Where water, land and air meet: Elemental Edges and the New Chinese City

• In Event: Plumbing the Depths: Towards a Deeper Understanding of Groundwater

Abstract

This paper investigates the lived and imagined effects of urbanization without limits at precisely the moment when amplifying visions of ecological precarity are dominating debates in the earth sciences. In the context of China’s unprecedented mass urbanization program, it interrogates the logics of the country’s recent Sponge City initiative, a new urban water management program that mobilizes permeable pavement to transform environmental calamity and linear processes of waste into closed loops of sustainable regeneration. Yet, as the paper explores, the project also exceeds the imagined territories of groundwater management as it disarticulates the boundaries between air, water, land, and life in the city. Taking permeability as both the subject and object of analysis, I explore how Chinese urban planners today have increasingly come to view city building as a total environment encompassing the aerial, terrestrial and subterranean. To these ends, I suggest that, as sponge cities both urbanize nature and naturalize urbanization, they are also challenging traditional notions of the discrete elements of matter. Ultimately, tracing the vital entanglements between water, earth and atmosphere in Chinese urban planning, I ask what it might mean to view these forces as collaborators rather than distinct agencies.

Author

• Victoria Nguyen, Amherst College