Earth Choreographer is a design methodology that focuses on choreographing, scoring, and de-territorializing the landscape of an obsolete oil field. The project introduced in this article, titled Earth Choreographer, explores the imperatives and opportunities in remediation and repurposing of obsolete industrial sites, aiming to continuously investigate the potential of the land and possible scenarios over decades—even when the intended life cycle of the industrial site is over. It presents a design process that recognizes the ruination of the ground and the landscape. By acknowledging the evolving technologies and ever-increasing preoccupation with natural resources, it answers the following questions: 1) What happens when a productive landscape is sought to be both partially preserved and recreated? 2) How to represent a ground plane that is being constantly reconfigured by machines with ever-changing boundaries of spaces for human and nonhuman occupation? And 3) what does a site that constantly erases and reconstructs itself look like?

With several scenarios from 2025 to 2080, this project acts as a prototype for inhabiting obsolete landscapes by addressing climate change and depletion of resources. Its dynamic design methodology allows the site to constantly evolve and change over time based on the needs and interests of its occupiers.

The concept of “prototype” originated from "essentialism"—the theory holds that everything is found in its own pure realm that can be typically abstracted, described, and represented. In the development of Architecture, essentialism fails to describe the differences between formal variations, and then Typology was born which manifests the new spatial forms that are embedded within the historical, cultural, and environmental contexts through the changes and combinations of architecture. Prototype, stemming from Typology, highlights the qualities of the time dimension and has been broadly used in the field of landscape architecture to address the objects that are often complex and chaotic. Prototyping is to profile and test the spatial order and characterized by a process of “extraction–deduction–test–outcome”: through the scenario analysis upon understanding and perception of the site, the design extracts the elements, deduces the forms, tests the simulations, iterates the strategies, and finally realizes the outcome physically. In the discourse of Landscape Urbanism, designers must understand the specific material language of the site, the design language of the site’s history (past and future), and the design language of the human activities proposed, while considering the changes over time. This article primarily reviews the evolution of the concept of prototype, and discusses its role in benefiting the design of built landscapes, ranging from the design investigation to the conceiving and testing of design strategies.

The evolution of the Yangtze Riverfront Park in Wuhan, China highlights what many waterfront cities around the world are facing with respect to converging forces of urbanism, growth, resiliency, and ecological degradation. This site emphasizes why the public realm is a critical component in addressing all of these often-conflicting issues.

By re-envisioning the 16-kilometer-longriverfront landscape, Wuhan is creating a new paradigm for its parks by embracing flooding as a regular occurrence and a driving force in the shaping of its public realm. This strategy of working with Nature and not against it allows visitors to understand and appreciate the river’s complex dynamics. The proposed development of the Yangtze Riverfront Park aims to harness the power of natural processes to nurture a rich regional ecology, improve ecosystem services, and enhance public health and recreational amenities.

Informed by an extensive public engagement process and crowdsourced data, the redesign of the park reinforces Wuhan’s cultural identity by preserving decommissioned industrial infrastructure and other artifacts along the river that symbolize the city’s industrial legacy and urban history. The vision for an updated Yangtze Riverfront Park strives to create a socially inclusive, culturally relevant, and ecologically meaningful waterfront that emphasizes Wuhan’s identity of living authentically with an everchanging river.

Nature is a cultural construct, and a symbolic form to our cultural landscape. It plays a critical role in the profession of Landscape Architecture, shaping both the practice in the constructed environment as well as the conception of landscape in Pedagogy. This article evaluates contemporary landscape architecture practice in the U.S. through the lens of planting design and ecological design approaches. This retrospect situates selected individuals and their practices in the field of landscape architecture in the past two decades, in parallel with the evolving ecological understanding. These individuals and their works demonstrate the changes in planting design and ecological thinking in the professional practice, and most importantly how these changes contribute to current ecological design methodologies, landscape aesthetics, and public perception of landscape. In addition, the article aims to illustrate a shifting conception of Nature over time and in different cultural context, in which different conceptions of Nature facilitate various approaches to addressing environmental issues. By situating in such context, the article hopes to provide a critical view of contemporary American landscape architecture practice and the current ecological agenda, in order to enable discussions regarding the professional practice in the future.

