China is rapidly becoming an urban nation. According to UNESCO, the majority of the population will be living in cities by 2050. Amidst this massive ruralurban migration, officials inliving in cities by 2050. Amidst this massive ruralurban China’s provinces are pondering how to manage natural and human-induced disasters in light of the fact that existing urban-development policies have wrought drastic environmental and social harm: New dam projects have submerged the homes of millions of people, and cities have lined riverbanks with concrete and filled in wetlands. For the most part, this industrial approach to development has steamed ahead with little regard for heritage, culture, or aesthetics.
Against this backdrop, in 2002 the government of Taizhou City invited Landscape Architect Kongjian Yu, founder of the Beijing-based firm Turenscape and a professor of Peking University Graduate School of Landscape Architecture, to design an urban waterfront park on a 21-hectare site (about 52 acres) along the Yongning River. A city of about 5.5 million people on China’s southeast coast, Taizhou lies some five hours?nbsp;drive south of Shanghai. Yu’s earlier analysis of Taizhou’s growth pattern based on ecological infrastructure, which won a 2005 ASLA Honor Award, has become the master plan for the city’s development, providing him with a deep background from which to plan this new project.
Most of the riverside land on the site was already embanked with concrete, or "channelized",?as part of the local flood-control policy. The City officials asked Yu and his design team, landscape architects Yujie Liu and Dongyun Liu, to come up with a concept that would be accessible to both tourists and local residents, while also providing alternative flood-control and stormwater-management solutions that could be used as a model for the entire Yongning valley. The result was a striking synthesis of art and technology called the Floating Gardens.
Yu, who earned a Doctor of Design Degree from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, applied a typically integrated approach that involved Turenscape’s main disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design, following the firm’s principles of environmental design. This national flagship project promotes the restoration of local biodiversity along the country’s waterways and the protection of cultural identity within new urban settings.
Considering the ongoing eradication of habitats and the resulting recent extinctions, such as the loss of the Chinese river dolphin from the Yangtze River, this is good news-at least to private investors, who are seeing a sizable increase in land prices surrounding Yongning Park. The square-meter price of apartments in the adjoining downtown area has risen more than fourfold since before the park was built, according to a local government official. The only landowner in Taizhou is the government, which leases land to developers, so in theory this increase in capital could be fed back into further river front restoration, such as removing concrete channel walls, establishing diverse wetlands, decreasing flood risk, and increasing public amenities.
Challenging Objectives, Innovative Solutions
In addition to the technical aspects, one of the biggest challenges of the design was to create a park in a flood zone that responded to the needs of both people and wildlife-unlike a bird sanctuary, for example, which can flood and still serve wildlife without taking human activity into account.
The designers’solution was to build the park in two layers: a natural matrix (or layer) overlapping a human one. The natural matrix, composed of wetlands and natural vegetation, is designed to accommodate the processes of flooding and to regenerate native habitats. Within this natural matrix, Yu’s team wove in the human elements: a designed tree matrix, a path network, and eight "story boxes,"art installations which allude to the culture and history of the native land and people. This is the layer known that inspired the name "Floating Gardens."Although the parklands do not literally float, the name conjures the spirit of the watery site and also suggests the ecological principle of creating the least possible impact on the land. The moniker also aptly describes the design, which emphasizes water in details and primary features alike. The water level in the inland ponds touches the base of footbridges that cross them. Vistas from various points in the park take in clear reflections of elements at the waters edge.
In the larger sense, Turenscape’s stormwater analysis pinpointed the river’s flood patterns, which became the basis for the design, enabling flood control and water management to become integral components. As an alternative method of flood-control, the designers decided to build a wetland system that responds to the regional flood pattern. As part of the system that deals with natural processes, this restored riparian wetland along the flood plain complements an outer network of ponds within the body of the park, parallel to the river. In addition, Yu’s team massed native wetland plants (both herbaceous and woody), trees, and bamboos along the riverbank and throughout the park, not only to ensure successful establishment of the plantings, but also to meld the site with the surrounding ecosystem and urban layout. During the monsoon season, rains flood both the riparian wetland and the outside wetland. In the dry season, the outer wetland is still submerged in retained water, supplemented by fresh water from the inlet in the upper reaches of the river. Year round, park users have access to the restored riverfront.
