Kongjian Yu
BEAUTIFUL BIG FEET TOWARD A NEW LANDSCAPE AESTHETIC
This article appeared in Harvard Design Magazine, Fall/Winter 2009/10, Number 31. © 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Not to be reproduced without the permission of the publisher: hdm-rights@gsd.harvard.edu.
Little feet/big feet: sustainability and aesthetics in China
For almost 1,000 years, young Chinese girls were forced
to bind their feet so they could marry citified elites, since
their natural “big” feet were associated with provincial
people and rustic life. At first, foot-binding was the sole
privilege of the high class. The practice flourished until
the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1911. Respected
intellectuals had written poems and created paintings to
praise artificial tiny feet that today would be considered
grotesque and abused. Painters portrayed classic Chinese
beauties with small feet, flat breasts, tiny waists, and
white skin, in complete contrast to strong and healthy
peasant girls. For a long time, in other words, the beau-
tiful has been seen as necessarily unproductive, above
the “crude,” survival-oriented processes of nature.
1 Harvard Design Magazine 31, Fall/Winter 2009/10
This definition of beauty and its connection with
high-status urbanites is not unique to Chinese culture.
Pre-Hispanic Mayan priests and nobles deformed their
children’s bodies in a quest for social status. Their “beau-
tiful” features—sloping foreheads, almond-shaped eyes,
large noses, and drooping lower lips—today seem as
grotesque as bound feet.¹
For thousands of years, the urban elite worldwide has
maintained the right to define beauty and good taste as
part of its assertion of superiority and power. Bound feet
and deformed heads are among the thousands of cultural
practices that, in trying to elevate city sophisticates
above rural bumpkins, have rejected nature’s inherent
goals of health, survival, and productivity.

