‘The easiest way to control urban flooding is to give water more space’

Chinese landscape architect and Peking University professor Kongjian Yu, who pioneered the sponge cities concept and won the 2023 Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize this month, told Shivani Singh that it is wrong to judge a project that is still in the nascent stage, and needs to cover not just entire cities but regions, nations and perhaps the planet.