Hydrological Heritage Landscape

Abstract

As one of the essential elements in the ecosystem, water often plays a key role in the formation process of the landscape. The polder landscape is one types of hydrological heritage landscape formed by the interaction of water and human beings. However, with the influence of climate change and human activities, the unique polder landscape has been severely challenged recently. This project will take the polder landscape of the Ningshao Plain, which is situated near the mouth of the Qiantang River in middle-east of China as an example to research how the design can protect the cultural landscape and be adaptive to development at the same time.
The Ningshao Plain is one of the oldest polder areas in China. It is a long and narrow plain developed between the mountains and the sea, which is the result of residence creating arable land conditions for agriculture and struggling against sea invasion for thousands of years. Due to the needs of freshwater storage, transportation, and so on, the area eventually formed a landscape with the dense canal network and multi-level water conservancy systems. Although the system can quickly discharge water from the canal into the sea, when extreme weather such as typhoon comes every summer, cities are still often threatened by floods due to their poor surface discharge capacity; the rapid development of urbanization and the deterioration of the ecological environment also further damaged the morphology of the polder landscape, A large amount of agricultural field was replaced by building blocks so some traditional hydrological system has gradually lost its original function and be abandoned. The large potentials of the polder as cultural landscape was neglect.
Therefore, the design objective is to build a resilient framework taking hydrological heritage landscape as the basis to ensure the preservation of cultural history and sustainable development of Ningshao plain. And the design assignments concludes three aspects:1)increase rainwater recycle capacity 2)build a robust blue-green network 3) Rejuvenate water-related public spaces.
According to the guiding theory of this project, ‘Protecting with planning’, the core design strategy is to taking the historical polder landscape structure as the basis of the framework. So this project focuses more on the research of the spatial characteristics and development process of the polder landscape in the Ningshao Plain, and tries to explore the potentials of the polder landscape. Some principles of form and resiliency will be concluded from the site itself during the analysis process, which are the ‘polder grammar’, and will be experimented in the design of different scales. These design principles will also be combined with some other resilient strategies studied from cases. Finally, this project will provide a reference for how resilient strategy can be applied in design in a way of more adaptive to the local conditions and cultures.