60 built experiments: how Turenscape makes room for nature

By Priya Raman

Charles Waldheim's Landscapes for Adaptation: Evidence from China documents 60 built experiments by Kongjian Yu and Turenscape. The architect and Harvard professor examines how those projects respond to flooding, climate volatility, and ecological change across two decades.

Waldheim frames the inquiry with one question: can cities be designed as shared habitats for humans and other forms of life? Yu, founder of Turenscape and a leading advocate of the sponge city concept, has spent decades arguing that urban development should work with natural processes.

The book describes Yu's approach as landscape infrastructure. Water, vegetation, and existing ecological systems take active roles in addressing flooding, pollution, and habitat loss.

What does Houtan Park do?

Turenscape completed Houtan Park in 2010 for the Shanghai World Expo. The 14-hectare park occupies a former steel factory and shipyard site along the Huangpu River, where designboom's report notes heavy land degradation and severe pollution in the adjacent river.

A constructed wetland — terraces, cascades, and wetland plants — runs through the park to treat polluted river water. The system was designed to treat approximately 2,400 cubic meters of water per day, improving its quality from Lower Grade V to Grade III for non-potable uses.

The wetland also anchors the park's flood-management strategy. Its planted river edge creates conditions for aquatic and bird habitats, while reclaimed industrial materials, agricultural terraces, and a network of paths connect those ecological functions to everyday public use.

Waldheim writes that Houtan Park makes infrastructure visible, allowing visitors to encounter environmental processes usually hidden behind concrete walls and underground networks, and water treatment, flood protection, habitat creation, and public access operate within the same landscape.

How do 12 fish ponds become a green sponge?

Turenscape completed Yichang Yunhe Park in Hubei province in 2013. The 12-hectare project transforms twelve polluted, abandoned fish ponds into what the practice describes as a 'green sponge'.

The design uses existing water bodies as the foundation for a system that cleanses polluted canal water and remediates contaminated stormwater. Turenscape relies on regenerative design (repairing damaged systems through natural processes) and minimal intervention, letting former ponds join a wider system of vegetation and water while paths and elevated walkways cross the site.

In Ningbo, the Yinzhou Central River Transformation, completed in 2010, introduces wetland planting along riverbanks alongside walkways and public areas. The intervention softens engineered edges while retaining the river's role as part of the city's water infrastructure.

What does 'making-with' change?

Waldheim groups these sites as ecological urbanism that does not require untouched nature in the city. Drainage channels, abandoned ponds, industrial waterfronts, and flood-control systems become opportunities to restore ecological functions and change how people encounter water.

The book draws on Donna Haraway's 2016 Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Haraway challenges the idea that humans exist separately from the rest of the living world, describing life as "a network of interdependencies in which organisms and environments shape one another."

Her concept of sympoiesis, or making-with, frames the world as something produced collectively rather than controlled by a single species. Through that lens, Yu's wetlands and river corridors create environments where plants, insects, birds, microorganisms, and aquatic species interact, shifting attention from human use to wider ecological relationships.

Where does ecological infrastructure fall short?

The book rejects automatic claims. A landscape can support biodiversity while remaining primarily designed around human priorities, and its ecological value depends on long-term maintenance, water quality, habitat connectivity, and whether different species can establish and survive.

Vegetation, or the appearance of a natural landscape, is not on its own evidence of a functioning ecosystem, according to Waldheim. Green infrastructure may improve urban environments without addressing unequal access to public space, the displacement of existing communities, or the uneven distribution of environmental benefits.

Ecological restoration can also become part of wider redevelopment processes, sometimes raising land values and changing who can afford to live nearby. Assessments therefore need to look beyond environmental performance toward effects on local communities and other forms of life.

What does this change for city builders?

Waldheim concludes that the more-than-human city is not a finished ecological utopia. It remains an ongoing process of learning how to live alongside the many species and systems that already make urban life possible.

Yu's work supplies practical evidence for that shift. Its value, the book argues, depends on whether other species thrive, how ecological systems develop over time, and how well these landscapes are maintained.

Designboom published the feature in its POSTHUMAN UTOPIAS chapter, presented with INDX|GLOBAL, a global cultural platform placing Indian architecture, design, and creative intelligence in conversation with the world. The project images include Fish Tail Park.