Turning cities into sponges: how Chinese ancient wisdom is taking on climate change

Landscape architect Kongjian Yu is making 'friends with water' to mitigate extreme weather events in modern metropolisesHow does a city cope with extreme weather? These days, urban planning that doesn't factor in some sort of catastrophic weather event is like trying to build something in a fictional utopia. For Kongjian Yu, one of the world's leading landscape architects, the answer to coping with extreme weather events actually lies in the past. Yu is the founder and dean of the school of landscape architecture at Peking University, founding director of architectural firm Turenscape, and famous for being the man who reintroduced ancient Chinese water systems to modern design. In the process he has transformed some of China's most industrialised cities into standard bearers of green architecture. Continue reading...