Pearl S. Buck vividly depicted this process of
urbanizing and denaturalizing taste in her novel about
Chinese village life, The Good Earth (1931). Early on we
meet Wang Lung, a poor man who could marry only a slave
from the local aristocrat’s Great House. The slave was very
productive, giving birth to three sons and two daughters.
She was not beautiful, but she was hardworking, cooked
and kept house well, and begged in the streets to relieve
her family’s poverty. Wang Lung eventually became so
wealthy that he didn’t need to labor himself but instead
hired farmers. He could even afford to leave his land un-
fruitful, buy from others, and build rooms to accommo-
date a slender beautiful woman as his concubine, who
was prevented from working or having children. As Wang
Lung’s property increased, he was able to rent the Great
Beautiful Big Feet: Toward a New Landscape Aesthetic
Below: The little feet landscape: rockery in Chinese garden,
Liu Yuan, Suzhou. Courtesy of the author
This article appeared in Harvard Design Magazine, Fall/Winter 2009/10, Number 31. © 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Not to be reproduced without the permission of the publisher: hdm-rights@gsd.harvard.edu.
House as his family’s residence and live in town. His un-
productivity was the measure of his social “success.”
Mixed into in the evolution of the Chinese idea of
beauty are people’s changing ideas of urbanity and good
taste in landscape design. For thousands of years,
farmers had managed living landscapes using the survival
skills passed on by their ancestors through endless trial
and error. Generations had adapted to both the threat and
the results of natural disasters—floods, droughts, earth-
quakes, landslides, and soil erosion—while honing their
abilities in field grading, irrigation, and food production.
A popular story arose: Our ancestors created and main-
tained “The Land of Peach Blossoms,” a lost paradise,
a productive and harmonious basin discovered by a
fisherman.² Efforts to survive were what engendered the
2
 skills and artistry of rendering the landscape productive
and durable. People found this land beautiful because it
had the order and integration with natural processes that
resulted from working with the given.
But as China has become more urbanized and
“civilized,” this vernacular landscape has gradually been
deprived of its productivity, its support to and of life,
and its natural beauty. Like the peasant girls whose foot-
binding crippled them, it has gradually been adapted by
the minority urban upper class and transformed into arti-
ficial decorative gardens. The aesthetic of uselessness,
leisure, and adornment has taken over as part of a larger
overwhelming urge to appear “modern” and sophisticated.
But designed landscapes and gardens in different
This article appeared in Harvard Design Magazine, Fall/Winter 2009/10, Number 31. © 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
cultures have roots in the agricultural landscapes that
were the first expressions of civilization: Islamic gardens
evolved from dry fields that needed irrigation. Italian
terraced gardens originated as vineyards adapting to
steep slopes. Picturesque English landscapes began as
pastures. And Chinese gardens have roots in agricultural
farms. But the owners and designers of urban gardens
didn’t appreciate the vernacular peasant landscapes,
which were associated with the disheveled working class.
IN THE PAST FIFTY YEARS, 50
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PERCENT OF CHINA’S WETLANDS
HAVE DISAPPEARED. THE GROUND
WATER LEVEL DROPS ONE METER
EACH YEAR IN MANY SITES.
Using ornamental plants and artificial rocks for 2,000
years, emperors and nobles created a fake Land of Peach
Blossoms for the pursuit of indolent pleasures. Irrigation
ditches and ponds were turned into ornamental water
features. Fish farms were stocked with mutant ornamental
goldfish. Green plants were replaced with golden- or
yellow-leafed ones; vegetables and herbs were ousted
by ostentatious peonies and roses. Healthy trees were
pruned, twisted, dwarfed, and damaged to make bonsai.
Only “delicate” Small-Foot rocks were arrayed. Peach
trees unable to bear fruit were planted. Like tiny-footed
women, these urbane ornaments produced little and
survived only with constant human upkeep. They were
watered, pruned, weeded, and artificially reproduced.
Most of the “great gardens” in history decayed soon
3 Harvard Design Magazine 31, Fall/Winter 2009/10
after their owners passed on. What survives or has been
revived today requires endless maintenance.
Please don’t misunderstand me: In one sense all art,
music, and dance is “unproductive”—it is useless for
sustaining biological life. I am not arguing for the end
of all this or for any demeaning of the value of beauty
and pleasure in our lives. What I am arguing is that in our
resource-depleted and ecologically damaged and threat-
ened era, the built environment must and will adapt a
new aesthetic grounded in appreciation of the beauty
of productive, ecology-supporting things. Our desire for
beauty detached from utility is weakening, and it should
be. In our new world, survival is at stake. Wastefulness
becomes viscerally unattractive, if not immoral. But there
is plenty of opportunity for joyful pleasure in useful things.
From Rusticitas to Urbanitas and the challenge of survival
The massive movement of people from rural to urban
areas is a recent phenomenon. Today more people are
living in cities than in the countryside. In the past century,
the proportion of urban population worldwide rose from
13% in 1900, to 29.1% in 1950, to 48.6% in 2005; it is
expected to rise to 60% (4.9 billion) by 2030. By 2050 over
6 billion people, two-thirds of humanity, will be living in
towns and cities.³
For 2,000 years prior to 1950, China’s urbanization
was enabled by agriculture surpluses, and its urbani-
zation rate barely reached 10% (13% in 1950). By the
end of 2007, around 43% of the 1.3 billion Chinese were
urbanites. Each year some 18 million people migrate to
China’s cities. The UN has forecast an even number of
urban and rural people in China by 2015.⁴
The aestheticized landscapes defined by the privi-
leged urban minority prior to the 20th century are now
eagerly sought by the mass population, whose peasant
ancestors had struggled for generations to become city
dwellers. These migrants, just like the peasant Big-Foot
girls, are eager to bind their feet, to gentrify themselves
physically and mentally. Contemporary Chinese land-
scape, architecture, and urban design simply reflect the
aspirations of ordinary people to become sophisticates.
Before the recent swarming to cities, ornamental
landscape and civic design in China projected the aspi-
rational identity of the privileged urban class typically
through European Baroque landscape designs and orna-
mental gardening. These elite spaces have now turned
into newly developed urban settlements and public
spaces. Post-vernacular inherited values about urbanity
changed not only the city but also the whole landscape of
China. Rough and wild rivers are channelized and lined

