It is also an example of how Yu uses age-old agricultural processes to tackle one of China's most pressing problems – the quantity and quality of its water.
Yu has spent the past 20 years designing landscapes that take China back in time. He uses plants to alleviate some of the problems – particularly around flooding – caused by China's rapid urbanisation over the past four decades.
In 2016, in the city of Quzhou (population 2.5 million), Yu took a deserted, mismanaged 32-hectare landscape and filled it with seasonal crops such as canola, sunflowers, buckwheat chrysanthemums, cosmos and poppies. Out came the site's concrete embankments and in went bioswales that allowed water levels to fluctuate naturally. By creating elevated boardwalks and flood-friendly pavilions, Yu lured the locals. The site, ringed by high-rises, has become a popular ornamental park and productive farmland.
It is a similar story with Yu's work on a deserted 1950s shipyard with wildly fluctuating water levels in Zhongshan (population more than 3 million). Yu reused industrial buildings, created terraces and introduced beds of native weeds to create an open green space where intermittent flooding is welcomed.
Water-sensitive design is happening in lots of countries, Australia included, but Yu told an audience at the National Gallery of Victoria's Melbourne Design Week that the scale of water-related problems in China has called for a particularly ambitious response. With a monsoon climate, China has short periods of concentrated rainfall, followed by months of dry weather. On July 21, 2012, a flash flood in Beijing killed 79 people and forced the evacuation of almost 57,000 people. A year earlier, severe storms in Beijing closed public transport.
While engineers designed thicker drainage pipes and installed stronger pumps, Yu says the scale of the problem calls for a different approach. He proposes something that is "simple, inexpensive and beautiful".
Through his company Turenscape, which has been involved with more than 1000 projects in 200 Chinese cities, Yu designs landscapes that he calls "sponge cities" – like a cloth, they retain and clean water. He keeps artificial infrastructure to a minimum, instead introducing ponds and channels through which water moves by gravity. He plants seasonal crops that suit available water levels or chooses plants that can cope with both wet and dry soils.
He says there is nothing new in any of this. "China has a long history of agriculture and 2000 years ago farmers had a pond system to fight against floods. We have a 2000-year history of building terraces that catch water in the rainy season and keep it through the dry season But we forget this.
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