also have depots. Yet many of these sites still sit idle — fenced off, underused and quietly accumulating value that no one is capturing. Understanding what China has figured out — and where it has stumbled — is the first step toward unlocking that potential elsewhere.

Depot-integrated development: Two programs, one deck

A metro depot is not a vacant site awaiting redevelopment. It’s a working industrial facility. Building above it requires a structural deck that separates rail operations below from city life above while managing noise, vibration, ventilation, fire access and future building loads. Those challenges are real, but they are solvable. Floating track beds, isolation bearings and acoustic barriers have been deployed and codified into technical standards across dozens of Chinese cities, and residents above these depots report no perceptible noise or vibration. 

After years of working on these projects, I’ve come to see that the design goal is simple: make the deck disappear, physically and psychologically. Residents should experience a normal neighborhood, not life above infrastructure.

Solving the depot is only half the challenge. These projects require designing two worlds at once: the active industrial facility running today, and the future neighborhood that will be built above it, often years later. Every structural decision made below shapes what becomes possible above.

The residential test: Hangzhou Yangliu Jun

The first question is whether people will choose to live above a depot. Yangliu Jun in Hangzhou offers a compelling answer.

Hangzhou, home to roughly 12 million people, sits about one and a half hours southwest of Shanghai by high-speed rail. Yangliu Jun, located in a growing outer district with strong rail access but limited amenities at the time of launch, was built above the Qibao Depot on Hangzhou Metro Line 1. Since its completion in 2017, resale values have consistently outperformed comparable nearby housing. The market did not just accept the setting — it rewarded it.

The reason was not a well-designed project alone. The project delivered parks, retail, and, most importantly, a primary school and two kindergartens directly on the deck. Placing a school above an active depot required years of coordination, but it changed the proposition entirely. With schools, it becomes a vibrant neighborhood, not just housing.

There’s a transit upside as well. As residents moved in, ridership at the station below increased noticeably. The people living above the depot became daily riders using the metro beneath them.

For U.S. planners, the lesson is straightforward: density alone does not create place. Schools, childcare, parks and everyday amenities are what turn infrastructure land into a real community.

The commerce test: Shanghai MixC Wuzhong Road

If Yangliu Jun proved the residential case, Shanghai MixC Wuzhong Road tested the commercial one.

In Minhang District, beyond Shanghai Middle Ring Road, a 20-hectare Line 10 depot once sat in the middle of dense urban fabric like an industrial scar, cutting pedestrian movement and generating noise. When China Resources Land acquired development rights from Shanghai Metro in 2010, building above an operating depot at this scale was still rare. 

Seven years later, the site had been transformed into a mixed-use development that rose above the deck, attracting global corporate tenants despite abundant office options elsewhere in Shanghai. The project also introduced two international hotels and more than 400 retail tenants,  generating over RMB 1 billion in tax revenue within three years. This case demonstrates that the commercial real estate market — including office, hospitality and retail tenants — does not inherently discount a well-executed depot location. China Resources Land has since scaled this model to 70+ projects across 29 Chinese cities. 

For any U.S. city with depot land in dense, transit-connected neighborhoods, that matters. The assumption that maintenance land can sport only low-value or back-of-house uses does not always hold.

The timing test: Hangzhou Cangqian

But technical success and market success do not always move together.

In 2019, I led a team that won the design for a 98-hectare "super-depot" in Hangzhou’s western growth area near the future West high-speed rail hub. Think of it as a greenfield transit site at the edge of a growing metro area — not unlike outer yard sites that WMATA or L.A. Metro control beyond their established urban cores. Two depots were consolidated into a single large platform supporting housing, schools, eldercare, offices, retail and major public open space, above an active depot serving Metro Line 3 and the Airport Express Line.

The scheme was approved during the COVID-19 pandemic, and construction advanced quickly. The deck was completed in 2022, in time for the opening of the Airport Express Line for the 19^th Asian Games the next year. Since then, trains have been running and maintained daily. But the city above has not yet arrived. The towers, the schools, the parks, the retail — fully designed and envisioned — remain unbuilt. The deck now sits on the western edge of Hangzhou, waiting for the capital that will turn it into a neighborhood. When the drone photos came in, the engineering was everything we designed it to be. The silence above it was harder to comprehend.

Cangqian is not unique. Across China, some depot decks were completed just as the property market slowed after 2021. Projects like this stretch across time — and that’s where the risk lies. The depot and deck require major upfront investment, while the development above depends on market conditions that may shift years later. The model is not flawed, but the timing can slip. Infrastructure moves on one clock; real estate moves on another.

From platform to neighborhood

The lesson is not to step back from this model, but to approach it with the right timing and flexibility. The depot and the development above should be treated as two linked moves, not one. Plan them together, but finance and phase them so they can adapt if the market conditions change. Build the deck for what the place can become, while recognizing that the city above may take longer to arrive.

When it works, the impact is clear. People choose to live there — and pay for it. Companies move in. Schools open. Parks fill with daily life. Infrastructure that once pushed neighborhoods away begins to support them instead. What was once a barrier becomes a foundation.

This isn’t unique to China. Every city that builds rail systems also builds depots, and each one has a chance to do more with land that would otherwise remain hidden. The engineering itself is not foreign to Western cities: Hudson Yards in New York was built above an active rail yard, and similar projects are in various stages of planning in Washington D.C., San Jose and Queens. What China has tested is something more ambitious than a conventional air-rights transaction: the creation of complete neighborhoods above active operational maintenance facilities. 

The gap is not technical capability. It's whether transit agencies, planners and development authorities are organized to pursue this kind of development together. Several U.S. transit agencies are already advancing joint development programs. The depot integration model offers those efforts a far more ambitious destination to aim for. 

China’s past twenty years don’t offer a perfect template, but they offer something more valuable: built proof. With the right design, governance and patience, what sits below doesn’t have to limit what can grow above. The depot at the end of your metro line is not a dead asset. It may be the most undervalued piece of land your city already owns.

—

Photos courtesy of Anderson Hsieh.

Anderson Chider Hsieh is Architecture & Design Lead for China at Surbana Jurong Group. He previously served as Vice President at AECOM China and as President of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Shanghai Chapter. He holds a Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design from Columbia University GSAPP.