Top: Turenscape, Yongning River Park (The Floating
Gardens), Taizhou City, Zhejiang Province, China, 2004.
Bottom: Turenscape, Yongning River Park.
Courtesy of the author
Beautiful Big Feet: Toward a New Landscape Aesthetic
with marble. Rustic wetlands are replaced with fountains
and immaculate artificial ponds. “Messy” native shrubs
are uprooted and replaced by exotic horti-cultural
ornaments; native grasses are replaced by tidy exotic
lawns that consume more than one cubic meter of water
per square meter each year in Beijing and in most
of China.
From 2002 to 2010, China will have consumed about
half of the world’s total production of cement and more
than 30% of its total production of steel.⁵ Is this necessary
to urbanize a rural country? Not completely, since some
of these non-renewable resources are being wasted in
the destruction and controlling of “messy” nature and
the creation of ornamental landscapes and visually
This article appeared in Harvard Design Magazine, Fall/Winter 2009/10, Number 31. © 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
“iconic” buildings. Examples include the new Olympic
Park, the steel-wasteful Bird’s Nest Olympic stadium,
the exorbitant and “spectacular” CCTV Tower, and the
energy-gorging National Centre for the Performing Arts.
The beautiful Bird’s Nest consumed 42,000 metric tons
of steel (roughly 500 kilograms per square meter). The
CCTV Tower consumed nearly 300 kilograms per square
meter and is the most expensive building in the world in
terms of steel used.⁶ Millions of dollars were spent on
decorative flowerbeds during the 2008 Olympic Games:
Between 40 to 100 million flowerpots were used.⁷
Imagine how much better Beijing’s air pollution would be
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had those been forty million trees. In Shanghai almost
all landmark buildings are crowned with ornamental hats:
One hat represents a lotus flower, another a lily, another
a screwdriver, a fourth a UFO. The city is trivialized by
this frippery.
In the current Chinese “City Beautiful Movement”
(or rather “City Cosmetic Movement”), the arts of urban
design, landscape, and architecture, guided by the Small-
Foot aesthetic, have lost their way in a search of mind-
numbing conventional styles or meaninglessly wild forms
and exotic grandeur. Work in these modes accelerates the
degradation of the environment. China has 21% of the
world’s population but only 7% of its land and fresh water.
Two-thirds of its 662 cities lack sufficient water; 75% of its
rivers and lakes are polluted. In the north, desertification
has created a crisis. In the past fifty years, 50% of China’s
wetlands have disappeared. The ground water level drops
one meter each year in many sites.⁸ These conditions and
trends are desperately unsustainable. What values do
we hold as designers? Both global and local conditions
compel us to embrace an art enmeshed with fostering
survival, promoting land and species stewardship, and
making ornament subservient to those goals. We need a
new aesthetics of big feet—beautiful big feet.
4
 Below: Turenscape, Zhongshan Shipyard Park,
Zhongshan City, Guangdong Province, China, 2001.
Opposite: Turenscape, Zhongshan Shipyard Park.
Courtesy of the author
This article appeared in Harvard Design Magazine, Fall/Winter 2009/10, Number 31. © 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Not to be reproduced without the permission of the publisher: hdm-rights@gsd.harvard.edu.

The Big-Foot aesthetic: recovering landscape
architecture as the art of survival
As people worldwide have finally admitted, anthropogenic
climate change has brought and will bring additional
floods, storms, droughts, diseases, extinction of much
animal and plant life, and other threats to survival. A new
study shows that CO2 emissions from fossil-fuel burning
and industrial processes are increasing three times faster
than speeds in earlier predictions: The Arctic ice cap is
melting three times faster; the seas are rising twice as
rapidly.⁹ On every continent some rivers are drying out,
threatening severe water shortages.¹⁰ We are experienc-
ing the greatest wave of extinctions since the disappear-
ance of the dinosaurs: Every hour, three species dis-
appear.¹¹ To quote Albert Einstein, it is obvious that
“we shall require a substantially new manner of thinking
if mankind is to survive.”¹² This will entail a shift in what
seems pleasurable and beautiful to us, especially in land-
scape architecture, a crucial profession in the struggle for
sustainable ecology.

