Kongjian Yu - champion of “sponge cities”

Kongjian Yu, recipient of the 2023 Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize. Credit: Nord Wennerstrom, The Cultural Landscape Foundation

Kongjian Yu, recipient of the 2023 Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize is the global champion of the “sponge cities” concept for addressing climate change accelerated urban flooding, which was adopted as national policy in China in 2013.

Yu defines landscape architecture as the art of survival and his ideas are inspiring planners and decision makers in Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, Denmark, Egypt, England, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Mexico, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, and Sweden.

 His “sponge cities” concept addresses climate change accelerated urban flooding with large-scale nature-based infrastructure – including constructed wetlands, greenways, parks, canopy tree and woodland protection, rain gardens, green roofs, permeable pavements, bioswales, other measures – that acts as sponges soaking up and storing rainfall instead of relying exclusively on traditional concrete reinforced riverbanks, dams, pipes, drains, and other conventional engineering solutions.

Since being adopted as national policy in 2013, more than 70 cities in China have implemented the “sponge cities” concept with the goal that by 2030, 80% of the cities would be able to absorb 70% of their rainfall.

Yu is the founder and leads the Graduate School of Landscape Architecture, and the College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at Peking University. He is also the founder and principal designer at the landscape architecture firm Turenscape.

Yu has been called the “Olmsted of China,” a reference to Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., the influential founder of the landscape architecture profession in the United States and best known as the co-designer of New York City’s Central Park.

However, Yu describes himself as a “peasant’s son” who was born in 1963 and raised in Dong Yu village in Jinhua, Zhejiang Province, which had a population of less than 500 people, a place he called a paradise. It is where the White Sand Creek flows down from the mountain through 36 weirs, which help facilitate crop irrigation, and into the Wujiang River. When the monsoon season-related flooding came, he says, the whole village would get excited because carp would swim up the creek from the Wujiang River to spawn, going over the low weirs, and into the fields and rice paddies where they were caught.  

“Yu’s journey from farming in a remote Chinese village to international pre-eminence in landscape architecture traces an extraordinary odyssey,” wrote William Saunders in the book Designed Ecologies: The Landscape Architecture of Kongjian Yu, (2012).

“[D]uring the 1966 to 1976 Cultural Revolution … [h]e grew up near an enchanting forest and a fish-filled creek, only to see the forest cut down and the creek become too polluted to support life. This helps explain the depth of his commitment to recreating and protecting natural abundance. He suffered social ostracism in the countryside for having wealthy ancestors and then for being a ‘country bumpkin’ when he made it to the big city.

“This helps us understand his conviction that parks are to be enjoyed by all ranks of people. He loved farming and was proud that his commune used every square meter of its land productively. This helps explain his revulsion to landscapes that are ‘merely’ ornamental. He learned how to deploy scarce water resources and cultivate crops in ways that ensured their survival. And this helps us understand his will to create parks that are low-maintenance and ‘productive.’”

In 1978, Deng Xiaoping reversed the policies that barred children of the landlord class from going to school. Within two years, Yu was the only one of three hundred in his county’s secondary school to pass university entrance exams and he was admitted to Beijing Forestry University in 1980. Because his examination score was higher than that required for forestry, he was invited to enrol in the landscape gardening program, which he recalls as the only university program in the field at the time in China.  He earned a master’s degree in 1987.

Yu cites three events as being influential in his life. In 1972, the year that U.S. President Richard Nixon came to China, his village used newly available pesticides for the first time. The use of DDT resulted in a massive fish kill and the sickening of people who consumed the contaminated fish since no one knew the pesticide was poisonous. A year later he fell into the monsoon swollen creek and nearly drowned. He caught hold of an overarching branch of one of the stream’s many willows; the trees and other volunteer vegetation slowed the current. In the 1980s, concrete dams, culverts, pipes, and other so-called “grey infrastructure” were constructed throughout China, which severely disrupted the natural flow of the local waterways, eradicated trees, and vegetation (the sort that saved him from drowning), and altered finely calibrated irrigation networks, including in his own village.