Plant communities in mountainous cities play significant roles in revetment protection, sediment interception, water purification, ecological buffer, biodiversity conservation, and landscape quality improvement. Meanwhile, the local complex hydrologic conditions may pose adversity stress to the structure, function, and ecological process of these plant communities. This paper introduces the restoration practices of river revetments in the Jiulong Waitan section of Chongqing employing ecological planting strategies. First, a technical framework was proposed for the re-establishment of riparian herbaceous communities as the multilayered semi-natural meadows that were planted by strips and zones upon hydrologic conditions. Second, principles and modes of these ecological planting practices were elaborated. Third, an evaluation on the communities’ performance indicated that they could adapt to the complex hydrological conditions in mountainous cities, including sharp rise and fall of river level during summer floods, high temperature, and storm runoff. This study may provide a scientific reference for riverfront landscape optimization of the main stream of the Yangtze River, and a paradigm for the ecological conservation and the establishment of ecological barrier for the upper reaches.

Possessing significant ecological and landscape values, river shorelines are regarded as a region’s most important interface to resist natural disasters while they are also extremely dynamic and sensitive. Therefore, it is critical to follow the laws of nature in design and planning of river shorelines to achieve the harmonious coexistence of human and nature free of flood catastrophes.

This article takes the S River Park on the Living Shoreline of the Rule Lake New Town, Ganjiang New District, Jiangxi Province as an example of nature-based design approach: First, by examining remote sensing maps and water level data in different historical periods of the site, the design team learnt the evolving hydrological characteristics of the river; Second, the relations between the river’s evolution and major human interventions in history are clarified and sorted; Last but not the least, guided by the nature laws of water erosion and sedimentation, a naturebased design solution was approached—Bycatalyzing natural processes with appropriate human interventions, it aims at rehabilitating the damaged sandbar habitats through spontaneous remediation of the river, and creating fascinating riverfront experience out of a rational function zoning of the park based on various natural conditions, thus to make the new town more vibrant and resilient by connecting it with the seasonal waterfront landscape driven by the ebb and flow of the river.

The landscape renovation project of Shekou School Square in Nanshan District of Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China is a micro renewal of urban public space. Through a seven-day investigation on user behaviors of the square, the design team recorded various usage needs and learned about the deep feelings of the local residents to the site. The team then conceived a design theme of “Time Story” by opening the boundary of the site and creating recreational spaces and features such as modular seats, school logo display wall, childhood game silhouettes on planters, interactive installations for science education, and physical game patterns on the ground, the needs of various groups were met and more ways to use the square could be developed. The team adopted a research-based method and refined design to create a public space that is conducive to the physical and mental health of children and the elderly, promoting communication and interaction between different user groups, and significantly improving the quality of urban public space. In addition, the team’s post-occupancy observation and reflections on maintenance and utilization provide valuable experience for future design.

Looking to Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) sites and traditional ecological knowledge-based infrastructures (Lo–TEK), we find nature-based systems that symbiotically work with the environment. This article suggests that by hybridizing Lo–TEK with high-tech systems, the GIAHS sites could offer designers a toolkit towards economically, ecologically, culturally, and technologically innovative systems that can improve productivity and resilience. Whereas urban development results in the erasure of history, identity, culture and nature, this idea explores how urbanization can be an agent for the migration and reapplication of agricultural heritage systems, rather than their greatest threat. Cities can leap-frog the typical Western model of displacing indigenous diversity for homogenous high-tech. Instead, catalyzing localized, agricultural heritage landscapes like those designated as globally important agricultural heritage systems, as scalable, productive and resilient climate change solutions and technologies. It requires a shift in the thinking about traditional agriculture and about the relationship to Nature, from superior to symbiotic.

