A Force Of Nature

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.