Traditional Chinese farming techniques

Kongjian Yu is a landscape designer who grew up in the eastern coastal province of Zhejiang. He applies traditional Chinese farming techniques to the urban design of China’s ‘sponge cities’.

He says, “Nobody would drown, not even in the monsoon season. We just lived with the water. We adapted to the water when the floods came… You cannot fight the water, you have to let it go…

The technique that evolved in European countries cannot adapt to the monsoon climate. These cities fail because they have been colonised by Western culture and copy their infrastructure and urban model.”

Kongjian Yu in: Tessa Wong “The man turning cities into giant sponges to embrace floods” BBC News November 11, 2021

Image: White Sand Creek as Yu remembers it, in a picture taken in 1984. Credit: Yu Kongjian.