Landscape infrastructure

We've always argued Landscape design is more effective here in China than elsewhere, reintroducing the role planning has lost.
Through this rigorous new approach several of the key paradoxes we faced are addressed, namely: rural-urban (societal and economic) divide, rural-urban fragmentation, (short-term) investment cycles, society engineering (job creation / innovation / sourcing etc.), and most notably the green-in-black paradox and issues of remediation (China=brown site) and even the notion of deurbanization (as we've introduced in Longgang), while aiming for spatial-urban streamlining and densification.

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According to a national report on brown fields redevelopment
titled Recycling America’s Land (USCM 2006), more
than 400,000 sites with real or perceived environmental hazards
dot the American landscape today. That legacy is estimated to be
worth more than $2 trillion in devalued property. Underlying this
legacy is a major network of post- war infrastructures—airports,
harbours, roads, sewers, bridges, dikes, dams, power corridors,
terminals, treatment plants—that is now suffering major decay
from lack of repair and maintenance (ASCE 2008, Infrastructure
Canada 2007–2008, Choate and Walter 1983). In revisiting a
series of milestone events in the history of North America, this
paper draws a cross- section through phases of industrialization
in the 19th and 20th centuries in order to track how the necessity
for infrastructure accidentally emerged from crisis and failure.
A series of patterns and shifts are identified to expose the
paradoxical, sometimes toxic relationship between pre- industrial
landscape conditions and modern industrial systems. The underlying
objective of this essay is to redefine the conventional
meaning of modern infrastructure by amplifying the biophysical
landscape that it has historically suppressed, and to reformulate
landscape as a sophisticated, instrumental system of essential
resources, services, and agents that generate and support urban
economies. Three contemporary streams of development including
urban ecologies, bio- industries, and waste economies are explored
briefly to discuss future fi elds of practice.