Word: zhongshan
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Guilin's main drag is Zhongshan Lu, running from the railway station toward Solitary Beauty Peak and Folding Brocade Hill - both featuring prominently on tourist itineraries led by flag-waving, fact-quacking guides. But Zhongshan itself is carpeted with an enticing parade of hawkers: barbecued-meat vendors alternate with bootblacks banging their brushes together to attract custom, grizzled farmers hunch over mounds of dried persimmons, and pickled-vegetable sellers rub shoulders with eco-entrepreneurs whose handwritten signboards tout for secondhand MP3 players...
...officials in the city of Zhongshan decided to tear down a shipyard and replace it with a park. The city, situated across the mouth of the Pearl River from Hong Kong, has a tradition of putting its wealth to good civic use: its tidy streets are adorned with banks of flowers and well-manicured trees, and it has racked up model-city awards from Beijing and the United Nations. But these shiny credentials presented a dilemma for local leaders?their political promotion would depend in part on outdoing their predecessors, and Zhongshan didn't leave much room for improvement...
...Kongjian, China's pre-eminent landscape architect, was brought down from Beijing to lend the project some cachet?and, as is often the case, his first move was to throw a wrench into other people's plans. Zhongshan didn't need more flowers, Yu told the city officials; it didn't need fountains, ornate wrought-iron fences, or hedges shaped like animals. Instead of bulldozing the shipyard, he proposed, they could put it to new use. A gantry crane would make an interesting gate, a crumbling water tower could become the base of a lighted beacon. Instead of grass...
...more recently of austere Stalinist-style parks designed to project state authority. But he felt the country needed more. "Landscape architects can't just be garden artists," says Yu. So, in 1998, he founded Turenscape, China's first private landscape-design firm, and set about finding places like Zhongshan where officials were willing to try something different...
...kind of literal food for thought?a reminder that landscaping needn't be expensive and that even agriculture can look modern. In Taizhou, Yu un-channeled a local river, removing cement barriers and letting it flood into a wetland through which he snaked bicycle paths, docks and terraces. In Zhongshan, Yu's shipyard park, which like the campus was honored by the American Society of Landscape Architects, has quickly become a local landmark. On a recent weekday afternoon, the park was full. Toddlers climbed happily over pebbled railroad tracks, men played chess on a platform surrounded by tall reeds...