5 Harvard Design Magazine 31, Fall/Winter 2009/10

Beautiful Big Feet: Toward a New Landscape Aesthetic
6
This article appeared in Harvard Design Magazine, Fall/Winter 2009/10, Number 31. © 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Not to be reproduced without the permission of the publisher: hdm-rights@gsd.harvard.edu.
 THE PRACTICE OF THE BIG-FOOT AESTHETIC
Make friends with floods: The Floating Gardens of
Yongning River Park, Taizhou
This project demonstrates how we can live and design with
nature, enacts an ecological approach to flood control and
storm-water management, educates people about solutions
to flood control other than engineering, and reveals the
beauty of native vegetation and the ordinary landscape.
The site occupies 21 hectares (52 acres) along the
Yongning River, the mother river of the historical city of
Huangyan on the east coast. Most of the site was already
embanked with concrete as the result of the local flood
control policy and before a landscape architect was asked
This article appeared in Harvard Design Magazine, Fall/Winter 2009/10, Number 31. © 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
to “beautify” it. Our firm successfully convinced the local
decision-maker to stop the conventional flood control
engineering along the remaining part of the river and to
create instead an ecological flood control and storm-
water management system.
A water process analysis dictated a regional drainage
approach; concrete embankments were removed and
replaced with wetlands that provided flood mitigation,
biodiversity conservation, outdoor recreation, environ-
mental education, and local historical and cultural
demonstrations. Native grasses—“ugly weeds” most
thought—were used to stabilize the riverbanks. On the
Not to be reproduced without the permission of the publisher: hdm-rights@gsd.harvard.edu.
recovered natural landscape is a network of straight
paths and informational mounted texts to help people
enjoy the natural processes and learn about local history.
The results have been remarkable: Flood problems
were successfully addressed; frogs, fish, and birds have
returned; local television celebrated the “weed” grass
in blossom on prime time; and hundreds of thousands
of people visit to appreciate what would have been
considered a messy and uncouth landscape.¹³
Revalue common culture and the beauty of weeds:
Zhongshan Shipyard Park
This park covers eleven hectares (twenty-seven acres)
in Zhongshan in Guangdong Province. It is built on the
site of an abandoned shipyard that was originally
constructed in the 1950s and went bankrupt in 1999,
seemingly insignificant in Chinese history, and there-
fore likely to be razed to give space for urban develop-
ment and a grand “Baroque” garden. But the shipyard
reflected the remarkable fifty-year history of socialist
China, including the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and
’70s, and recorded the experiences of common people.
The principle of reducing, reusing, and recycling
natural and man-made materials is followed. Original
7 Harvard Design Magazine 31, Fall/Winter 2009/10
vegetation and natural habitats were preserved, just as
only native plants were used throughout. Machines,
docks, and other industrial structures were recycled for
educational, aesthetic, and functional purposes. The
design addresses several challenges of the site, including
accommodating variable water levels and balancing river-
width regulations for flood control with protecting old
riverbank banyan trees.
Completely different from the classical Chinese
scholar’s gardens, this park, since its inauguration in
2002, has become an attraction to tourists and local
residents. It has been used all day and yearlong, has
become a favored site for wedding photographs, and has
even been used for a fashion show. It demonstrates how
landscape architects can create environmentally friendly
public places full of cultural and historical meaning but
not on sites previously singled out for attention and
preservation. It supports the common people and the
environmental ethic “Weeds are beautiful.”
The productive landscape: The Rice Campus of
Shengyang Architectural University
This project demonstrates how agricultural landscape
can become part of the urbanized environment and how
cultural identity can be created through an ordinary
productive landscape. The overwhelming urbanization
of China is encroaching upon much arable land. With a
population of over 1.3 billion people and limited tillable
land, food production and sustainable land use is a
survival issue that landscape architects must address.¹⁴
The site of about 80 hectares (198 acres) forms the
new campus of Shengyang Architectural University.
The design and construction had to contend with a small
budget and a short construction timeline (six months),
but the university still wanted the landscape to provide a
strong identity. My firm proposed creating productive
rice fields (along with other native crops) while fulfilling
the need for new functions. Storm water is collected in
ponds to irrigate the fields. Frogs are raised to control
insects, and fish are cultivated to double the productivity
of the field. Sheep “cut” the grass, eliminating the
pollution of mowing machines.
Student involvement is part of the landscape’s
productivity. Each year a planting festival and a harvest-
ing festival are held on campus, which bring Chinese
culture alive. Farming processes become an attraction
to the students of the university and the nearby middle
school. The crop is packaged as “Golden Rice,” which is
sold in the university canteen and presented as souvenirs
to visitors. Now Golden Rice has become the university’s
 This article appeared in Harvard Design Magazine, Fall/Winter 2009/10, Number 31. © 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Not to be reproduced without the permission of the publisher: hdm-rights@gsd.harvard.edu.