Tetris Square is a commercial plaza located in a corner of a large mixed-use development in Tianhe District, Guangzhou. Designers treated the site as an urban public space rather than a commercial place simply for children play, with focus on younger users and core families. Landscape architects attempt to respond to a series of community demands with a smarter proposal. Instead of a direct use of finished play equipment, designers create many flexible spaces for diverse play experience, and “hide” a grove by integrating it into the play facilities, which introduces an urban oasis attracting more visitors to the square. This does not follow the conventional design principle of commercial spaces which is to plant as few trees as possible for a maximum storefront display. The grid modules of squares make facility fabrication and installation much easier, helping save the costs and ensure the construction quality. Assembled precast concrete outdoor furniture was used extensively in the whole complex. Landscape architects designed only two basic precast concrete modules, which could be assembled into more than twenty combinations. Now Tetris Square is an urban playground for children and their parents, as well as a public space for other residents in adjacent communities. The project provides children with fun and happiness through user-friendly and naturalized design, encouraging children’s cognitive learning from the external world, and simulating their imagination and creativity in play.

By analyzing master planning of the Overall Improvement Initiative for Tianhe Central Business District, Guangzhou, this paper focused on the overall improvement initiative driven by micro regeneration in the urban public realm. To deal with challenges such as a variety of issues, multiple stakeholders, and long time span in this initiative, the planning team came up with a systematic roadmap including three stages, i.e. fundamental principals, design strategies, and implementation measures. In response, they built a goal-oriented Holistic Quintuple-Value System, drew Three Urban Public Realm Maps on urban governance, and launched the pilot action projects based on the “Influence-Complexity Matrix”. Additionally, the team valued public participation and feedback, and played diverse roles, e.g., consultant and organizer for public participation events, promoter for communication of communities, and propellant for project implementation. The Initiative has been reviewed and legalized in 2019, wherein, the implemented ones by stage since 2020, not only enhance the regional governance in Guangzhou, but offer references to urban governance and space quality improvement of the built areas in downtown metropolis of the same kind.

Over the last 50 years, 370 large cities worldwide have severely depopulated, or shrunk, by at least 10%. Johnstown, Pennsylvania, is the third fastest U.S. shrinking city. Primarily a victim of deindustrialization, Johnstown faces severe decline issues related to depopulation, including social disorder and lowered quality of life. This project develops a framework for urban design for shrinking cities, integrating permanent functions into high development potential areas but temporary functions into declining areas. This approach allows for future development to occur through time as the city recovers. Using a GIS-based weighted overlay model to assess the threat level of decline, 4 sites were identified and strategies for each were developed. Master plans to retrofit new functions integrating residents' desire and demands into vacant / abandoned properties were then generated for each site. Rather than chasing hefty attempted quick-hitting developmental incentives, this approach will bring new long-term economic engines and lifestyles to the city due to a diversity in the economic base; it also pays attention to the social dimension of urban regeneration by providing a structured way to promoting social justice and equity in shrinking cities.

In recent years, in the context of the transition from urban construction to inventory development, landscape architects have begun to explore an urban micro-regeneration mode with gradual, small-scale interventions based on community building. Through the lens of Landscape Architecture, the project elaborated in this article focuses on everyday landscape, explores strategies for improving urban spatial quality in public space, and discusses the ways that landscape architects engage in public participation and community building. Taking Dashilanr neighborhood as the testing ground, this project experimented on a public space microregeneration framework and an innovative public participation mode based on pop-up practices. In response to current spatial problems in Dashilanr neighborhood, the project team proposed a regeneration framework of 5 strategies for public space: activity implantation, traffic improvement, greening promotion, rainwater management, and event and industry planning. As a test to the framework, project presentation and feedback, interactive experience, community building, and other functions were integrated into temporary urban space installations in the pop-up spaces. Combined theoretical framework with practical experiences, this project paid attention to the discussion of propagation effects and discipline boundaries, so as to compile the Dashilanr Micro-Regeneration Handbook, which provides an experimental sample for the inventory planning of Beijing’s old city.

