Horizontal and vertical processes
The two models, namely the conventional urban growth model and the ecological planning model, are incompatible. One of the obvious reasons for this incompatibility is that the conventional urban growth is often a horizontal process, while the ecological suitability analysis is essentially a vertical process. Green space based on the layering model can not only protect the horizontal ecological processes, such as species movement in the system, it may actually become attractor for intensive urban development .The economic value of the land surrounding this green space will increase and development may eventually encroach. The development of landscape ecology, which focuses on landscape patterns, horizontal processes and change, provides the fundamentals for setting up a green infrastructure that will help to integrate the horizontal processes of urban development with ecological protection. [more]

For thousands of years, people struggled with natural forces to survive, and as a result created a landscape that reflected the balanced relationship between man and nature, and that recorded people’s hardship and happiness. The knowledge and skills associated with this authentic relationship sustain people for generation after generation, give people their identity, and provide their lives with meaning. Their knowledge and skills make up the essence of the profession called landscape architecture. This art of survival, however, has been buried and submerged in the high art of gardening, which only reflects a false relationship between the land and people.

At the new era, the balance between man and nature has been broken again, and the survival of humanity has again become critical so that a new, harmonious relationship must be built. This is the opportunity for landscape architecture to recover its role as an art of survival, and to take the position to recreate a new type of land of peach blossoms, that sustains humanity, gives people their identity, and makes their life meaningful. In order to do that, landscape architecture must break with the art of gardening, and return to the vernacular landscape and people, and must lead the process of urban development by preserving and integrating cultural and ecological landscapes into the infrastructure. [more]

The CCTV Tower will become a complex system combined with agriculture, animal husbandry, and fishery. In the hole of the “underpants,” several wind turbines will generate electricity. The National Centre for the Performing Arts, easily transformable into a greenhouse, will grow various fruits; its basement will grow mushrooms. The Bird’s Nest can become a national vegetable market. Its great steel framework can be used to hang vessels holding a kale yard in the air. Tiananmen Square can be converted into a sunflower field. While producing oil, it will offer citizens the chance to enjoy the daily movement of the bright flower heads tracking the sun. Transportation tools will be high-speed railway trains, connecting compact pedestrian communities, where people can pick up public bicycles. Outmoded parking lots can be used to grow wheat and vegetables, or become fishponds that collect rainwater.
The new garden city is a mark not of utopia but of ecological civilization. It is an art of survival. [more]

The tradition of using non-productive ornamentals as a measure of aesthetics has a long history both in China and around the world. Productive plants and agriculture carry a connotation of being banal and utilitarian, because productive landscapes are how human life began to prosper in our early beginnings. However, as society advanced, the upper class wanted a way to distinguish themselves from the lower classes and as a result ornament and artificial forms transformed into the upper echelon of beauty. Concerns of productivity and health were cast aside. Large sheep were once valued in primitive society, but have long since been devalued in China’s 2000-year history and this remains a negative influence on today’s cities. The disfigurement of the human body, the city, and its surroundings has come to define aesthetics. [more]

In the current Chinese City Beautiful Movement (or rather City Cosmetic Movement), the arts of urban design, landscape, and architecture, guided by the Little-Foot aesthetic,have lost their way and succumbed to banal and conventional style with meaningless wild forms and exotic grandeur.
Excessive
use of foreign materials and environmental assets has accelerated degradation of the environment. Two thirds of China’s 662 cities are short of water; 75 percent of the nation’s surface water is polluted, and 64 percent of cities’ aquifers are also polluted. A third of the national population is threatened with drinking polluted water and almost half of wetlands have disappeared in the past 50 years in China. How will we survive in the future? What values do we hold as designers? Both global and local conditions compel us to embrace an art enmeshed with fostering survival, promoting land stewardship, and making ornament subservient to those goals. We need a new aesthetics of big feet—beautiful big feet, and we need to recover the Good Earth and practice landscape architecture as the Art of Survival. [more]