In mid-July, floodwater submerged the city of Zhengzhou, in China's central Henan province. A year's worth of rain poured down on the city streets over just three days. The cloudburst overwhelmed Zhengzhou's flood defenses, washed away cars, swamped ground-floor shops, and inundated the subway transit line. Over 300 people died in the deluge.

Two recent articles in the American media — one from The New York Times and another from The Christian Science Monitor — raised questions about the efficacy of China’s sponge city concept in the face of climate change.

How the Chinese Communist Party is building an “ecological civilization.”

Dr. Yu Kongjian and his "sponge city" model have helped change how we think of landscape architecture but also seen him branded a "US spy" by some

The urban collapse, caused by real estate overexploitation and exacerbated by the climate crisis, does not have to be imminent.

The talk will follow the author Kongjian Yu to explore a low maintenance approach to create a green wall and productive roof at his own home and beyond.

The ecological urban planner Kongjian Yu believes that the urban model of gray cities, which prioritizes the use of cars and expels water from the basin, can be transformed into sponge cities .

1 Project Statement Breaking through the conventional way of flood control engineering, Beijing Yongxing river greenway turns a seasonal urban drainage into a water resilient green sponge to retain and filtrate stormwater, meanwhile create an ecologically sound, productive and community building green infrastructure. Concrete slope is removed and wetland are constructed, porous landform are created through the earth-balance cut and fill to create diverse habitats, activity places are create...