With the increase of population in big cities, urban industrial districts are constantly seeking new development to realize the conversion from single-functional to multifunctional systems, to equip the city with diverse public spaces. The Port of Houston operates at the dynamic confluence of industry, transportation, and ecological systems, and has been a major driver of Houston’s economic growth over the last century. However, behind the prosperous economic growth, the port suffers from the isolation with the surrounding communities. Based on the “2045 Port Houston Master Plan,” the Landscape Planning and Design for the Port of Houston project focuses on urban space activation and ecological environment restoration through landscape planning and design methods, while facing the challenges of ecological environment, urban spatial pattern repositioning, and other urban issues. The project is expected to build an economically, socially, and ecologically healthy industrial waterfront zone. Port Houston, beyond its primary function as an economic driver, becomes a more visible and substantial force in urban governance of advancing the region’s activation and resilience.

In recent years, challenges of storms, land loss and sea level rise are getting more and more serious in the coastal areas. Since its founding in 2009, the Coastal Sustainability Studio (CSS) of Louisiana State University has been trying to use innovative approaches to foster resilient coastal communities and ecosystems. This interview focuses on CSS’s way of building teams, transdisciplinary collaboration, and their practices on large-scale planning in coastal areas, etc. As is stated by Jeffery Carney, director of CSS, climate change is increasingly recognized as a huge factor in coastal community design and is affecting inland regions as well, which has become a global issue to be seriously concerned. Carney also suggests that it is the duty of landscape architects to put the complexities of the ecosystem into a human context. Only with the application of systems thinking and with collaboration with a diverse team, can we realize design and development in productive and responsible ways.

The meanings of Sponge City and LID Technology are explained followed by an analysis of the Sponge City and LID ideas in Chinese and world history. Recent developments of planning and design techniques for LID are summarized. Effects and limits of Sponge City and LID are explained on behalf of Chinese and international examples. Further some advice for best planning and design strategies including principles for merging technical and landscape / urban planning issues are given. Finally, experiences with practical designs and different projects are reviewed, highlighting what is needed to improve practice of Sponge City and LID theories.

Many of the world’s coasts are becoming increasingly urbanized, with two-fifths of cities with populations of millions located near coastlines. Coastal settlements have always been attractive due to the provision of critical inputs to industries, despite the many threats — floods, typhoons, tsunamis, etc. With the Southeast Asian market expected to become the fifth largest economy by 2020, migration from rural to urban areas is set to increase, putting a strain on existing infrastructures within the cities, one of which is the solid waste disposal and recycling infrastructure within the developing nations in Southeast Asia.

Currently in the age of the Anthropocene, it is clear that human has greatly reshaped the Earth, bending nature into the course of human wishes, terraforming the land with landfills, mines, and patchwork agriculture fields, choking the atmosphere with toxic emissions, and cloging the seas with plastic waste. Inadequate waste disposal management has resulted in poorly managed landfills with waste being washed into water during rainy seasons, jeopardizing the environment and local communities (typically the most vulnerable ones) that depend on it. This project hopes to explore the nature of plastics, by envisioning a “mechanic landscape” that manages waste input within rivers whilst creating a speculative infrastructural network that varies with environmental conditions (such as global warming and sea-level rise).

