Celebrating Olmsted

Sponge City

The Impact of Transforming China's Urban Centers Into Sponge Cities

BEIJING (AP) — To cushion the impact of extreme weather due to climate change, a Chinese landscape architect has been making the case for China and other countries to create so-called “sponge cities.

Our relationship with water has been thrown fatally off balance in many parts of the world this year.

Urban planning and landscape architect Professor Kongjian Yu has put forward an innovative and eco-friendly option for flood mitigation. It involves transforming our cities into ‘sponges’ to absorb overflowing waterways and prevent threats presented by extreme flooding.

Sponge cities utilise natural wetlands to passively absorb, clean and use rainfall in an ecologically friendly way that reduces dangerous and polluted runoff into urban streets.

China is re-engineering old cities and designing new ones to accept, rather than fight, natural water flows in a vast project spearheaded by ‘water detectives’

Professor Kongjian Yu is the founder and principal designer of Turenscape, which Fast Company named one of the 10 Most Innovative Architecture Companies of 2021 for its work in “balancing China’s hyperspeed urbanisation with green sponge cities”. An often-outspoken voice in the world of landscape architecture and urbanism, Professor Yu has been heralded by Michael Sorkin as “a hero of effective advocacy within a system fraught with perils.”