Turning cities into sponges: how Chinese ancient wisdom is taking on climate change
NOVANEWS
Landscape architect Kongjian Yu is making ‘friends with water’ to mitigate extreme weather events in modern metropolises
Brigid Delaney
Sponge cities ‘contain water at the origin, when the rain falls from the sky on the ground’. Photograph: NGV
How does a city cope with extreme weather? These days, urban planning that doesn’t factor in some sort of catastrophic weather event is like trying to build something in a fictional utopia. For Kongjian Yu, one of the world’s leading landscape architects, the answer to coping with extreme weather events actually lies in the past.
Yu is the founder and dean of the school of landscape architecture at Peking University, founding director of architectural firm Turenscape, and famous for being the man who reintroduced ancient ...