The "Floating"matrix above the seasonally flooded natural layer consists of groves of native trees. A network of paths extends from the surrounding urban fabric into the park, linking different spaces, which the designers call nodes, marked by the story boxes-architectural features that celebrate the industries and activities of Taizhou and integrate the park into the city’s surrounding cultural fabric. These unique aspects of place are not historical, but ongoing activities that are part of the life of the city.
Inscriptions on standing stones introduce each story box to visitors. The boxes, built of concrete and steel with no floors or roofs, feature cut-out doors and windows. Each box’s footprint is roughly the size of a two-car garage. Their colors, which relate to their particular stories, help differentiate them from one another. Each contains a human-scale scene illustrating or interpreting a topic within the larger landscape, from the prosaic (rice, citrus, fish, industrial molding) to the poetic (Taoism; stone, mountain and water). The martial arts story box, for example, is a composition of bright red poles of two different heights (1.25 meters and 3.75 meters). (In this case, the poles form the“box,"which lacks the concrete walls of others.) The installation tells the story of a famous kung fu training school within the metropolitan area. The columns, the path leading to it, and the surrounding tall grasses are designed to survive immersion during the flood season.
The walls of the fish story box consist of concrete and steel mesh suggesting a fishing net. Inside, a waist-high stone sculpture representing a fish is popular with children, who like to climb on it and sit, as the sculpture’s curves match the arch of a person’s back. The Taoism box suggests its topic through its color, purple, which has long been associated with the religion and is still worn by monks at a local temple.
Controlling Floodwaters
After years of negotiations with the local government, Yu’s team persuaded the city to stop channelizing the southern Yongning Riverbank in 2002. This is when the park’s construction began. After the relocating the site’s previous residents and the removal of their outdated housing, groundwork began 50 to 100 meters inland. Crews dug a network of naturalistic ponds along the riverfront. A belt of undulating mounds, set back 25 or more meters from the shore, and artificial undulating topography within the park enclose the site and separate the bulk of it from the riverfront. This division provides varied experiences for visitors and a barrier that helps maintain a balance of water levels between the river and the ponds. The designers then introduced the elements of the park-the story boxes, linked by a network of direct and snaking paths.
Yu’s team devised a flood-control system that averts flooding by retaining, leaching and diverging storm water. As Yu expresses it in his concept and theory, The Art of Survival, the first emperor of China, Da Yu, was able to "make friends with floods,"choosing the right places for settlements and terracing the land to benefit from excess water. Surely this indicates the possibility of similarly wise planning today.
Indeed, the park’s flood-management system has been locally recognized as a success. Although plantings are struggling to withstand the intense winds and rains of the typhoon season, the ponds and underground storage and pumping system have been operating well. Yu’s team correctly anticipated the volumes of water the system needed to handle during the rains and accurately specified the storage capacity of the underground water tank that serves as the outlet for excess water retained on site. An electronic mechanism senses the river’s water level, making judgments of when and at what rate, after storms or tidal backwashes, it is safe to pump water back into the river.
Each segment of the park requires a certain holding capacity for when the river’s level rises. When this occurs plantings are submerged for two to three days at a time. All but the living fossil trees (Metasequoia glyptostro boides) are coping with these conditions.
The effectiveness of the wetlands to reduce tidal impacts and improve water quality is slightly less successful. The banks created for wetlands plantings have, in places, been washed away, and the plantings along with them. The enclosed areas formed by the banks to provide space for plant diversity have restricted flows from the river, causing stagnation and collecting air pollutants on the water’s surface. Although the addition of purified water is improving water quality, this makes it impossible to gauge the park’s effect on water quality, an important benchmark in proving the park’s success, especially as the designers seek to model future riverside rehabilitation and development policy on this project.
Yu’s approach to the riverfront was influenced by the amount of canalization already established. The designers created a transition leading from the existing concrete banks to a gently sloped ecological bank. Granite steps lead to the water’s edge; from the steps, small timber piers jut out over the river, providing seats from which to fish. Formal hedgerows near the steps can withstand being submerged as the river rises. Farther along the edge of the park, the steps meet a pebble beach, which gently slopes from the main riverside path to the water’s edge.
