He's got a plan for cities that flood: Stop fighting the water

A landscape architect in China has a surprising strategy to help manage surges of water from storms caused by climate change

- RICHARD SCHIFFMAN

CITIES AROUND THE world face a daunting challenge in the era of climate change: Supercharged rainstorms are turning streets into rivers, flooding subway systems and inundating residential neighbourhoods, often with deadly consequences.

Kongjian Yu,a landscape architect and professor at Peking University, is developing what might seem like a counterintuitive response: Let the water in.

"You cannot fightwater," he said. "You have to adapt to it."

Instead of putting in more drainage pipes, building flood walls and channelling rivers between concrete embankments, which is the usual approach to managing water, Yu wants to dissipate the destructive force of floodwaters by slowing them and giving them room to spread out.

Yu calls the concept "sponge city" and says it's like "doing tai chi with water," a reference to the Chinese martial art in which an opponent's energy and moves are redirected, not resisted.

"It's a whole philosophy, a new way of dealing with water," he said.

Through his Beijing-based company, Turenscape, one of the world's largest landscape architecture firms, Yu has overseen the development of hundreds of landscaped urban water parks in China where runoff from flash floods is diverted to soak into the ground or be absorbed into constructed wetlands.

Yu said growing up in a village in Zhejiang Province toward the end of the Cultural Revolution showed him how earlier generations in rural China had "made friends with water." Farmers in his region built terraces, berms and ponds to direct and to store excess water during the rainy season.