On March 15th, the Lecture Series "Landscape, City and Water: Regional Planning and Design" was successfully held by the Institute of Landscape Architecture, Zhejiang University and Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. It was the first transdisciplinary international seminar organized by the Institute of Landscape Architecture. Six scholars from the Netherlands, Belgium and China expertizing in landscape architecture, urban and regional planning, and civil engineering were invited to discuss the regional planning and design theories and practices in the intersecting fields of urbanization, landscape transformation and water management from the Chinese and Western perspectives. The forum was moderated by Dr. Yuting Xie and Dr. Christian Nolf (an associate professor at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University). Furthermore, international cooperation network was framed between Zhejiang University, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University and Delft University of Technology.
Dr. Steffen Nijhuis (associate professor at Delft University of Technology), Dr. Christian Nolf, and Dr. Wei Guo (associate professor at Beijing Forestry University) gave lectures titled Landscape Interfaces: Regional Design at the Intersection of Landscape, City and Water, From Sponge City to Sponge Region: Exploring the Yangtze River Delta and Dyke, Reclamation and Settlement: Research on Traditional Polder Landscapes. The lecture by Dr. Yuting Xie Delta Urbanization 2.0：A Typological Landscape Approach introduces the current situation of the loss of landscape diversity in the Yangtze River Delta region because of urbanization and industrialization, and generates type-specific strategies of landscape conservation, transformation and critical reconstruction for the cases of Suzhou, Nantong and Yangzhou.
At the end of forum, four speakers and two guests—Dr. Yongchao Zhou (associate professor from the College of Civial Engineering and Architecture) and Dr. Yunwen Chen (Institute of Landscape Architecture) joined the round table discussion, which focused on the issues such as how to establish a cooperation system between the planning, water conservancy, agriculture and landscape design departments in China, and how to apply advanced western planning and design theories and methods in respond to the large population density.
