China’s Sponge Cities—A Vast Living Roof Lab

Living roofs are important Low Impact Design (LID) tool to manage stormwater.Due to climate change and intense urban development, LID stormwater strategies are now crucial for urban design around the world, especially in economically booming China with a long history of floods. The changing climate made rain events and their peak flow runoff rates extremely difficult to accurately predict. Designers need to be prepared to deal with excessive rainwater in increasing denser and impervious cities in China. The “Sponge City” initiative started in 2015 provides an opportunity to use and monitor living roofs at large scale. Most of the international peer-reviewed research so far has been applied in controlled small-scale test plots or site environments. The sponge city projects provide a chance to apply and monitor their effectiveness at urban scale. China’s innovative flood protection history goes back 5000 years, a good opportunity for China to be a world leader in large scale living roof application for stormwater management. This article argues that LID should not be an afterthought but the driver of urban design. Landscape architects are equipped not only with a holistic understanding and reading of a site at regional, urban and site scale and its environmental systems, they also have the holistic knowledge of the other parameters needed to implement LID. The article provides an insight into China’s governance structure and suggests methods to designers to support the implementation of LID.