From the concrete edge at the entrance plaza, visitors walk into the park with the riverbank dropping gradually to their right. This path, stretching the 1.5-kilometer length of the park, features four different edge treatments. It is as though the designer has taken a cross-section of a glacial valley and strung out its landform changes in a sequence along the river’s edge. The transition progresses from a white granite terrace (the channelized front), to a pebble beach dotted with palms, then a "moraine"planted with Chinese tallow (Sapium sebiferum) and Chinese soapberry (Sapindus mukorossi), which yield waxy berries traditionally used for making candles and soap, and leaves for herbal medicine. This last part of the sequence blends into the riparian wetlands that cover the largest segment of riverbank.
The wetlands area, in which the designers most rigorously applied ecological principles, shows the least impact by visitors because human use is contained to sunken granite stepping stones and timber log bridges flanked by spreading grasses that arch overhead. An especially attractive and effective eco-design feature is the wooden framework for a hut built on one of the thin banks separating river and wetland. Grasses grow through the entire structure, which serves as a nesting place for ducks. The structure draws visitors?nbsp;attention to nature, yet minimizes human impact on these natural processes: if people want to reach it, they have to climb through dense patches of vegetation and wade through the water.
Planting for Habitats and Water Management
The designers planted native species throughout the park, arranged differently for the wetlands and common park areas. For most of the park’s edge, three species of grasses (Acorus gromineus, Phragmaites australis, and Lythrum salicaria) create a soft transition from the land to the water along the riverbank. Yu chose these during a visit to the surrounding countryside, when he was inspired to bring the natural beauty of the area into the city center. This soft edge also functions as a wave breaker.
Tidal backwashes and the recent typhoon season had, in some places, managed to loosen the newly created banks against which lotus plants float (Nymphaea tetragona, Nelumbo nucifera). Workers have repaired and bolstered the banks with timber posts just under the water’s surface. Living fossil trees, which symbolize local, ordinary people, have been planted throughout this region since the species?nbsp;discovery in the early 1900s. They have been interspersed across the site within square, raised granite-walled beds.
Native plant diversity was the "designers"aim, whether plantings are laid out in formal or naturalistic arrangements. While plant diversity is not the park’s biggest success-the site has yet to show any impressive increase in flora-the wetlands plantings have provided a renewed habitat for insects and birds. Yu believes that creating more wetlands along the additional 70 kilometers of riverbanks is the way to develop a richer variety of local species.
The ancient Chinese redwood species and bamboo groves suffer from typhoon winds. Most of the trees and palms are propped upright with wooden struts, realigned after each storm. This maintenance, plus cleaning the river pools with purified water, account for the highest operating costs met by the client.
Providing Pleasing Public Open Space
Open space is most apparent on the park’s snaking easterly path, where one side is always open to the river and the outline of pyramidal mountains form a picturesque backdrop. The brightly colored story boxes create windows over the river, providing views out and framing vivid scenes of people inside the structures. The hard materials and verticality of the story boxes set within the band of swaying grasses create a bold and intriguing contrast, juxtaposing people and nature. The boxes also act as minor gateways from the ecological area, guiding visitors into the recreational interior of the park, where the boxes interact with the landscape in a different way. A foreign designer may find these and other elements inspiring from a design point of view, but here they resonate with meaning.
Paved open spaces lie along the park’s urban edge, providing marked entrances that serve as meeting places. Entering the park, visitors immediately see social activity and commence people-watching. The central entrance (one of four) is uncluttered and well proportioned to balance the park with the neighboring apartment housing, giving the residents easy access and a sense of shared ownership. The adjoining low-income community, some of whose residents used to occupy the site, is an important part of daily life in the park, and, conversely, the park is a major part of the improvements in these residents?nbsp;lives.
Straight, angular paths within the area around the ponds provide a contrast between the natural and human layers. The paths do not wind around the water but cut straight across, seeming to float on the surface, and create angular intersections at the ponds?nbsp;rounded corners. The riverside path is wider than other routes and it snakes parallel to the shore. A level below this path, a series of timber piers jut out over the river, giving fishing enthusiasts a place to spread out their equipment as they spend the day fishing with friends. This daytime activity can easily run into the evening; it gives other visitors a mellow sense of time passing and some photo opportunities to capture old pastimes taking place with this modern space.
