Making Sponge City by Deciphering Indigenous Ecological Wisdom: case study of Chengdu, China

As the impact of the climate change, the city flood in China has been becoming more and more serious recently. Under this circumstance, government in China started to push a new city construction concept called Sponge City. In 2014, the Ministry of Housing and Construction set 30 cities as the pilots for the implantation of Sponge City. The Special Planning of Sponge City had been made out to support the development of the pilot cities. More than 3 years passed, the term Sponge City has become popular all over China, more and more cities started to accept the Sponge City concept, and tried to find the proper way to make plans and to implement. To improve the way to build sponge city, an important way is to summarize the experience and problem in the past 3 years. Based on the accumulations of the planning documents, selected sites surveys and interviews and questionnaire surveys of the officials from the 30 pilot cities, this research tries to summarize the present paradigm of building sponge city in China and analyzes the problem on planning making and implementation performance.