Top, left: Turenscape, Shenyang Architectural University

Rice Campus, Shenyang City, Liaoning Province, China, 2003.
Top, right: Turenscape, Shenyang Architectural University
Rice Campus. Bottom: Turenscape, Tanghe River Park (The Red
Ribbon), Qinhuangdao City, Hebei Province, China, 2008.
Courtesy of the author

Beautiful Big Feet: Toward a New Landscape Aesthetic 8

This article appeared in Harvard Design Magazine, Fall/Winter 2009/10, Number 31. © 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Not to be reproduced without the permission of the publisher: hdm-rights@gsd.harvard.edu.

Top: Turenscape, Tianjin Waterfront Corridor Bridge, Opposite: Turenscape, The Qiaoyuan Park, Tianjin, China, 2008.
Hedong District, Tianjin, China, 2008. Bottom: Turenscape, Page 58: Turenscape, playful re-imagination of uses for OMA’s
Tianjin Waterfront Corridor Bridge. Courtesy of the author CCTV Tower, Beijing, China. Courtesy of the author

9 Harvard Design Magazine 31, Fall/Winter 2009/10


identity marker, well-known across universities
nationwide.
The Rice Campus increases sensitivity about the
environ-ment and farming among the mostly urban
students. It demonstrates that inexpensive and productive
agricultural landscapes can also become, through careful
design and management, pleasurable social spaces. And
finally this working landscape is a clear example of the
new Big-Foot aesthetic—unbound but beautiful.
Minimum intervention
The red ribbon: Tanghe River Park, Qinhuangdao
In natural terrain and vegetation, the landscape architect
placed a 500-meter “red ribbon” integrating lighting,
seating, environmental interpretation, and way-finding.
While preserving as much of the natural river corridor as
possible, this project demonstrates how a minimal design
solution can achieve dramatic improvements.¹⁵
The site was in good ecological condition: Lush and
diverse native vegetation provided habitats for many
species. Located at the edge of the Tanghe River, which
runs through the Qinhuangdao, it was, however, unkempt
and empty, used for garbage dumping, and spotted with
deserted shanties as well as irrigation ditches and water
towers built years ago. Filled with scruffy shrubs and
“messy” grasses, the site was inaccessible and unsafe.
The government wanted to use it not only for urban sprawl
but also for fishing, swimming, and jogging.
Beautiful Big Feet: Toward a New Landscape Aesthetic
This article appeared in Harvard Design Magazine, Fall/Winter 2009/10, Number 31. © 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
The lower reaches of the river had already been
channeled with marble and “beautified” with ornamental
plants, and channeling was likely to be carried out at the
site. To prevent this, our firm proposed the red ribbon
design. After the rehabilitation of the littered and polluted
Not to be reproduced without the permission of the publisher: hdm-rights@gsd.harvard.edu.
areas, the insertion of the ribbon was a light intervention.
The ribbon brightens this densely vegetated site, links
diverse natural vegetation types, and provides a structural
means of reorganizing the formerly unkempt and inaccess-
ible site. The park is urban and modernized—attributes
highly sought by the local residents—while enhancing the
ecological processes and natural services of the site.
Let nature work: the adaptation palettes of
The Qiaoyuan Park, Tianjin
This is a park of 22 hectares (54 acres) in the northern
coastal city of Tianjin. Rapid urbanization had changed
a peripheral shooting range into a garbage dump and
drainage sink for urban storm water. The site was heavily
polluted, littered, deserted, and surrounded by slums and
rickety temporary structures that were torn down before
the design was commissioned. The soil here is quite
saline and alkaline.
The regional landscape is flat and was once rich in wet-
lands and salt marshes that have been mostly destroyed
by decades of urban development. Though it is difficult to
grow trees in the saline-alkali soil, the ground cover and
wetland vegetation are rich and vary in response to subtle
changes in the water table and PH values.
10
 This article appeared in Harvard Design Magazine, Fall/Winter 2009/10, Number 31. © 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
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11
Harvard Design Magazine 31, Fall/Winter 2009/10