Recently completed, The Block was constructed over a seven-month period along the Dubai Water Canal in Dubai Design District, providing a much-celebrated public park for the people of Dubai. Through their re-purposing of seven hundred 30-ton concrete blocks left over from the canal construction, landscape architects, desert INK created countless play features for children, outdoor exercise areas, and food and beverage outlets. Breaking all public park stereotypes and incorporating an unconventional approach to design, The Block stands out as one of the most unique and innovative landscape designs in the Middle East, if not the world. With a clear brief to attract a diverse range of new visitors to d3, desert INK set out to create an extraordinary park which would attract children and families to this otherwise design-industry focused district so that different lifestyles could co-exist and the community could thrive.

The Great Wall is a world cultural heritage and a treasure of human civilization. In 2017, the Government of Datong, Shanxi Province proposed to build a cultural heritage corridor of the ancient Great Wall. Based on deep investigation and meticulous analyses, the planning team envisioned a heritage corridor with a length of 258 km, covering a total area of 186 km2, in which the slow-traveling facility system, as an important component that integrates the construction, operation, and management of related heritage sites, provides sightseeing, recreational, and educational services. This article discusses the strategies to develop the slow-traveling facility system in the cultural heritage corridor, which adopts a low-interference structure according to the spatial distribution of heritage sites along the Great Wall, and applies the minimum cumulative resistance model and other scientific methods to analyze development suitability and ecological environment conditions of the project site. Based on the evaluation results, the slow-traveling facility system and the service node system are adaptively planned and designed, combined with a low-intervention interpretation system. Finally, the scales of facilities are designed based on an estimation of tourist amount to control the impact of construction on heritage sites and natural environment. As such, the balance between heritage conservation and tourism development is achieved.

On October 8, the 2020 Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe Award of the International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA) was awarded to Yu Kongjian, professor of School of Architecture and Landscape of Peking University. This highest honor for landscape architects and scholars recognizes their outstanding lifelong achievements. This article is a record of his speech given in the award ceremony that summarized his academic and professional careers. Looking back, Yu held that his village landscape experiences, melded with modern concepts of landscape and urbanism, sustainability and aesthetics, enables him to deal with the common challenges faced by the landscape architecture industry today. At the moment, the global COVID-19 pandemic is a powerful reminder that this is an incredibly sobering time to contemplate the relationship between humans and the nature. He also believed that the pandemic—together with other crises such as climate change—is highlighting the importance of landscape architecture that can not only heal bodies and minds, but also the planet itself.

Since 2018, the integrated regional development of the Yangtze River Delta has been subjected as a national strategy to intensify the interconnection between its cities. However, the questions of open space conservation and planning have so far remained essentially quantitative and strongly informed by regulatory and top-down principles. Focusing on the vast green heart between Shanghai, Suzhou, and Hangzhou, this design-driven research project hypothesizes that Taipu Canal can be upgraded from its current technical role into a civic spine that frames new developments and articulates the rich diversity of open spaces, ecosystems, historic water towns and villages. The research adopts a crossscale method of “contextual prototypes” that combines sampling, typological classification, and prototypical design explorations in pilot projects. A reflective phase zooms out to critically assess how these prototypical strategies can be systemized as structuring principles at the regional scale. The conclusion of the article discusses how this prototypical approach offers an opportunity to inductively complement the top-down Chinese territorial planning system, which needs to cope with increasingly complex conditions and vaster scales.

Wetland park design seeks to protect and restore the wetland ecosystems of sites through scientific approaches. However, in practice, the relevant ecological principles about wetland restoration are often not effectively understood or applied by landscape designers, resulting in compromised ecological benefits after the restoration, especially in biodiversity and habitat benefits. The authors highlighted the main causal factors in wetland—flooding and fertility—and adopted wetland birds as indicator species to simplify the evaluation method. Based on years of practice, the authors summarized a hydrology-based wetland design method for habitat restoration, aiming to translate ecological principles and research findings into design guidelines that can be easily understood and applied by landscape designers to spatial design. This design method includes 7 steps, namely 1) targeted species selection and goal setting; 2) design of habitat types and spatial arrangement; 3) landform design; 4) water level design; 5) plant community building; 6) landscape design with minimal intervention; and 7) spatial design for natural succession. The article then expanded each step using an illustrative design case, the Qinghua Wetland in Baoshan, Yunnan Province.

