1999年，中山市的政府官员决定拆除一个旧船厂并在原址上建造一个公园。中山市位于与香港邻近的珠江三角洲出海口交界处，该市有为市民创造优良生活环境的传统：整洁的街道上装饰上鲜花和精心修剪的树木，并曾获得中国政府和联合国颁发的“最佳人居环境奖”。但也正因为这个奖项，使得现任地方领导人面临着新的困境：如何在城市建设上做得比前任更好，因为中山市已经没有太多城市空间可以改善了。正在这个时候，粤中造船厂倒闭，这为地方政府改善城市环境提供了新的机会。
俞孔坚，这位中国卓越的景观设计师，从北京带来了对该项目的独特建议，这也是他通常的做法，首先对原有别人做的规划给与了尖锐的抨击：中山不需要更多的鲜花。他告诉当地官员们，这里不需要喷泉，也不需要装饰华丽的铁围栏，不需要像动物园一样被围闭。他建议，应该把船厂变成新的用途，而不是全部拆除和推平这个船厂。龙门吊机可以变成一个有趣的大门，旧水塔可以变成航标灯塔，城市应该种植野草去代替大片的草坪。中山市的官员觉得这些构思有点不可思议。“我们只想构建一些有特色的东西，但你这些构思却让我们感觉很另类。”邵阳（译音）说，他是时任的城市规划局的领导。“这不像是一个仅仅在里面布置一些石头和植物之类的中国园林。”但同时，由于其低廉的造价和生态的概念，俞孔坚的构思最终赢得了当地官员们的认同。邵阳说：“总之，中山已经有很多的公园，我们不一定把所有公园都造成同一个模式。”
这是当今中国与众不同的观点。中国正处于人类历史上最快速城市增长的剧痛之中。近年来，中国平均每年建成的建筑面积20亿平方米——这相当于全世界总量的一半，同时它还计划到2020年增加200～300亿平方米的建筑。从理论上看，这为城市规划革新创造了无限的机会。但当中国城市变得越来越大的时候，城市的面貌却千篇一律：每个城市看起来都有不可一世的壮观的政府办公楼，有象高速公里宽阔的城市道路，有象天安门般宽大的广场。这些雷同的城市的产生，主要是因为缺乏专业的设计师，以及过快的增长使得根本没有时间对设计做精明和细致的考虑。这同时反映出人们的价值观：通常把城市基础设施看作是一个城市的符号而不是考虑它的实际用途，同时铺张地只把它看作是一个城市现代化的标识。
俞孔坚，北京大学景观设计学的教授，指出当今中国的城市发展的方式只强调城市的规模和性质，却对环境漠视和对自然界不计后果的索取。随着耕地和森林的不断减少和水资源的匮乏，俞教授指出，城市再承受不了这样的浪费了。“中国需要一个根本的转变。我们之前误解了什么是发展的意义。我们必须发展一个新的本土化的系统，去理解人地关系的变化。”现年42岁的俞孔坚，在哈佛大学获得设计学博士学位后于1997年回国任职于北京大学景观规划设计中心的时候，景观设计甚至不是一个官方认可的职业。中国有着为士大夫们造园的悠久历史，以及近几十年来在官方工程项目中充满了呆板的斯大林式的公园。但俞博士认为，中国需要更多其它的东西。“景观设计师不能只是园林艺术家”他说。在1998年，他成立了土人公司——中国第一个私人景观设计公司，并着手寻找象中山这样政府官员愿意尝试新事物的地方。
对中国公司而言，“土人(turen)”是一个奇特的名字。“人（ren）”表示人，但“土（tu）”的意思却复杂得多。按照字面得意思表示“泥土”或“土壤”，但这个字通常也表示“弄脏”，表示未开窍或不懂世故的意思——这通常就是指新进城的工人：满嘴发黄的牙齿，穿戴着不整洁的衣服和过时的鞋子。当俞博士的同事们在接电话时说：“这是土人”，其意思简直就是说“我是乡巴佬”。俞孔坚记得他第一次被人叫“土”的时候是在1980年，考入北京林业大学后从他的老家浙江的一个农村来到北京报到时的情形。那年他17岁，说着满腔生硬的普通话，惊讶于两旁种满了白杨树的宽阔的城市道路。这就是“小农意识”，俞博士在描述他自己第一次对北京城的印象时说，正是这种意识造成中国城市当今景象的原因：“我们是一个农业国家，当我们建设城市的时候，我们是尽可能地让他变得跟农村不一样。我们讨厌野草，我们喜欢看到高楼大厦，我们逃避自然。他说：“要建设一个真正的城市，中国需要对“土”有一个新的认识。”
上个月的一个星期天，温家宝总理在全国人大会议作的报告中提出了要建设“社会主义新农村”。俞教授当时正动身前往北京房山区的长沟镇。“尽量保留树木”，当他的在当地政府任职的朋友打电话给他，说他们正计划拆除数个村庄和搬迁近5000个村民，作为项目的一部分，准备挖一个大型人工湖泊去吸引房地产投资商和旅游者。他的朋友说当地领导希望俞教授前来商谈，并邀请他做设计。“这简直就像50年代的‘大跃进’”，俞教授说，这时候他正在前往长沟的车上，车上坐满了景观设计师。“但我想，我可以阻止他们这样做”。
当地的领导们带着俞教授踏勘他们宏大的计划，地上用白色粉线标注出人工湖泊如何沿着村庄和道路开挖。俞教授离开汽车，用相机拍下了一对推土机，这推土机在刚收割完的堆着土垛的广袤的田野中显得异常渺小。在官员的视线范围之外，俞教授把他的镜头对准了一个白杨树上的鸟窝，树的旁边是准备给人工湖泊供水的地下温泉。“他甚至只是给这些东西拍照。”当俞教授离开得越来越远的时候，一个当地官员惊奇地说。开车沿着整个镇走了一遍，俞教授经过了空置的村庄，俯视着他们计划开挖的人工湖泊。附近，一个没有围栏的草地上，放养着一头大象和梅花鹿，但它们却是由石膏做成的。