The largest of the spaces within the park appears as visitors enter the park by way of a curved, timber-clad bridge that runs alongside a gray-painted concrete floodgate built in 1933. The plaza opens out in front of the walker toward a water-play area, the main walk along the riverfront, and the base of an obelisk (representing the city’s molding industry, which dominates this first view of the park). Yu added the obelisk at the request of the client, and this landmark looms over the park, at odds with the ecological spirit of the place. Strangely, however, this unappealing feature provides visual continuity between the area that connects the new section of the riverfront park to its 1990s predecessor, an earlier misguided beautification treatment.
It is in this open space that visitors are most exposed to a cluttered overview of the park’s various elements, yet this flurry of visual activity was designed for local people, who follow different recreational habits than those of most westerners. A path lines the periphery of the main entrance plaza, demanding movement, so there is little choice but to become part of the action, watching as children play and friends laugh together against a backdrop of surrounding buildings with giddy neon facades.
The park comes to life once the sun goes down. Chinese leisure time has a different cycle to that found in the West. Here, parks see the most use during the cooler evening hours. The park is extensively lit to accommodate evening visitors, from simple ambient path lighting and romantic spots to elaborate displays synchronized with water jets moving to the rhythm of music emanating from suspiciously oversized "mushrooms."
Some of the park’s best qualities, however, are lost during the peak, after-dark hours. The interplay of sunlight and plant forms yields to fixed light sources and pulsing light features that create a spectacle. On the other hand, the interweaving paths and spatial enclosures do make more sense at night, when details, viewed close up, dominate overviews of the site.
Is It Working?
The majority of this project has been a success. It fulfills its aims by managing the flooding of the river, it has pleased the client, and it has been widely accepted by the public. Another test of its success will emerge in the coming years, when it will be revealed whether or not this project signaled the beginning of an environmental awakening in China. With such widespread urbanization, the landscape-planning methods used by Turenscape present many opportunities to protect people, investments, and ecological corridors along waterways. Will China encourage these during this critical period?
Yongning Park is designed to remind people of what makes their region so special: elements of everyday life that may be lost under mounting pressure. The most interesting example is the indigenous orange trees of this region, widely known in China for their high-quality fruit. Orange groves are scattered through both urban and rural areas, and one of the best producing areas lies beside the Yongning River, opposite the park. The soils, enriched by flooding, nourish the trees to produce great tasting oranges. This land is currently occupied by an orange grove and research center for their cultivation, surrounded by outdated low-income apartment buildings. This area cannot be seen from the park, blocked from view by large, unsightly billboards.
This land is currently being considered for new development. While previous trends suggest that apartment blocks eventually will fill this space, a creative alternative would be to preserve the orange grove and research center as an operating agricultural site and tourist attraction. This best-case outcome would create a unique amenity, continuing the example set by Turenscape to restore and improve more of the river corridor, effectively linking agriculture, research, tourism, and housing in a sensitive and beautiful solution.
[AUTHORS’TAGLINE]
Graham Johnstone is concluding travels in China and preparing for a voluntary internship with a permaculture project in Sumatra, Indonesia, before returning to Masters studies in landscape architecture and urban planning at Leeds Metropolitan University, in Leeds, England. He can be contacted at grj.100@gmail.com
Xiangfeng Kong is completing a Masters program in landscape architecture at Peking University. He can be contacted on kxf2001@gmail.com
PROJECT CREDITS:
Location: Taizhou City, Zhejiang Province, China
Size: 21.3 hectares (approx. 52 acres)
Date of Completion: March 2004
Owner/Client: Government of Huangyan District, Taizhou City
Design Firm: Turenscape, Beijing, China
Design Principal: Kongjian Yu, dean and professor, Graduate School of Landscape Architecture, Peking University, and President, Turenscape, Beijing.
Awards: ASLA Design Honor Award, 2006; Human Habitat Award, 2005, Ministry of Construction, China
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