Advancements in data collection, computing, and visualization methods have given rise to a new form of urban concept over the last decade: the smart sustainable city which tackles various urban challenges with digital technologies. However, earlier approaches omit the importance of citizens’ involvement in decision-making processes, which leads to an imbalanced information asymmetry between individuals and authorities and an increasingly reduced agency for the vulnerable. In this article, a tool and process was proposed which integrates the voices of evolving self-organizing entities to solve collective action challenges: Named as CoDAS (Co-Design Ang Sila), it is a digital platform which facilitates continuous communication between citizens and authorities during different development phases of a given project. By including a large number of stakeholders to participate in the codesign process as co-creators, CoDAS aims to improve communication efficiency while achieving equitable outcomes in design and development, along with post-occupancy common resource management. To test this hypothesis, a site design experiment was conducted on a site near a historical fishing village of Ang Sila, Thailand.

Located in the suburb of Nanchang City in Jiangxi Province, the Nanchang Red Earth Heritage Park is positioned as a country park that features vast vermicular red earth and Pinus massoniana forest. The off-site review and on-site exploration suggested that the site was confronting with problems of severer soil erosion, biodiversity loss, and intensive human intervention. Both to preserve the symbolic red earth in the site and to reduce cost due to limited budget, a country park requiring low intervention and maintenance was proposed. The park would also engage citizens with geological and scientific education programs and create diverse interactive experience. The design strategies were optimized through continuous site observation and reflection, both with historical and existing data in a broader sense and individual feeling by on-site exploration. This way of dialogue and connection to the site finally gives birth to a natural country park that stays in harmony with nature.

The street is a type of important urban public space with multiple social values, one of which is the restorative potential. Based on the “beingaway,” “extent,” “fascination,” and “compatibility” constructs of restorative environments proposed by the Attention Recovery Theory, this study elaborated the significance of restorativeness provided by street environments to people living in high-density cities. It used the traditional restorativeness scale with mobile eye trackers to explore the restorative experience provided by an urban street, and identified the specific streetscape elements related to restorativeness and the degree of their influences. The results show that “greenery,” “people,” and “cars” perform significant influences, and different streetscape elements have different degrees of influences on the 4 constructs of the restorative environment. For example, for the“being-away,” “extent,” and “fascination” constructs, the influence of “greenery” is the most important, while “people” plays the core role in “compatibility.” The findings can help professionals develop targeted design strategies to improve diverse street environments for a better restorativeness.

Land reclamation and dredging have a damaging effect on marine and coastal ecology. This study rationally analyzes the conflicts in the approved environmental impact assessment (EIA), including the negligence of the direct and indirect effects on coastal and marine habitats, the short circuit of the EIA procedures among stakeholders, and the insufficient marine environmental restoration schemes. This study also promotes awareness among the stakeholders so they will understand the direct and indirect effects of land reclamation on marine and coastal ecosystems, as well as the indications if they follow the EIA procedures, and implement a responsive marine bioremediation before and during the dredging process. By taking the Ocean Flower Island in Hainan, China as an example, this study applied the responsive oyster-seagrass-coral filtration bed system before and during the dredging process to maintain the water turbidity and suspended sediment concentration below the tolerance limits of the coral reefs in the adjacent areas.

