<
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/sponge-cities-china-climate-change-resilience/>
"From an airplane window, Hainan, an oval-shaped island floating alone in the
expanse of the South China Sea, resembles a sea sponge.
In reality, the Chinese province genuinely is a kind of engineered urban
sponge, thanks to its pioneering network of green, nature-based infrastructure
capable of absorbing storm floods and soaking up heavy monsoon rains.
“If you want to survive, you have to be spongy,” says Yu Kongjian, dean of
Peking University’s College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, and
founder of Turenscape, one of China’s largest landscape architecture firms.
“Trying to protect cities with hard, gray infrastructure made of concrete is
doomed to fail.”
Over the years, many architects, engineers and city planners have espoused the
value of, and need for, effective water management in urban areas. But Kongjian
was the first to propose the holistic concept of the “sponge city.”
The idea is not to install enormous artificial foam structures across urban
areas, but rather to create cities filled with natural spaces such as parks,
lakes and wetlands — which are capable of absorbing, storing and cleaning rain
and floods — as well as smaller tools like bioswales, rain gardens, permeable
pavements and green roofs. Such “green and blue infrastructure” is in contrast
with the manmade “gray infrastructure” that fills most cities — think concrete
walls and hard flood barriers, which cause water to build up on surfaces and
limit collection of valuable groundwater for drinking, irrigation and more.
While good water management has always been essential for cities, climate
change, which is bringing more extreme rains and floods and causing sea level
rise — combined with urban growth into more vulnerable areas — has made it an
even bigger priority."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
