Quotes of the Day

In 1999, officials in the city of Zhongshan decided to tear down a shipyard and replace it with a park. The city, situated across the mouth of the Pearl River from Hong Kong, has a tradition of putting its wealth to good civic use: its tidy streets are adorned with banks of flowers and well-manicured trees, and it has racked up model-city awards from Beijing and the United Nations. But these shiny credentials presented a dilemma for local leaders—their political promotion would depend in part on outdoing their predecessors, and Zhongshan didn't leave much room for improvement. So when the Yuezhong shipworks went bankrupt, it wasn't long before plans emerged to remove an eyesore, cut ribbons and make progress.

Yu Kongjian, China's pre-eminent landscape architect, was brought down from Beijing to lend the project some cachet—and, as is often the case, his first move was to throw a wrench into other people's plans. Zhongshan didn't need more flowers, Yu told the city officials; it didn't need fountains, ornate wrought-iron fences, or hedges shaped like animals. Instead of bulldozing the shipyard, he proposed, they could put it to new use. A gantry crane would make an interesting gate, a crumbling water tower could become the base of a lighted beacon. Instead of grass, the city should grow weeds. Zhongshan's leaders found the plan unsettling. "We wanted something distinctive, but this made us nervous," says He Shaoyang, then head of the city's planning commission. "It wasn't like a Chinese garden with a rock here and a tree there." But, in time, the ecological soundness and low cost of Yu's ideas won them over. "After all," says He, "Zhongshan has a lot of parks. They shouldn't all have to look the same."

That's an unusual attitude in today's China. The nation is in the throes of the fastest urban growth in human history. In recent years the country has built an average of 2 billion sq m of floor space annually—half the world's yearly total—and plans to add another 20-30 billion by 2020. In theory, this should offer limitless opportunities for innovative urban planning. But as China's cities have grown larger, they have only become more uniform, so that each now seems to boast a skyscraping government office, roads scaled like highways and a vast Tiananmen-like square. This alikeness results largely from a dearth of professional designers and from the fact that breakneck growth leaves scant time for subtlety. But it also reflects a value system in which city infrastructure is conceived in symbolic rather than practical terms and where extravagance is the accepted symbol for modernity.

Yu, a professor of landscape architecture at Peking University, argues that China's current approach to urban development, with its emphasis on size and status over originality, is as environmentally reckless as it is visually dull. With farmland and forests disappearing and water running out, Yu says, cities can't afford be so wasteful: "China needs a dramatic shift. We've misunderstood what it means to be developed. We need to develop a new system, a new vernacular, to express the changing relationship between land and people." When Yu, now 42, returned home in 1997 with a doctorate in design from Harvard and a teaching appointment at Peking University's Architecture Center, landscape design wasn't even an officially recognized profession. The country had a long tradition of private gardens cultivated by gentry, and more recently of austere Stalinist-style parks designed to project state authority. But he felt the country needed more. "Landscape architects can't just be garden artists," says Yu. So, in 1998, he founded Turenscape, China's first private landscape-design firm, and set about finding places like Zhongshan where officials were willing to try something different.

Turen is an odd name for a Chinese company. Ren means person, but tu is more complicated. Literally the word translates as "earth" or "soil," but it's often used as a slur, a put-down for anything that is backward or unsophisticated—the manners of a migrant worker, bad teeth, cloth shoes. When Yu's colleagues answer the phone, "Turen," it sounds like they're calling themselves bumpkins. Yu himself remembers being called tu when he arrived in Beijing from a rice farm in Zhejiang to enroll at the Beijing University of Forestry in 1980. He was 17, could barely speak Mandarin and was awestruck by the straightness of the city's poplar-lined roads. This "farmerist outlook," as Yu describes his own first impressions of Beijing, is the reason Chinese cities look the way they do: "We're a country of farmers. When we make it to the city we want to feel as far away from the land as possible. We hate weeds. We want to look up at tall buildings. We shun nature." To be truly urban, Yu says, China needs a new attitude toward tu.

Last month, on the sunday when Premier Wen Jiabao opened the annual National People's Congress with a speech about building a "new socialist countryside," Yu headed for the town of Changgou, in a rural district of Beijing, "to try to save some trees." Friends in the district government had phoned with news that Changgou had announced it would bulldoze several of its constituent villages and bring in 5,000 laborers to create an enormous man-made lake as part of a program to attract real estate investment and tourism. They'd recommended that local leaders give Yu an audience and consider hiring him. "It sounds like the Great Leap Forward"—Mao's disastrous campaign to boost economic productivity in the 1950s—Yu said, as he sped toward Changgou in a van full of landscape designers. "But maybe I can stop them."

