Landscapes for Adaptation (Evidence from China)

The climate crisis is now readily evident rather than a future possibility. After decades of failing to mitigate our impacts, we must now adapt to survive in the context of a rapidly changing climate.

Adaptation requires enlightened planning and reconceptualization of our urban environments. The engineering solutions inherited from the nineteenth century are obsolete. These Western single-purpose civil engineering systems are brittle and prone to catastrophic failure. Climate adaptation demands that we replace those obsolete systems with landscapes for human adaptation. This process demands the best available scientific knowledge, experiments, and evidence. In the twenty-first century, China has built more experiments in climate adaptation than any other culture. An overwhelming number of those experiments are the work of Kongjian Yu and his firm, Turenscape. Over the past two decades, Turenscape has realized hundreds of built experiments in climate adaptation through landscape architecture and planning.

This publication presents sixty of the most significant of those experiments. The book analyzes those projects and evidence of their environmental performance. Landscapes for Adaptation assembles a menu of practical strategies and real-world tactics for landscape adaptation in China and around the world.