Shanghai Jiao Tong students design Melbourne magpie waterfront

A team of three Shanghai Jiao Tong University students has built a Melbourne waterfront that doubles as Australian magpie breeding habitat. The landscape, "Wings and Ways: Human-magpie Harmony Safe Space for Arden," leads ten graduate projects in a new Dezeen School Shows feature on the university's School of Design.

What does a Melbourne waterfront have to do with magpies?

Wu Jinghan, Li Shuyuan and Cao Yuheng designed around magpie breeding behaviours and the Arden Precinct's existing vegetation. They connected native shade planting, reshaped waterfront paths through subtle landform changes and restored native plant communities. Their project statement lands it bluntly: "By transforming spaces of conflict into opportunities for coexistence, Wings and Ways proposes a waterfront where people can gather and relax while magpies forage, nest and breed."

The work came through a joint virtual classroom with RMIT, supervised by Wang Ling, Zhu Liqing, Alice Lewis, Ethan Zhang and Lee Parks, as part of the Master of Landscape Architecture (International).

What's in the rest of the showcase?

The other nine projects span every program at the school:

• The Sunken Days of Towers by Yan Jiahao — a virtual heritage project built from archival research and ethnographic fieldwork, reimagining Bologna's Two Towers through six atmospheric narrative worlds.
• Life Pulse: Avenue by Peng Di, Zhou Hengli, Zhuang Yaru and Zhu Xinyi — a proposal converting Shanghai's North Caoxi Road into the city's "first sports and vitality business corridor," linking Xuhui Park, Xujiahui Center and Xuhui Sports Park.
• Parallel Orbits by Alima Adalaiti, Yang Yuchen, Zhang Hewen, Wang Jiamin and Guo Yaya — a camera, projector and AI synthesis system that records two distant partners and projects them working and living side by side.
• Kingdom Midas by He Liyouyu, Zhang Kai, Zhu Wenxin and Zhu Yeqi — a children's game that turns pulping, sorting and magnetic separation into playable mini-games for a boy named Maimai.
• VeriSpine by Lu Hanwen, Xu Zhiyu, Huang Keqiao, Peng Xinying and Mukaidaisi Abuduaini — a wearable scoliosis screener for adolescents that uses nine IMU sensors and a deep learning gait network.
• Soft-Tech Mobility by Liu Yirui, Li Weiran, Wang Weichuan, Zhang Yin and Tao Kaiyan — colour, material, finish and ambient lighting proposals for future car interiors, ranging from "Serene Float" sky blue to "Crimson Rhythm" vivid orange.
• Shihe Garden by Yin Ruoting and Zhang Bingru — a Song Dynasty-style seasonal garden built around flower, incense, tea and painting identities.
• MR Supported Nature Science Popularization by Zhao Jie, Xu Congru, Chen Qiuyu, Wang Weiran, Li Shuyuan and Yang Weiyi — a Shanghai Chenshan Botanical Garden project that pushes mixed reality into landscape design.
• Architecture Ex Parte by Xin Mei — a thesis that fragments architecture into responsive components governed by "threshold switching, gradient modulation and functional re-coding."

Where does digital heritage fit in?

Yan Jiahao's "Sunken Days" turns Bologna into an interactive journey into urban memory. "Participants collect fragments, encounter the towers as speaking characters and choose which memories to carry forward," the project reads.

The "Parallel Orbits" team wants long-distance love to feel lived-in, not patched together by phone calls. Their setup records each partner's routines, recombines them with AI and projects scenes of the two working, studying and living together — chasing "a lasting sense of companionship and shared life."

What does this change for SJTU?

The ten projects were supervised across four international programs: the Master of Architecture, International Industrial Design Engineering, the Master of Design and the Master of Landscape Architecture. Core tutors include Chang Danni, Du Qian, Zhang Zhan, Tan Xinyang and Chen Dan.

A Melbourne magpie habitat vetted through an RMIT exchange, and a scoliosis wearable aimed at schools, suggest SJTU's graduate students are pushing past lecture-hall briefs. The school frames its mission as a "harmonious communion of humanities, arts, science and technology" — and the 2026 showcase reads as a working map of that ambition.