OUR MONUMENTAL ARCHITECTURE,
WIDE ROADS, ENDLESS PARKING
LOTS, HUGE CITY SQUARES,
FLOWERED LANDSCAPES, AND
ENGINEERING-ORIENTED MUNICIPAL
NETWORKS WILL EVENTUALLY
BE SEEN AS GHASTLY MISTAKES.
The overall design goal was to create a park that can
provide a diversity of nature’s services for the city and the
surrounding residents, including containing and purify-
ing urban storm water; improving the saline-alkali soil
through natural processes; recovering the regional land-
scape’s low maintenance vegetation; providing oppor-
tunities for environmental education about native land-
scapes and natural systems, storm-water management,
soil improvement, and landscape sustainability; and
creating a cherished aesthetic experience.
The solution was called “the adaptation palettes,”
a name inspired by the adaptive vegetation communities
that dot the landscape. A simple landscape architecture
strategy was devised, one that included digging twenty-
one pond cavities 10 to 40 meters in diameter and 1.1 to
5 meters in depth. Some cavities are below ground level,
others above on mounds; some are water ponds, some
are wetlands, and some are dry cavities. Diverse habitats
were created, and natural processes of evolution and
adaptation were initiated. Seeds of mixed plant species
were sowed to start the vegetation, and other native
species were allowed to grow wherever suitable. Through
the seasons’ evolution, patches of unique vegetation
established a correspondence to the individual wet or
dry cavities. A few cavities vary their spatial relationship
to the top of the high water table, with one variation
in depth of only 10 centimeters. The patchiness of the
landscape reflects the regional water- and alkaline-
sensitive vegetation. Within each cavity is a wood plat-
form that allows visitors to sit in the middle of the vege-
tation patches. Along the paths is an environmental
inter-pretation system that gives descriptions of natural
patterns, processes, and native species.
The park realizes its core goals. Storm water is
retained in the water cavities, allowing diverse water-
Beautiful Big Feet: Toward a New Landscape Aesthetic
sensitive communities to evolve. Seasonal changes in
plant species occur and integrate with the beauty of the
native landscape, attracting thousands of visitors every
day. In the first two months of its opening, October to
November 2008, about 200,000 people visited; the
ecology-driven Big-Foot aesthetic produces objects of
desire.¹⁶
Utopian proposal: Beijing as new garden city
Today’s Chinese cities and architectures are unsustain-
able: Our monumental architecture, wide roads, endless
parking lots, huge city squares, flowered landscapes, and
engineering-oriented municipal networks will eventually
be seen as ghastly mistakes.
This article appeared in Harvard Design Magazine, Fall/Winter 2009/10, Number 31. © 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Future cities will be “new garden cities,” emitting low
or no net carbon, productive and conservation-minded.
Rainwater will no longer be discharged from municipal
pipes but will be retained in local ponds and supplement
groundwater. Green spaces will be full of crops and fruit
trees, instead of ornamental flowers and fruitless trees.
Rice and broomcorn will ripen in the fields of communities
and schools. In the harvest season, animals and humans
will take pleasure together. Architectural surfaces will
support photosynthesis. The roofs will be fish-raising
ponds, with the functions of heat preservation, energy
saving, and food production. Cellars will be great
Not to be reproduced without the permission of the publisher: hdm-rights@gsd.harvard.edu.
mushroom factories.
The CCTV Tower will become a complex system
combined with agriculture, animal husbandry, and
fishery. In the hole of the “underpants,” several wind
turbines will generate electricity. The National Centre for
the Performing Arts, easily transformable into a green-
house, will grow various fruits; its basement will grow
mushrooms. The Bird’s Nest can become a national
vegetable market. Its great steel framework can be used
to hang vessels holding a kale yard in the air. Tiananmen
Square can be converted into a sunflower field. While
producing oil, it will offer citizens the chance to enjoy
the daily movement of the bright flower heads tracking
the sun. Transportation tools will be high-speed railway
trains, connecting compact pedestrian communities,
where people can pick up public bicycles. Outmoded
parking lots can be used to grow wheat and vegetables,
or become fishponds that collect rainwater.
The new garden city is a mark not of utopia but of
ecological civilization. It is an art of survival.
Notes
11 Vera Tiesler, “Head Shaping and Dental Decoration among the
Maya: Archeological and Cultural Aspects” (paper presented at the
64th meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Chicago,
12
 1999), http://www.mesoweb.com/features/ tiesler/media/
headshaping.pdf.
12 This is, in essence, the original story of Shangri-la, a mystical,
harmonious valley described in the 1933 novel Lost Horizon
by British writer James Hilton.
13 United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs/
Population Division, World Urbanization Prospects: The 2007
Revision (New York: UN, 2008), 1–4.
14 UN World Urbanization Prospects: The 2007 Revision Population
Database, http://esa.un.org/unup/.
15 “China to Dominate Cement Use in 2007,” Concrete Monthly,
January 2007, http://www.concretemonthly.com/monthly/
art.php?2596; see also Freedonia Group Inc., Cement in China,
January 1, 2009, http://www.marketresearch.com/product/
display.asp?productid=1331744&g=1; and RNCOS, “China Steel
Industry Forecast till 2012,” February 2008, http://www.research
andmarkets.com/reports/590881/china_steel_industry
_forecast_till_2012.
16 Huang Hong, Cheng Chao, and Li Li, Cu Tian Du Shi Bao, December
27, 2007.
17 Xing Yunfei, Hua Xia Shi Bao, July 19, 2008.
18 Chen Kelin, Lü Yong, and Zhang Xiaohong, “No Water without
This article appeared in Harvard Design Magazine, Fall/Winter 2009/10, Number 31. © 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Wetland,” China Environment and Development Review, 2004,

