Meet the architects igniting a green city revolution.
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0:00
There was just so much water
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It was everywhere. We had water pushing up like a geyser. It was just everywhere
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Jakarta floods is always happen every year. Usually in the part that you are expected
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Even the one that you didn't expect them to have the floods
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now have the floods. It was just chaos. It was non-stop rain and we had no contact to anyone for five days pretty much
0:38
In my role as a photojournalist, I've been to war zones and I can honestly say that this felt like a war zone on a completely different level
0:46
Cities flood. Some more than others. Amid the global climate crisis, floods are now the most common natural disaster
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and the concrete jungles that we call cities are particularly vulnerable. Oh my god, I'm feeling like a baby
1:06
In the battle to contain trains through rain, one unusual approach stands out
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To try and tame flooding, China is using nature to turn cities into sponges
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and it's all thanks to one architect. Sponge City is a nature-based solution for climate adaptation
1:36
It is about how can we use nature to slow down the flow of water
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to regulate water using landscape. This is Professor Kong Zhang-Yu. He's the landscape architect that nurtured the Sponge City revolution in China
1:50
To him, all of China's catastrophic floods have the same root cause
1:56
modern gray infrastructure is developed based on urbanization beginning actually in in these
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countries like london like paris where the climate used to be very mild this infrastructure model
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being adapted by other countries like malaysia indonesia and chinese cities and now all these
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Why did the city fail? It's simply because it is not invented for this kind of climate
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The rain infrastructure just means building with concrete Buildings dams levees roads and pipes cementing the soil underneath and trapping water at the surface We think we can build a stronger pipe system
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or we think we can control flood by building bigger reservoirs or stronger dams
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But what if suddenly you have some kind of flood which you will never have, you will never have had before
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Then you will have a serious disaster. Gong Jiang Yu unsuccessfully lobbied policymakers to invest in sponge cities
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Then a disaster struck. 2012, a huge flood in Beijing. 79 people died
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And at the same time, some of my project get awarded. and it broadcast in the CCTV news
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in Chinese Central Television News. So in 2013, the central government, and President Xi
3:38
also says that we need to build a sponge city. It's true
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The Chinese government has committed to adding a degree of sponginess to at least 80% of its cities by 2030
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And that approach is slowly turning heads in the concrete capitals of the West. The challenge with implementing green infrastructure in older cities like New York versus newer cities that are being built in China is that it is much easier to incorporate these sort of new techniques, new practices when you're building new
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New York City's incorporated thousands of these green infrastructure practices over the last seven years
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It does still pale in comparison to, you know, how much impervious surface that the city has
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Turning a concrete city like New York green is basically a bureaucratic and engineering nightmare
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It's just terrible how hard it is to get our act together. There are so many problems that governments have
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I think they don't weight this high enough. And we need to make people and cities and nature
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much more resilient to the change that's happening and going to keep happening at an accelerating rate
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You only have to look at Lismoor, which had the worst flood it's ever had. It was over 14 metres high, and that was because their main solution
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is having a levy and the levy was overtopped You need something else You need to think differently about how you protect yourself from these floods which is not just engineering solutions
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It all comes down to a simple but costly calculation. How can a city work in tune with nature rather than trying to control it
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I think a longer-term solution is a restorative and regenerative one. This is where I think the sponge cities have a real role to play in helping to build resilience
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but not necessarily provide a 100% solution for any one of those shocks like a storm or stresses like sea level rise
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But as a whole, those nature-based solutions will reduce the exposure because they'll mitigate some of the impacts
5:58
Sponge cities are not a universal buffer against extreme weather events. Nor are they intended to be
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That's how cities got into this mess in the first place. Copy-pasting the same concrete urban model across the world
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with little concern for local climates or biodiversity. The real power of this is not thinking this is a silver bullet
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so if we just plant trees, that's the answer. This transformation from a grey palette where it's concrete
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to a green palette where it's softer and it's things that grow
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It's something that we all have a connection and there's multiple functionality from it
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Turning grey cities green is about much more than just managing the water cycle better
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It's about adapting to a changing climate while also improving city life
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Which brings us to the US-Mexican border and the twin cities of Nogales-Sonora and Nogales-Arizona
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The Nogales were founded at the same time, but the two cities experienced floods very differently
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The development of the two cities is highly influenced by the border itself
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To the point that it's common practice to refer to streets in Mexico as arroyos, which literally means creeks
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So in other words, when it rains, the street performs as a creek
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Gabriel Diaz Montemayor and Francisco Lara Valencia research ways to bring nature back to the Nogales
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The monsoon is experienced completely in a different way. We interview children and we ask them to draw their experience with rain
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Most of the kids in Nogales Sonora when they represent the rain they don see water falling from the sky They see water running on the streets And when you see the picture of the kids of Nogales Arizona
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they see the rainbow and they see flowers blooming. So it's a completely different experience
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It's the same place, the same watershed, the same community separated by the border in a very dramatic way
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And it's the most vulnerable communities that tend to live in these flood-prone areas
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This multifunctionality is critical to create not only more sustainable ways of handling stormwater, but also creating equity in seas
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The sponge city is a solution to solve the problem of climate adaptation, protection of biodiversity and provision of food and energy
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At the same time, provide beauty and healthy environment. This is the blueprint for a more resilient future
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Working in tune with nature. And yet, very few governments seem interested in replicating China's top-down sponge city policy
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Meanwhile, it is undeniable that extreme weather events are making cities from Lismore in Australia to Nogales in Mexico more and more vulnerable
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What we're facing is an existential threat to us all. And I don't think we've fully woken up to that yet
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If we can't slow down global warming and limit it, it's going to become impossible to survive in some of those locations
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And I'm sure some of the policy makers aren't the people who actually have to relocate their homes or relocate their cities
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And what we're trying to do is share best practice working with nature
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something that both individuals and governments can implement that can help the situation, help us to build resilience
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To get there, we have to completely rethink how we build our cities in the face of climate change
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Nature already has the answers. We just need to listen
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