A 140-hectare park at the east end of Century Avenue, the main civic boulevard of Pudong. Century Park is the largest central urban park in Shanghai and provides a genuine green escape from the built density of the Lujiazui financial district. The park has a large lake, cycling paths, picnic areas, and facilities for outdoor sports.
Century Avenue itself — four kilometres of eight-lane boulevard with a formal tree-planted centre strip — is one of the most ambitious pieces of urban planning in 1990s China, an exercise in Haussmann-scale boulevard planning applied to a district built from scratch. The scale is inhuman at street level but comprehensible from above; the contrast between the planned grandeur and the human activity that has grown up alongside it is a defining quality of new Pudong.