Alarming cases of climate disasters are a constant presence in world news. Last month's floods in southern Brazil gained special attention from heat waves and forest fires to droughts and cyclones. This tragedy, which left over half a million people homeless, was understood to be the result of a combination of factors, including human actions that have devastated ecosystems to create environmentally irresponsible cities.
In this context, the work of Beijing-based architect Kongjian Yu, founder of the landscape architecture firm Turenscape, has gained international visibility and recognition, which included receiving the 2023 Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize (“Oberlander Prize”). His "sponge cities" concept, designed to address and prevent urban flooding in the face of accelerated climate change, was adopted as national policy in China in 2013. This approach prioritizes large-scale nature-based infrastructures such as wetlands, greenways, and parks.
In an interview with ArchDaily, Yu advocates for a change in mentality, viewing landscaping as a functional and not merely ornamental aspect of our cities. He offers fundamental reflections and advice on facing the challenges of a changing planet. Check out the interview below.
Related Article
Floods in Rio Grande do Sul: The Tragedy of Non-Resilient CitiesArchDaily (Camilla Ghisleni): The concept of sponge cities approaches landscaping not as mere ornamentation but rather as valuing functionality. This also involves a cultural change where the landscape is no longer passively appreciated by users. How has this understanding of the landscape changed, and how significant is this change in mentality?
Kongjian Yu: Yes, it is a fundamental change in mentality and a revolutionary shift in landscape culture: how we represent the landscape, how we evaluate the landscape, and how we design and change the landscape. When climate changes, everything changes, leading to the creation of a new landscape culture. This includes a new language of landscape interpretation, design, intervention technology, and even a new aesthetic, which I call the "big foot aesthetics" as opposed to the traditional "manicured little foot aesthetics." This metaphor refers to the Chinese tradition of foot binding in pursuit of beauty at the expense of the functionality of natural, unbound feet.
AD: The “agrarian aesthetic” of your projects was inspired by Chinese peasant agricultural tradition. Why is looking at history and ancient techniques important when designing a landscape?
YU: Regardless of the type of landscapes that landscape architects are working with, from remnant wilds and agricultural fields to urban open spaces and post-industrial landscapes, they need to be designed to integrate human activities and natural processes as a harmonious whole that is sustainable. This results in a landscape of Deep Form, as envisioned by John Lyle, which is a manifestation of healing the alienated relationship between humanity and nature. Such a Deep Form requires a strong bond between human activities and nature. No bond between humanity and nature is as strong as that between peasants and their land; however, this deep bond has been largely broken by urbanization following the Industrial Revolution, continuing through to the modernization of the new Digital Age. It is, therefore, fundamentally important to study how peasants, historically and even today with their traditional farming practices, transform their natural landscape for living, thereby evolving a variety of inspiring Deep Forms.
AD: How do you define the role of landscape architecture in this new era of climate change?
YU: Landscape is the medium on which all natural processes occur. It is a stretch of the entirety of the global surface, where floods, drought, fire, sea level rise, and life are supported, and where almost all human living and social activities happen, including farming, mining, building, and movement.
Climate change means landscape changes, and vice versa. Landscape architecture literally means the art of transforming and changing landscapes by design. By changing the landscape, you either adapt to or counteract natural processes, and you mitigate or amplify the natural processes that are caused by, or are causing, climate change.
Therefore, more than ever, landscape architecture plays a key role in the era of climate change in all three pillars of climate change resilience: Adaptation, Mitigation, and Societal Transformation. (To quote from the most recent "Planetary Protocol for Climate Change Resilience," signed in May 2014 at the Vatican by the Pope, major city mayors, and state governors, I am honored to be the only co-author representing the fields of landscape architecture and architecture.)
AD: Considering the major environmental challenges our cities face, what is one specific aspect that an understanding of landscape as infrastructure could address?
YU: First of all, landscape as infrastructure should be understood as nature-based infrastructure or ecological infrastructure that provides critical ecosystem services, including provisioning, regulating, supporting, and cultural and spiritual services for citizens, reclaiming landscape as infrastructure means recovering nature-based solutions to holistically solve the problems that our cities face today, particularly in addressing climate change. This includes adaptation measures such as green sponges for stormwater management and street trees and green roofs for urban cooling, as well as mitigation strategies like urban agriculture, urban forestry, and rewilding for biodiversity. It also involves societal transformation, such as creating pedestrian and cycling paths that enable a green lifestyle.
Before industrialization and large-scale urbanization, landscapes were protected and planned as infrastructure for shelter, water management, transportation, communication, and even spaces for social and spiritual needs. While landscapes as public spaces may still be considered infrastructure, like those planned by Olmsted in the US, the infrastructural functions of landscapes have largely been wiped out by concrete urbanism or replaced by industrial technology-based and grey infrastructure, particularly water supply and drainage systems and communication infrastructure.
AD: Why do you define urban landscaping as the "art of survival"?
YU: Simply because cities or urban areas are becoming traps of death—just check the news from the past months—how many cities have been flooded, and how many people have died in storms, floods, urban heat, and urban pollution? Consider also how many people were locked down and died in cities during the COVID-19 pandemic!
It is so obvious that by wiser planning and designing of the urban landscape as life-saving and climate-adaptive ecological infrastructure and public space, we can save lives immediately and, in the long term, save the planet (since cities are major contributors to climate change).
One example is Zhengzhou City, where more than 300 people were killed in the urban center two years ago. In this city, the hospital is located in a low-lying area, while the nearby park is on higher ground and is managed as an ornamental garden instead of a green sponge that should be in the low-lying area.
AD: In an interview, you said China needs a dramatic shift. “We've misunderstood what it means to be developed. We need to develop a new system, a new vernacular to express the changing relationship between land and people.” What should this new language be and how it could be applied in different countries?
YU: This new landscape language or new landscape culture is based on the "big feet" concept, which means: (1) nature-based and climate adaptive deep form, not ornamental and manicured shallow form or fake form, and must be productive and ecological functional, and climate adaptive and climate positive; (2) That everyone served, the normal people, not the urban elite like what had been served by the traditional gardens. Therefore, this language comes from the local peasantry or ancient survival heritage that is nature-based, and that is every survival needs adaptation to local climate and natural processes.
AD: What advice would you give to the numerous cities in southern Brazil that need to be rebuilt due to the destruction of the most recent floods?
YU: Learn from the experiences of other parts of the world, particularly the mistakes that other countries and cities have made many times. Be prudent in investing in single-goal concrete dams and flood walls; they have failed, will fail again, and are doomed to fail! Instead, invest in holistic nature-based solutions to create a climate-resilient region and nation—a sponge city and sponge planet—that will be much cheaper, more sustainable, and capable of solving multiple problems holistically.
