He’s Got a Plan for Cities That Flood: Stop Fighting the Water
www.nytimes.com
A landscape architect in China has a surprising strategy to help manage surges of water from storms supercharged by climate change.

Instead of putting in more drainage pipes, building flood walls and channeling rivers between concrete embankments, which is the usual approach to managing water, Mr. Yu wants to dissipate the destructive force of floodwaters by slowing them and giving them room to spread out.

Mr. Yu calls the concept “sponge city” and says it’s like “doing tai chi with water,” a reference to the Chinese martial art in which an opponent’s energy and moves are redirected, not resisted.

    • silence7@slrpnk.netOPM
      7·
      8 months ago

      Levees, but further back from the rivers, rather than trying to push everything into a narrow and fast channel.

    • Sonori@beehaw.org
      1·
      8 months ago

      Not really, dikes, pumping stations, and canals are more of ways to drain and remove marsh than ways to get water out of the city and to the resivor, ocean, or pumping station.

  • Sonori@beehaw.org
    3·
    8 months ago

    Hasn’t this been the preferred water management strategy for US civil engineers for like two decades now? Hence why we’ve seen ao much money spent on rewilding urban channels as well as so much foucus on large retention capacity for any new development?

    Not saying it’s a bad approach, but doing the same thing a bunch of other people have been doing for decades isn’t a very ‘surprising strategy’, a break from the modern ‘usual approach’, or one that originated from allusions to eastern mysticism.