Pioneer Information
Yu, a self-described “peasant’s son” who was born and raised in the remote farming village of Dong Yu in Jinhua, Zhejiang Province, China, rose to become one of the world’s most influential landscape architects as the global champion of the “sponge cities” concept for mitigating urban flooding. He intended to study at Beijing Forestry University, but his entrance exam scores were so high he was invited to enroll in the landscape gardening program, where he earned an MA (1987). In his formative years, Yu was profoundly affected by seeing the ravages of DDT application on marine life and people. At the age of ten, he nearly drowned in a monsoon-swollen creek but was saved by low-hanging willow branches. In the 1980s he witnessed the effects of so-called “grey infrastructure” of concrete dams and related waterway disruptions that led to the destruction of paradisal areas like that of his home village. He received his Doctor of Design degree at Harvard Graduate School of Design (1995) and practiced two years with the SWA Group in California before returning to China in 1997. His pioneering research on Ecological Security Patterns (1995) and Ecological Infrastructure, Negative Planning and Sponge Cities (2003) has been adopted by the Chinese government (2013) as national policy for urban planning and ecological protection. He was founder of Peking University’s landscape architecture department as well as the landscape architecture firm Turenscape, which is responsible for some 600 projects, principally in China, but also in Thailand, and the U.S. Yu, for more than 25 years, tirelessly worked to promote the “sponge cities” concept for large-scale, nature-based solutions. He has lectured extensively throughout the world and written more than twenty books; he was also the founder and chief editor of the internationally lauded magazine Landscape Architecture Frontier. In 2023, Yu won the Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize. On September 23, 2025, he died in a plane crash near Aquidauna, Mato Grosso do Sol, Brazil.
