KONGJIAN YU

Designing for the Earth: The Life of Professor Kongjian Yu (1963–2025)

On September 23, 2025, during an ecological field study in Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands, Professor Kongjian Yu tragically died in a plane crash at the age of 62.

A pioneer of China’s ecological civilization, a thought leader in global landscape planning and design, and a designer grounded in the land and devoted to the people, he spent his life racing to save ecosystems and heal the national landscape. Profound in thought and rich in feeling, he leaves behind a deep scholarly legacy and a series of landscapes that have changed the world.

I. An Ecological Calling Rooted in Rural Memory

Born in April 1963 in Dongyu Village, Jinhua, Zhejiang, Yu grew up along the Baisha Creek, amidst thirty-six irrigation weirs and seven village ponds—a classic water-town landscape of the Jiangnan region. His childhood spent in close contact with nature profoundly shaped him, instilling the simplest yet firmest ecological convictions.

He often recalled how a farming life wrestling with floods, droughts, and the land forged his resilience and inspired his reverence for “survival wisdom.” His advocacy for the “Big Feet Aesthetics,” “Negative-Planning,” and “Sponge City” concepts all grew from this formative soil of experience.

These rural memories were not only the source of his ecological thinking; they also became the emotional starting point of his lifelong effort to rebuild a harmonious relationship between people and nature.

II. Academic Path and a Mission to Return

In 1980, Yu entered the Department of Landscape Architecture at Beijing Forestry University, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in agronomy and then staying on to teach. In 1992, he went to the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) for his Ph.D., where his pioneering research began with the Ecological Security Pattern (ESP).

In the United States, he worked as a designer at the renowned SWA Group, participating in major international projects. Despite bright prospects abroad, his heart remained with his homeland. In 1997, he resolutely returned to China to join Peking University, dedicating himself to education and research and launching a career of service to national ecological security.

At Peking University, he founded the Center for Landscape Planning and Design, later the College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture and related institutes; he promoted landscape architecture as an independent first-level discipline and established the journal Landscape Architecture Frontiers, systematically building an ecological design education system oriented to China’s territorial challenges.

III. Theoretical Foundations: ESP and Negative Planning

Yu’s most foundational and groundbreaking academic contribution was his 1995 proposal of the Ecological Security Pattern (ESP) theory. ESP provides scientific methods to identify and protect the key structural patterns of ecosystems, offering systematic support for drawing Ecological Red Lines and for integrated protection of mountains–rivers–forests–farmlands–lakes–grasslands–deserts.

ESP has supplied the base-map logic for China’s territorial spatial planning and become an important reference for ecological governance worldwide. By estimates, it has been cited over 30,000 times, with more than 500 derivative studies indexed in international SCI databases.

Building upon ESP, Yu advanced a negative planning approach: a methodology that prioritizes ecological protection by first controlling non-buildable areas to guide urban spatial development, thereby forming a green network that safeguards national land security and returning planning from a purely technical tool to a practice of public good.

IV. Methodological Innovation: Engineering Indigenous Ecological Wisdom

Yu also achieved far-reaching innovations in engineering methods. He distilled traditional practices from China’s agrarian civilization—such as terraces, pond-dikes, beitang ponds, and raised-mound “islands”—and, through scientific modeling, performance assessment, and modular integration, established an “engineering pathway for traditional ecological wisdom.”

These modules retain the holistic properties of traditional systems while gaining the efficiency and standardization of industrial systems. They have become core units in China’s large-scale ecological restoration, widely applied to Sponge City construction, water remediation, degraded wetland restoration, and saline-alkali land improvement.

Through this Nature-based Solutions (NbS) system, he addressed the dual challenge of “tight land resources” and “low natural recovery efficiency,” offering a replicable Chinese model for global climate adaptation and ecological resilience.

By 2025, Yu and his team had led over 1,000 ecological engineering projects across 200+ cities in China and in more than ten countries including the United States, Russia, Mexico, and Thailand. Representative works include Jinhua Yanweizhou Park, Houtan Park (Shanghai Expo legacy), Haikou Meishe River Greenway and Fengxiang Park, Sanya Mangrove and Dong’an Wetland Parks, Nanchang Fish Tail Park, Red Ribbon Park, and Tianjin Qiaoyuan Wetland Park. These projects achieved notable results in ecological restoration, water purification, and habitat reconstruction, while presenting a compelling design aesthetic. They have been highly acclaimed at home and abroad and have become important references for urban green transitions and the building of an ecological civilization.

V. Serving National Strategy and Shaping Top-Level Design

Yu insisted that research must serve not only scholarship but also the nation. He led the preparation of China’s first national ESP master plan, contributed to drafting policies and regulations for Ecological Red Lines and integrated “mountains-rivers-forests-farmlands-lakes-grasslands-deserts” restoration (“Shanshui” projects), and helped embed the ESP concept into multiple state strategies.

He edited or reviewed training texts organized by the Party’s Organization Department and the Ministry of Housing and Urban–Rural Development, and delivered more than 300 policy trainings and lectures—becoming one of the key academic pillars of the top-level design behind “Beautiful China” and ecological civilization.

His ideas and research have been deeply integrated into core national initiatives, including integrated ecosystem management, urban ecological restoration (“double repair”), black-and-odorous water remediation, rural revitalization, and climate resilience—forming a body of “public knowledge” for contemporary ecological governance.

VI. Global Influence: From China’s Experience to Worldwide Solutions

Yu’s ideas and engineering practices have drawn wide international attention. He was three times invited to present to the U.S. National Academies (of Sciences, Engineering, and Arts & Sciences) and delivered hundreds of keynotes at IFLA, WAF, ASLA, the World Economic Forum, UNESCO, and other global venues.

He served as Director of the IUCN Global NbS Innovation Center and as Chair of IFLA’s Committee on Water Security and Management, holding significant voice in global ecological design. Projects under his leadership were selected four times among IUCN’s Top Ten Global Ecological Restoration Practices, representing Chinese design on the world stage.

His theories and methods have been featured by Scientific American, Nature Water, MIT Technology Review, and other leading outlets, hailed as a “Chinese model” for climate-resilient design worldwide.

VII. An Unfinished Journey and a Living Legacy

In the days before the accident, he was still traversing the Pantanal—“the lungs of the Earth”—sounding the alarm: “As the last Edens retreat, where will humankind find hope for survival?”

He often said: “Think like a King; but act like peasants.” This was not only a designer’s ethic but a scholar’s conviction. The theoretical system, practical paradigm, and educational institutions he built have become vital supports for ecological civilization in China and beyond.

Professor Kongjian Yu’s life came to rest between earth and sky, but his ideas and spirit will continue in the work of those who follow—lighting the way for landscape designers, city-builders, and ecological restorers around the world.

What he called “the deep form” is more than a design language; it is a return of the heart—to nature, to the people, and to the justice and warmth of the land.

Professor Kongjian Yu, requiescat in perpetuum.