Green Thumb (or Toe?)

“Think like a king, act like a peasant,” said Kongjian Yu toward the end of his talk at Harvard GSD. The strange-sounding comment seemed to sum up the mindset of China’s leading landscape architect, a rare global figure who maintains roots in his country of origin. Yu’s knack for minting phrases to illustrate his ideas undoubtedly helped his rise. At the GSD, he discussed urban projects that illustrate, for instance, the success of the “Bigfoot revolution” over the “little foot” syndrome that characterizes old forms of city making in China. (The nomenclature references the historical practice of foot binding and the warped, insalubrious aesthetics it ostensibly promoted. Such attitudes, Yu noted, live on in our consumerist present and should be stamped out by—what else?—the planner’s proverbial big foot.) Of much wider appeal is his “sponge city” concept, with its prescriptions for replacing grey infrastructure with “green” infrastructure—parks, green belts, reservoirs—to manage stormwater and flooding. These may seem like odd ingredients for an ecological utopia, bu…