Project Introduction

Taizhou City Project also known as a project "against planning" received two professional awards in 2005: ASLA Honor Award, Planning and Analysis and ALSA Design Honor Award.This project was incepted by Dr. Kongjian Yu and presided by Turenscape and Peking University.

Time Magazine recently celebrated Kongjian Yu's ecologically and culturally sensitive design as "A Force of Nature", positioning him as "China's pre-eminent landscape architect" ( Time Magazine , 17 April 2006, pp58-60). This award winning project, The Negative Approach to Urban Development in Taizhou City, illustrates Kongjian Yu's thinking about internationality and identity in Chinese contemporary landscape architecture and urban design.

Dr Yu believes landscape architecture must address major challenges in the coming decades.One of these challenges being that of cultural identity. He advocates that Landscape architecture is well positioned to deal with this issue due to its intrinsic association with natural systems and its roots in agricultural tradition. Urbanization and globalization processes are so fast and overwhelming, and suggest that a 'negative approach' should be taken against conventional development planning. That is, landscape architects and planners should lead the way to identify and design an ecological infrastructure that safeguards ecological processes and cultural heritage, before the land development planning stage.

Taizhou City, China