回到镇上的办公室，当地官员们展示了他们的规划。他们播放了一段DVD，演示了在其它地方的大型湖泊的图片。长沟湖将是一个新的旅游胜地，他们告诉俞教授，在那里将会有帆板、高尔夫甚至滑雪。DVD用蒙太奇的手法演示了充满鲜花、水果累累的海滨小别墅。“这就是我们的概念。”一个官员告诉俞教授，这时候屏幕上飘着热气球。
当轮到俞教授发言时，他笑了：“你们的构思非常好。”他平静地说：“但我认为你们的湖泊没有必要这么大。你们这里有很稀罕的资源，在中国的北方，这里是仅有的发现温泉的几个地方之一。因此，我现在担心，你们会花费很多的金钱，却没有回报。其它很多地方都有湖泊，你们为什么不做些与众不同的东西呢？你们应该成为创新的典范。”
俞教授放映了他以前设计的幻灯片。“野草”，他停顿了一下强调说：“野草可以是很美的，也很现代。”之后有人给俞教授带来了一个小孩的标记盒子和地图，他用这些东西构思了一个草图：在规划的湖中的小岛上保留了方形的稻田景观。负责这个项目的官员退缩了：“我们镇有大量的稻田。”他告诉俞教授：“如果人们要看稻田，他们可以到别的地方，而不需要来我们这个湖泊。”
俞博士设计作品的魅力，就是用非常简练的手法去准确表达与业主们交流的各种理念。在公园里种满了各种生机勃勃的本土植物（这些植物不需要浇水和修剪），用直线的通道、最小量的雕塑作品和涂上鲜艳颜色的金属构件。在这些乡土和现代的元素中产生强烈的对比，吸引人们向往自然景观，同时尽量少的改变场地。在开始规划时，俞博士首先深入地研究场地，尽量地尊重和保留场地已有的各种元素——他把这种方法称之为“反规划”。
在沈阳，当建筑大学搬迁到郊区的时候，俞博士在校园里设计了稻田景观。在那里，稻谷既是一个修饰的元素，同时也是一个食物的符号引人思考——这提醒人们景观并不一定很昂贵，而农耕也可以看起来很现代。在台州，俞博士摈弃了河道的渠化，拆掉了混凝土的河岸，而是让洪水进入岸线的湿地，在湿地里设置自行车道、码头和观望台。在中山，俞博士的岐江公园设计获得了美国景观设计师协会的大奖，从而迅速成为当地的地标。在最近一个平日的下午，公园里游人如鲫。学步的幼儿欢快地走在鹅卵石的轨道上，下棋的人们坐在被高高的芦苇包围着的平台上，一个新娘摆出姿势故意地拨弄着树叶，一群官员组成的考察队伍正倾听着导游介绍环境保护的理念。
尽管他作为设计师很成功，但俞博士却认为他主要是一个教育者。在2003年，他在北京大学个人支助创立了中国第一个研究生教育的景观设计学研究院并出任院长。他写了大量的文章和著作，并再次个人出资把他的著作《城市景观之路——与市长们交流》寄送给了中国大约3000个市长和官员。这本书中直指了很多政绩工程的弊端：人迹罕至的宽阔大广场，疲惫的市民们却只能蹲坐在大片草坪边上的栏杆上。俞教授的观点最近得到了高层的重新关注。环境可持续，绿色增长和资源保护成为上个月全国人大会议的主要议题。俞教授在上海市恢复被旧工业污染河道的景观设计方案得到当局的批准。上海市为了迎接2010年世界博览会，计划沿1700米的大运河两岸设计一个公园休闲廊道。
但一个更小的成功似乎让他异常开心。在他访问之后的一天，长沟镇的领导打电话给他，说他们接受了他的方案。“我将在岛上设计自行车道。”俞博士说：“稻田景观将保留，他们会非常的美。”
《时代周刊》专访，作者：SUSAN JAKES，吴智刚译，原文如下A Force Of Nature
——China's top landscape architect is on a quest to bring unexpected beauty to the nation's boomtowns
BY SUSAN JAKES | ZHONGSHAN
April 10, 2006 Vol. 167, No. 14 TIME Asia Magazine
In 1999, officials in the city of Zhongshan decided to tear down a shipyard and replace it with a park. The city, situated across the mouth of the Pearl River from Hong Kong, has a tradition of putting its wealth to good civic use: its tidy streets are adorned with banks of flowers and well-manicured trees, and it has racked up model-city awards from Beijing and the United Nations. But these shiny credentials presented a dilemma for local leaders—their political promotion would depend in part on outdoing their predecessors, and Zhongshan didn't leave much room for improvement. So when the Yuezhong shipworks went bankrupt, it wasn't long before plans emerged to remove an eyesore, cut ribbons and make progress.