In a recent interview Yu said “the destruction of my own paradise is what make me think that we need a revolution”; at the core of that revolution is the “sponge cities” concept.

After Yu received Doctor of Design Degree, he practiced with the SWA Group in Laguna Beach, CA, before returning to China in 1997. For more than 25 years, he has spent his career fighting against deteriorating urban ecologies and transforming and stewarding the natural and cultural environment. His work has significantly elevated the role of design in the process, and what landscape architects can provide in designing large-scale nature-based solutions for the public’s benefit and enjoyment.

His pioneering research on Ecological Security Patterns (1995) and Ecological Infrastructure, Negative Planning and Sponge Cities (2003) has been adopted by the Chinese government (2013) as a guiding theory for nationwide ecological protection and restoration campaigns. He created Peking University’s landscape architecture department, which started with three students and has graduated more than 1,200 master’s and doctoral students.

To date Yu and his firm have some 600 built projects in more than 200 cities, principally in China, but also in France, Indonesia, Russia, Singapore, Thailand, and the U.S. 

Notable projects include the following:

Zhongshan Shipyard Park, Zhongshan, Guangdong Province, 2001

A 27-acre park built on the site of a 1950s shipyard that went bankrupt in 1999. Rather that raze the culturally significant site, the design, an early example of the “sponge cities” concept, retained some of the extant vernacular architecture, along with machines, docks, and other industrial structures that were repurposed. Yu believes in the retention of cultural landscape heritage, including industrial sites and working landscapes.

Red Ribbon Park, Qinhuangdao, Hebei Province, 2007

 The principal design element is an eye-catching yet minimal intervention – a surgically-inserted, sinuous 1,640-feet-long (500-meter) red benchlike structure threaded along the length of a narrow rectangular park on the Tanghe River. It integrates a boardwalk, seating, and lighting; lit from inside, it glows red at night. The park retained the site’s lush and diverse native vegetation, eliminated dumped garbage, and provided scenic and recreational opportunities.

Qunli Stormwater Park, Qunli New District, Harbin City, Heilongjiang Province, 2011.

One of the first “sponge cities” projects to gain wide attention, this 80-acre (34.2-hectare) national urban wetland park was created from a dying wetland. The park features a series of ponds and mounds with native grasses, meadow, and silver birch trees that create a dense forest setting. A series of pathways and elevated walkways ring the park and include multiple viewing opportunities including elevated platforms and towers.

Nanchang Fish Tail Park, Nanchang, Jiangxi Province, 2022

A 126-acre (51-hectare) floating forest in the provincial capital reclaimed a polluted former fish farm and coal ash dump site. Dozens of small islands planted with dawn redwood and two types of cypress, some of which are ringed by giant stands of yellow irises, help regulate storm water, provide habitat for wildlife, and offer an array of scenic and recreational opportunities. A network of walkways connects to bridges, platforms, pavilions and viewing towers that are strategically placed to key vistas and focal points.

His built U.S. projects:

Chinatown Park, Boston, MA, USA, 2007

A joint project with Boston-based CRJA, (now IBI Group) the roughly three-quarter-acre (.3-hectare) site was one of 45 parks and public plazas that resulted from the Central Artery/Tunnel Project, known as the Big Dig, which replaced a deteriorating elevated six-lane highway with an underground tunnel route. The arced rectangular-shaped park that replaced a former off-ramp features a serpentine path lined by on both sides by low stone benches that terminates in an open, multi-purpose gathering space. 

Hing Hay Park, Seattle, WA, 2018

 The dominant feature of this 3/4-acre (.27- hectare) park in the heart of the Chinatown-International District Neighbourhood is a twenty by 70-foot angular perforated red metal gateway inspired by Asian papercutting and folding traditions. A project with Seattle-based SvR Design Company (now MIG | SvR), the site includes multiple garden terraces, inspired by the rice paddies of Yu’s agrarian upbringing, and numerous gathering and performance spaces. The plant materials include Chinese natives such as white crape myrtle and lacebark pine.

This article was originally published on the Cultural Landscape Foundation’s website.