296–309. See also John McAlister, “China’s Water Crisis,”
Deutsche Bank China Expert Series, March 22, 2005.
19 Michael R. Raupach et al., “Global and Regional Drivers of
Accelerating CO2 Emissions,” PNAS, June 12, 2007, 10288–93.
10 C.M. Wong et al., World’s Top 10 Rivers at Risk, WWF International,
March 2007, http://assets.panda.org/downloads/worldstop
10riversatriskfinalmarch13_1. pdf.
11 Ahmed Djoghlaf, “Statement to the Second Meeting of the Advisory
Group on Article 8(j) and Related Provisions of the Convention on
Biological Diversity,” Montreal, April 30, 2007, http://www.cbd.int
/doc/speech/2007/sp-2007-04-30-8j-en.pdf.
12 http://www.spaceandmotion.com/Albert-Einstein-Quotes.htm.
13 For a detailed review of this park, see Graham Johnstone and
Xiangfeng Kong, “Making Friends with Floods: An Ecological Park
Reclaims a Degraded Stretch of a Chinese River,” Landscape
Architecture, April 2007, 106–15.
14 For a detailed review of this project, see Mary G. Padua, “Touching
the Good Earth: An Innovative Campus Design Reconnects
Not to be reproduced without the permission of the publisher: hdm-rights@gsd.harvard.edu.

Students to China’s Agricultural Landscapes,” Landscape

Architecture, December 2006, 100–7.
15 For a detailed review of this project, see Stefanie Ruff and Antje
Stokman, “The Red Ribbon Tanghe River Park Reconciling Water
Management,” Topos 63 (2008), 29–35. Also see Mary G. Padua,
“The Red Ribbon: The Tanghe River Park,” Landscape Architecture,
January 2008, 92–99.
16 Zhang Kailin and Huang Weiming, Tianjin Daily, November 27,
2008.

13 Harvard Design Magazine 31, Fall/Winter 2009/10