Your metropolis isn’t ready for what’s coming. The classical methodology for coping with stormwater is to get it out of city as rapidly as doable, with gutters and sewers and canals. But an increasing number of, that technique is breaking down: As the ambiance warms, it can hold more moisture, spawning ever-wetter storms that overwhelm this creaky infrastructure. Your metropolis was constructed for a local weather of 100, 200, 300 years in the past, however that local weather now not exists.

The sizzling new technique in city design, which was pioneered in China, is to sluggish all the pieces down. Since 2013, China has launched into a nationwide coverage to show its rising metropolises into sponge cities, which seize stormwater as an alternative of disposing of all of it. If engineers can sluggish the circulation of that water and permit it to soak into the Earth as an alternative of operating away—utilizing rain gardens, spreading grounds, permeable pavers, and concrete wetlands—that concurrently reduces flooding and refills underlying aquifers. That’ll be more and more vital because the planet warms and droughts intensify: Sponge cities goal to financial institution water for a wet day, or extra precisely, a parched one.

“Whenever rain falls, we retain as much as possible,” says Kongjian Yu, champion of the idea and founding father of the Beijing design agency Turenscape. “We slow down the flow and let the earth take in the water. A sponge city will become an adaptive city, a resilient water system, a porous landscape.” A latest research discovered that, all informed, cities throughout the United States may very well be absorbing billions of gallons of water a day partly by following China’s lead and accelerating sponge initiatives. “The sponge city is the urgent, immediate solution that can adapt cities to climate change, to heat, to floods, to drought,” says Yu.

Following Yu’s latest award of the Oberlander Prize by the Cultural Landscape Foundation for his work on sponge cities, WIRED sat down with the panorama architect to speak about tips on how to make city areas as spongy as doable, how that may remedy an entire lot of issues abruptly, and what metropolises can do now to organize for the more and more chaotic local weather of tomorrow. This dialog has been condensed and edited for readability

WIRED: One factor that makes this idea so highly effective is that you are able to do it on such totally different scales. In Los Angeles, they’ve spreading grounds—open areas tons of of toes throughout the place water is allowed to soak into the aquifer—however they’re additionally tearing up thin strips of roadside and putting in greenery.

Kongjian Yu: A sponge metropolis will be on any scale. Water is treasured. If you keep water in your yard, you don’t should water your bushes, you don’t should water your backyard, as a result of water is beneath—your treasure is right here. It’s at a private, particular person, neighborhood scale.