A group of local leaders took Yu on a tour of their project. Chalk lines marking the lake's proposed shores ran through villages and along roads. Yu leapt out of the car to take photos of a pair of bulldozers that looked tiny against the vast swath of empty land where they were mounding up dirt. Bounding past the officials, he turned his camera on a bird's nest high up in a poplar next to the mineral spring supposed to supply the lake. "He even takes pictures of that," marveled one official when Yu was out of earshot. Driving through town Yu passed a cluster of empty villas, waiting for the lakeside they'd overlook. Nearby, on a fenced-off piece of grass grazed an elephant and a giraffe, both made of plaster.

Back at the town office, the officials presented their plan. They played a DVD that showed pictures of large lakes in other places. Changgou's lake would be the center of a new resort, they told Yu. They would have windsurfing, golf and maybe skiing. The DVD played a montage of flowers opening in time-lapse followed by pictures of ripe fruit and beachside cottages. "This is our concept," one official told Yu, as the screen filled with hot-air balloons.

When it was Yu's turn to speak, he smiled. "I think you have a very good idea," he said quietly. "But I don't think your lake needs to be quite so big. What you have here is very rare. You're one of the only places in North China with spring water. If you use it up to make a giant lake, no one will come here. Right now I'm worried you're going to spend a lot of money, but lose value. Other places have lakes. Why not do something different? You could be a model of innovation."

Yu showed some slides of his work. "Wild grass," he said, pausing for emphasis. "It can be beautiful. It's very modern." Before long someone brought him a box of children's markers and a map, and he went to work sketching in islands of existing rice paddies within the planned lake's neat, rectangular perimeter. The official in charge of the project (who asked not to be named) winced. "I have plenty of paddies in this town," he told Yu. "If people want to look at them, they can go somewhere else. I don't need paddies in my lake."

The power of Yu's designs is the succinctness with which they communicate his ideas. His parks pair bushy tufts of native plants (which don't need to be watered or trimmed) with angular paths and minimalist sculptures in brightly-colored metal. The contrast between these rustic and futuristic elements is intended to attract people to the natural landscape, while changing it as little a possible. Yu studies the sites of his projects intensively before he starts planning and tries to work with what's already there—an approach he calls "anti-planning."

In Shenyang, when an architecture school moved to the suburbs, Yu designed its campus to incorporate the rice paddies of the farms it had displaced. The rice became both a decorative element and a kind of literal food for thought—a reminder that landscaping needn't be expensive and that even agriculture can look modern. In Taizhou, Yu un-channeled a local river, removing cement barriers and letting it flood into a wetland through which he snaked bicycle paths, docks and terraces. In Zhongshan, Yu's shipyard park, which like the campus was honored by the American Society of Landscape Architects, has quickly become a local landmark. On a recent weekday afternoon, the park was full. Toddlers climbed happily over pebbled railroad tracks, men played chess on a platform surrounded by tall reeds, a bride posed for a portrait amid some (deliberately) unraked leaves, and two vanloads of officials on a study tour listened to a guide talk about environmental protection.

Despite his success as a designer, Yu sees himself primarily as an educator. In 2003 he founded—and personally funded—China's first graduate program in landscape architecture (at Peking University) and he serves as its dean. He writes prolifically and, again at his own expense, has mailed copies of his book, The Road to Urban Landscape: A Discussion with Mayors, to some 3,000 city officials. The book is a direct but gently mocking assault on monumentalism: its illustrations show absurdly massive plazas and people squatting on low fences designed to keep them off mosaics of hedges that can only be appreciated from the sky. Recently, Yu's ideas have gained new traction in high places. Environmental sustainability, green growth and resource conservation were major themes of last month's meeting of the National People's Congress. And Yu has been approved to help Shanghai rehabilitate a decrepit industrial stretch of its main river for its 2010 World Expo and to create a corridor of parkland along 1,700 m of the Grand Canal.

But it's the smaller victories that seem to excite him the most. The day after his visit, Changgou's leaders called to say they'd accept his plan. "I'm putting in islands and bike paths," says Yu. "The rice paddies are staying. They'll be beautiful."

• Susan Jakes | Zhongshan
• China's top landscape architect is on a quest to bring unexpected beauty to the nation's boomtowns