Decoding the relationship between crime and place has been the focus of researchers in both design and social fields for a few decades. Space syntax theory offers the possibility of examining the configuration characteristics of the environment and their potential influences on people’s activities and crime patterns; however, its implementation in landscape architecture has been limited. This study responds to such a gap by exploring the effectiveness of applying space syntax theory to predict safety levels in a park in Cairo, Egypt. depthmapX was used to analyze the spatial configuration of the park. Crime records from 2019 were collected through site observation and staff interviews, and analyzed using ArcGIS 10.3 software. Results indicated a strong correlation between space depth / integration / connectivity and crime pattern distribution. The park visibility graphs indicated the different impacts of vegetation (evergreen tree / deciduous trees) in summer and winter on visual connectivity and crime types. The research concluded that applying space syntax theory to landscape architecture is challenging; nevertheless, it represents a promising approach to predict committing crimes in urban parks, and the findings can be adopted to enhance park conceptual designs to achieve higher safety level.

Traditional landscape design studio training starts with the learning of a classic or prominent landscape project, may it be through site observation or a trace-over / imitation exercise. Foundation year students in a landscape program typically take the landscape precedent project as a study ground, to learn about the landscape master’s design through the mimicking process in the trace-over exercise, or to learn about the articulation of spatial design through site observation.

Landscape Architecture, afterall, is a creative endeavor. Thus, an alternative approach is to start the fundamental training with the study of artistic processes, to foster appreciation in art and design, innovative concept development, and articulation in craftsmanship. Also, the contemporary discourse of Landscape Architecture is no longer simply about spatial design, but has transformed to require understanding of process, operation, step-by-step mechanism, movement, and how a system works. The performative and dynamic aspects of landscape are being valued nowadays.

Such ways of seeing landscapes require a different set of observation and representation methods and skills. In this article, the author shares how the pedagogical content and developments of the foundation year landscape design studio in the HKU Bachelor of Arts in Landscape Studies BA(LS) Program help train students with such new interpretations to contemporary Landscape Architecture.

The design of a curb is straight forward. The curb itself provides a conveyance of stormwater, facilitating the movement of water and pollutants from the street into waterways. Pollutants such as sediment, nutrients from lawn fertilizers, bacteria, viruses, pesticides, metals, and petroleum byproducts accumulate on the road surface and are released during storm events, carried to storm drains, and deposited into waterways, often without treatment. Once pollutants enter the waterways they impact the ecosystem and affect water quality. How can discrete standards—like a curb—be leveraged to have larger systemic impacts?

The redesign of the curb to perform as a magnet for pollutants can challenge this design standard. During the summer of 2019, the interdisciplinary research team tested alternatives to the standard concrete curb and apron at Ohio State University. The team used an iterative design process to add patterning and crenellations to the face of the curb and apron. Using full scale models to test simulated storm events, the team collected data to evaluate the performance of 21 alternative designs. The results suggest the new combined curb and apron designs can abstract pollutants from roadways before they are detrimental to water bodies and aquatic ecosystems.

As one of the frequently used green spaces of urban residents, residential green spaces have a positive effect on people’s mental health status. In order to understand the impact of residential green spaces on citizens’ mental health during the COVID-19 epidemic, this study collected the sociodemographic data of 556 residents from 15 residential communities in Hefei New Municipal and Culture District, Anhui Province, China in March, 2020 through online questionnaires, then adopted the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (K10 Scale) to evaluate the residents’ mental health status, and used GIMP Grid to quantify the green view index of residential green spaces outside the windows. Besides, a multiple linear regression model was used to explore the correlations between residential green spaces and residents’ mental health status. The findings show that green coverage ratio, satisfaction of the landscapes of green space, green view index outside the window, and green viewing duration of the residential green spaces have positive effects on residents’ mental health status. The study verifies the benefits of residential green spaces to promoting resident’s mental health status under COVID-19, providing a scientific guidance for the future practice of urban construction.

As of 2007, over 50% of the global population is now urban. With more global urbanites, has come increased urbanisation and displacement of green space and natural environments from our urban centres. Biophilic design aims to restore natural stimuli in our built and designed environments to protect, maintain, restore and enhance our physiological, cognitive and psychological connections with the natural world. As part of a wider salutogenic approach to health, biophilic design has the potential to catalyze landscape architecture into playing a central role in public health of urban environments.