Sponge City: Healing the Planet

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’