While most of the world dithers in the face of climate catastrophe, Beijing-based landscape architect Kongjian Yu has been implementing climate resilience projects on a vast scale. Winning the confidence of mayors all over his country, Yu’s design firm, Turenscape, has completed hundreds of infrastructure projects called “Sponge Cities” since its founding in 1998. These innovative designs stem from Yu’s environmental philosophy of “living with water,” which has proved influential enough to earn him the 2023 Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize, awarded by The Cultural Landscape Foundation.
Yu grew up in rural China, farming with the bounty of the monsoon rains. Only as a young adult did he move to a metropolis, Beijing, and see firsthand how its breakneck growth based on ill-fitting Western models was increasing flood risk. Rather than fighting runoff with hardscapes, drainpipes, and energy-hogging pumps, Yu’s Sponge Cities channel and harvest rainwater through attractive parks. As the renowned landscape architect told me, clad in his trademark red shirt, today he hopes to apply the lessons of a lifetime to transform the world.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Daniel Brook (DB): I’ve heard a lot about your work. Can you tell me more about your underlying philosophy of “living with water?”
Kongjian Yu (KY): The philosophy of living with water is the total opposite of living against water. In the past, the philosophy of modern infrastructure was to fight—to create a reservoir, accumulate water, and channelize it to speed it up and flush it away through a concrete water pipe system that ultimately sends it to the ocean. It required building walls against water. A Sponge City takes the opposite approach. It lives with water, retaining it on-site instead of draining it away. We keep the water; we slow down the water; we embrace the water.
DB: Is the water that you harvest in your Sponge Cities eventually used for agriculture or for drinking water? Or does it just sit there until it naturally dissipates through absorption and evaporation?
KY: Well, it all depends. If you are in a farming region, you will use the water for irrigation. If you are in the city, you will harvest and use it for watering the park and let it recharge the aquifer. So it depends on the nature of the area and what specific function its land is serving.
DB: You were born in a rural area and then moved to a mega-city. What lessons did rural living teach you?
KY: I spent 17 years in a village. I was born there, and I worked on a farm. I know how to cultivate crops. Farming was a totally immersive experience with water. Each year when the monsoon flood came, we got excited; water was something to be celebrated.
When I moved to Beijing, there was a problem. Beijing was not so “mega” a city in the 1980s; it was just picking up speed. But in 30 years, we suddenly urbanized while in European and North American countries you had 100 years to urbanize. Because of this short period of time, we simply copied Western infrastructure, ignoring the fact that we have a different climate situation. In New York and Boston, the infrastructure is built to handle four inches of precipitation maximum per day. Well, in China, you have to reckon with about 40. And now this number is exacerbated by climate change. So that’s why in China, suddenly in the late 1980s and 1990s, we faced constant flooding because we copied the infrastructure from the western world, and it didn’t work for us. It simply failed. By 2012 when Beijing flooded, drowning 79 people, the monsoon was becoming a terror in the modern city instead of the farmer’s friend. Sponge Cities was my solution to this problem.
DB: Many designers have brilliant ideas, but most are not nearly as good as you are at getting them built. You say your success often lies in getting politicians on board with your ideas. Can you tell me how this works in the Chinese context?
KY: Design is not only physically sketching buildings or designing parks. It’s a political process. It’s a social process. You have a client. In the Chinese context, because we have this top-down system, your client is usually the mayor and the leaders of the local regional government. So only if you convince the mayor to say, “we’ll buy your product,” only then can you build it.
DB: Your projects seem to be growing in scale. Can you walk me through a few of the newer projects and trace their trajectory?
KY: My dissertation was about security: ecological security planning. I’ve always been thinking about how we can protect a critical ecosystem. Having enough space for water protects biodiversity. But what about security in terms of cultural heritage? This is why we create infrastructure. So I think of landscape as infrastructure.
Green infrastructure can either replace or to some degree integrate with existing gray infrastructure. I’ve proposed a national ecological security strategy to the prime minister. When you’re doing design of an individual project, it’s like acupuncture: Your puncture activates the system. My projects always relate to this infrastructural thinking even as I work across different scales. Right now, we’re doing some major projects in the Yellow River basin. It’s a true transformation. My concept is infinitely scalable. My theory can grow from being a Sponge City to ultimately becoming a Sponge Planet.
DB: At the global scale, with the increase in average temperature, the storms keep getting bigger. How does that play into your design philosophy?
KY: Conventionally, if you build a pipe or dam, they fail if the water passes a certain capacity, right? Reform-era China was initially designing for four inches of precipitation. But then we get six inches of precipitation. So it fails. There’s no resilience.
Sponge Cities are able to regulate flexibly. How? Because we build swales. During the dry season you don’t notice them because they’re covered with vegetation. Then there’s the wet season. When you look at our projects in monsoon regions, like on Sanya Island, for example, you find thousands of spaces that can be flooded. It’s this flexibility that makes a Sponge City different. We might only need 1 percent of the water-storage space on normal days and you’ll just see the creek as a water feature. But on a flood day, it fills up. If you build your city this way, you can avoid disaster.
DB: How can your Sponge Cities go beyond mainland China? Under the Chinese system, you have an ability to build this type of thing in a way that other places don’t, whether it’s the U.S. with its different political system or developing countries that don’t have the same resources. What can they learn from your designs?
KY: Climate change is more serious in the Global South: Sponge Cities are particularly crucial in monsoon regions like Thailand, India, and Malaysia. We currently have a project in Bangkok that had a low budget but was done very quickly with very little skilled labor. It’s a park in the middle of Bangkok that was created in just 18 months.
DB: What lessons might Sponge Cities hold for a city like Houston or Miami that is in a developed country, but now faces unprecedented storms?
KY: Sponge Cities will work, but U.S. designers need to really follow the principles I mentioned. And they’re not being followed. In America, you still have the Army Corp of Engineers mentality. Instead of giving water more space, you trust that you just need to build a larger pipe system. In New York, people are still talking about building walls. Are you going to build a wall around the financial district in Manhattan?
I was in Texas just a couple of months ago—they have this infrastructure to also flush away stormwater. I read in the news that a Houston policeman got sucked into this underpass and drowned in it. This happened, in Texas, in a very wealthy neighborhood! So it’s about the mentality. Do you trust green infrastructure? Sponge Cities have worked across the world, and they cost less. We could build a Sponge City in the developed world, very easily. But it’s a matter of changing the mentality.
Daniel Brook is a journalist and urbanist. Born in New York and based in New Orleans, he has reported from China for publications including Harper’s, Slate, and Foreign Policy. He is the author of several books including A History of Future Cities and the forthcoming The Einstein of Sex: Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, Visionary of Weimar Berlin.
