As night falls and the lights are on, the Ziwei Road Commercial Street, located in Longta Street, Yubei District, Chongqing, is gradually bustling. Mexican style restaurants, brewed beer bars, Japanese hotpot restaurants, drinks and snacks shops... There are more than 150 characteristic shops on both sides of the kilometer long street, attracting many citizens and tourists to take photos, clock in and taste food.
Li Mengting, a tourist from Sichuan, started to take photos and send friends when she walked into a Yunnan food restaurant. "The purely handmade bamboo weaving, decorative paintings, tables and chairs in the restaurant are full of Yunnan characteristics, which is very artistic." Li Mengting said that she found many "treasure" restaurants on Ziwei Road, and many people in her circle of friends expressed their desire to experience them.
Ziwei Road, the once dirty and disorderly old back street, has become a "popular online road" after upgrading, with an average monthly flow of more than 500000 people. "In the past, it was called the 'auto repair street'. Its business type was mainly non-staple food, auto repair and auto parts, and farmers' market, and it was an old street that undertook the function of ordinary community services." Li Jingwei, the head of Ziwei Road business operation, said that in 2019, Yubei District started to transform Ziwei Road by means of urban renewal.
How can we build a high-quality community street? Li Jingwei said that at the initial stage of Ziwei Road reconstruction, someone gave him a suggestion to simply renovate the entire street's facade to make it a shopping street with a unified style. "This way is simple and crude, and easy to drain, but it will erase the flavor of the back alleys of the old streets and its service function as a block." Li Jingwei said that he hopes to create a slow street integrating commerce and culture through transformation, and promote the common development of commerce and community.
The transformation of Ziwei Road started from hardware upgrading and cultural building. Yubei District, while standardizing the infrastructure of Ziwei Road, such as sidewalk rectification, greening and trimming, has continuously upgraded the sidewalk landscape, increased the construction of street scenes, set up outdoor flower boxes, leisure seats, customized lighting systems and guidance systems along the roadside. "The change of the hard environment has provided a warm and comfortable leisure space for the coming and going citizens and tourists, which is both humanized and fashionable," said Cao Xingbing, secretary of the Party Working Committee of Longta Street, Yubei District.
The implantation of cultural elements makes Ziwei Road more nimble. In the outer street of Ziwei Road, a 100 meter long "Jiujiu Art Corridor" is eye-catching. There are more than 7000 oil paintings and traditional Chinese paintings displayed here, which are free of charge to the public. From time to time, intangible cultural heritage exhibitions, new book conferences, reading conferences and other activities are organized to enhance the vitality of the block with cultural attraction.
In the era of consumption upgrading, multi business lifestyle has become a new trend. It is precisely by grasping the consumption psychology of modern consumers' personality, fashion and trend that Ziwei Road has introduced many new retail, catering, leisure, cultural and entertainment brands at home and abroad in the process of commercial renovation, created a new consumption scene with literature, art, fashion and retro as the main theme, and built a multi-level and multi-dimensional consumption supply system.
On Ziwei Road, catering is the absolute main business. There are more than 20 restaurants and bars, each with different styles. The street is also interspersed with a variety of jewelry shops, exquisite medieval shops, and leisure yoga shops. All kinds of small shops are in full bloom.
Go through the gray gate shaped like a barn and enter GLASS&PLAT, the largest restaurant bar on Ziwei Road. The mellow smell of coffee, the sweet smell of bread, and the faint smell of beer all flow into the nose. Yu Lei, the owner of the store, said that in order to meet the diversified needs of diners, they introduced the famous brand "Beiping Machine" in the domestic craft beer industry, and provided more than 20 types of fine wines with public praise and more than 100 kinds of wine, which are popular with young people, with an average monthly passenger flow of nearly 10000 person times.
Not far away, a medieval store called "Seeking Place" is also very popular. The space of about 200 square meters displays a variety of fashionable games, second-hand luxury bags, accessories and retro clothing, attracting many customers to Taobao. "More and more young people like the unique retro style of the medieval products. We carefully select and identify each medieval product to make the retro feel young and meet the consumer needs of the small and personalized customers," said Xiong Lie, the owner of the store.
"No introduction of non characteristics, no gathering of non boutiques." Li Jingwei introduced that the business layout of Ziwei Road adheres to the road of characteristics, promotes the integration of business and property, consumption and life, home and community, and other scenes, realizes diversified, centralized and intelligent development of business types, and strives to provide consumers with personalized products and enrich consumption experience. "Next, we will continue to introduce specialty restaurants, fashion art exhibitions, online celebrity bookstores, small theaters and other formats to form multi-dimensional consumption scenes such as food, tourism, culture, exhibitions, and create new landmarks for fashion consumption that are both smoky and artistic," said Li Jingwei.
