Healing the world's cities - Kongjian YU | Frontiers Forum 2021

The Frontiers Forum provides a platform to showcase and discuss groundbreaking new developments for extending healthspans, producing food in a sustainable way, providing clean energy, reversing climate change, and preserving biodiversity. The aim is to spark powerful collaborations that transform data-driven insights and cutting-edge technologies into urgently needed solutions – faster. 

Organized by leading Open Access publisher and Open Science platform Frontiers, the Forum extends our corporate mission to make research results openly available to the world, thereby accelerating scientific and technological innovation, societal progress and economic growth.

In 2021, the Forum opens its virtual doors in a series of webinars featuring visionary speakers from science and beyond.

Theme

Accelerating scienceled solutions forhealthy lives on a healthy planet

Speaker

Kongjian YU：Healing the world's cities

Video

See how “sponge cities” solve urban environmental issues like flooding and pollution, while creating beautiful living spaces.

In his May 27 talk at the Frontiers Forum, Professor Kongjian Yu showed how his pioneering concept uses nature-based solutions to transform cities and manage water. By replacing concrete infrastructure with ecological restoration, he is bringing biodiversity and beauty to the heart of city centers while “letting nature do the work” to cleanse water systems and manage floods. His talk was attended by over 1,800 international representatives from science, policy and business.

Kongjian is a world-renowned landscape architect and a leader in ecological planning and design. Inspired by a combination of ancient Chinese wisdom and modern science, his nature-based approach to urban planning is implemented in over 200 cities, and has significantly impacted national policies for improving the environment in China.

Kongjian is the founder and Dean of the Graduate School of Landscape Architecture at Peking University and founder of Turenscape, an internationally awarded landscape architecture and urban design firm.

The Frontiers Forum showcases science-led solutions for healthy lives on a healthy planet. For upcoming talks, and to watch previous sessions, see forum.frontiersin.org

MAIN TALK

00:00:10 - Introduction

00:03:12 - Talk from Kongjian Yu

EXPERT CONTRIBUTORS

00:24:00 - Statement & question | Ricardo Vives Guerra on behalf of Jaime Pumarejo

00:32:38 - Statement & question 1 | Clara Irazábal

00:42:36 - Question 2 | Clara Irazábal

00:45:19 - Statement & question 1 | Sangwon Suh

00:52:03 - Question 2 | Sangwon Suh

Q&A

00:54:32 - Question | How do you prevent large mosquito populations in large water bodies?

00:58:58 - Question | How can you avoid pathogens in waste water?

01:00:59 - Question | What is the biophilic effect of sponge cities?

01:02:15 - Comment | Ecology is typically in a trade off with economy - but sponge cities could change this

More details: https://forum.frontiersin.org/