Urban River Transformation and the Landscape Garden City Movement in China

Dihua Li,Shuhan Shi,G Kondolf

doi:10.3390/su10114103

Dihua Li, Shuhan Shi + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/su10114103

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Abstract

The practice of enhancing existing rivers and creating entirely new waterscapes has exploded in China over the past two decades. In our study of 104 randomly selected cities across China, we identified 14 types of river projects based on grey literature reports and their appearance on sequential aerial imagery, falling into three categories: ‘engineering’, ‘waterfront spaces’ and ‘ecological’ projects. ‘Waterfront spaces’ is the most common (60.5%), followed by ‘engineering’ (28.7%) and ‘ecological’ (10.8%). Using multiple stepwise regression, we found that the types of projects undertaken were strongly influenced by factors such as climate, social-economic setting, and ‘Landscape Garden City’ designation. Designation as a ‘Landscape Garden City’ was correlated with ‘waterfront spaces’, but not ‘engineering’ and ‘ecological’ projects. We found that cities in drier climates (as measured by ‘precipitation minus evaporation’) constructed more projects and they included many projects that impounded seasonal rivers to create year-round water bodies. Based on our results, we conclude that Chinese cities are still in the process of ‘decorating’ rivers, and that the ‘Landscape Garden City’ designation promoted such ‘decorating’ projects, especially ‘linear greening’ projects and ‘public spaces along rivers’. The results also demonstrate that the new river projects in China are often at odds with the local climate.

Highlights

The practice of enhancing existing rivers and creating entirely new waterways has exploded in China over the past two decades, accompanying the rapid expansion of urban areas
To better understand the many urban river projects in China, we explore the influence of urban area expansion, social-economic development, different climates, the ‘Landscape Garden City’ designation, and the influence of Chinese classical garden design and Howard’s Garden City concept
For the 104 cities we studied, we identified an average of 11.7 years of imagery per city in which one or more river projects were constructed, as visible on aerial imagery

Summary

Introduction

The practice of enhancing existing rivers and creating entirely new waterways has exploded in China over the past two decades, accompanying the rapid expansion of urban areas While these river projects share many attributes with urban riverfront projects that have proliferated in Europe and North America over the same time period, there are some significant differences. Definitions of river restoration tended to emphasize restoration of conditions ‘prior to disturbance’ [7], which is a standard that could only be applied in contexts in which the ‘disturbance’ (i.e., massive anthropic transformations) occurred recently enough that there is evidence of the prior condition This is the case in parts of North America and Australia, but certainly not Europe or other long-settled areas. Long as rivers were open sewers, there was little opportunity to restore ecological conditions and little motivation to connect urban populations to these polluted, foul-smelling waterways

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