Yu Kongjian, China's pre-eminent landscape architect, was brought down from Beijing to lend the project some cachet—and, as is often the case, his first move was to throw a wrench into other people's plans. Zhongshan didn't need more flowers, Yu told the city officials; it didn't need fountains, ornate wrought-iron fences, or hedges shaped like animals. Instead of bulldozing the shipyard, he proposed, they could put it to new use. A gantry crane would make an interesting gate, a crumbling water tower could become the base of a lighted beacon. Instead of grass, the city should grow weeds. Zhongshan's leaders found the plan unsettling. "We wanted something distinctive, but this made us nervous," says He Shaoyang, then head of the city's planning commission. "It wasn't like a Chinese garden with a rock here and a tree there." But, in time, the ecological soundness and low cost of Yu's ideas won them over. "After all," says He, "Zhongshan has a lot of parks. They shouldn't all have to look the same."
That's an unusual attitude in today's China. The nation is in the throes of the fastest urban growth in human history. In recent years the country has built an average of 2 billion sq m of floor space annually—half the world's yearly total—and plans to add another 20-30 billion by 2020. In theory, this should offer limitless opportunities for innovative urban planning. But as China's cities have grown larger, they have only become more uniform, so that each now seems to boast a skyscraping government office, roads scaled like highways and a vast Tiananmen-like square. This alikeness results largely from a dearth of professional designers and from the fact that breakneck growth leaves scant time for subtlety. But it also reflects a value system in which city infrastructure is conceived in symbolic rather than practical terms and where extravagance is the accepted symbol for modernity.
Yu, a professor of landscape architecture at Peking University, argues that China's current approach to urban development, with its emphasis on size and status over originality, is as environmentally reckless as it is visually dull. With farmland and forests disappearing and water running out, Yu says, cities can't afford be so wasteful: "China needs a dramatic shift. We've misunderstood what it means to be developed. We need to develop a new system, a new vernacular, to express the changing relationship between land and people." When Yu, now 42, returned home in 1997 with a doctorate in design from Harvard and a teaching appointment at Peking University's Architecture Center, landscape design wasn't even an officially recognized profession. The country had a long tradition of private gardens cultivated by gentry, and more recently of austere Stalinist-style parks designed to project state authority. But he felt the country needed more. "Landscape architects can't just be garden artists," says Yu. So, in 1998, he founded Turenscape, China's first private landscape-design firm, and set about finding places like Zhongshan where officials were willing to try something different.
Turen is an odd name for a Chinese company. Ren means person, but tu is more complicated. Literally the word translates as "earth" or "soil," but it's often used as a slur, a put-down for anything that is backward or unsophisticated—the manners of a migrant worker, bad teeth, cloth shoes. When Yu's colleagues answer the phone, "Turen," it sounds like they're calling themselves bumpkins. Yu himself remembers being called tu when he arrived in Beijing from a rice farm in Zhejiang to enroll at the Beijing University of Forestry in 1980. He was 17, could barely speak Mandarin and was awestruck by the straightness of the city's poplar-lined roads. This "farmerist outlook," as Yu describes his own first impressions of Beijing, is the reason Chinese cities look the way they do: "We're a country of farmers. When we make it to the city we want to feel as far away from the land as possible. We hate weeds. We want to look up at tall buildings. We shun nature." To be truly urban, Yu says, China needs a new attitude toward tu.
Last month, on the sunday when Premier Wen Jiabao opened the annual National People's Congress with a speech about building a "new socialist countryside," Yu headed for the town of Changgou, in a rural district of Beijing, "to try to save some trees." Friends in the district government had phoned with news that Changgou had announced it would bulldoze several of its constituent villages and bring in 5,000 laborers to create an enormous man-made lake as part of a program to attract real estate investment and tourism. They'd recommended that local leaders give Yu an audience and consider hiring him. "It sounds like the Great Leap Forward"—Mao's disastrous campaign to boost economic productivity in the 1950s—Yu said, as he sped toward Changgou in a van full of landscape designers. "But maybe I can stop them."
A group of local leaders took Yu on a tour of their project. Chalk lines marking the lake's proposed shores ran through villages and along roads. Yu leapt out of the car to take photos of a pair of bulldozers that looked tiny against the vast swath of empty land where they were mounding up dirt. Bounding past the officials, he turned his camera on a bird's nest high up in a poplar next to the mineral spring supposed to supply the lake. "He even takes pictures of that," marveled one official when Yu was out of earshot. Driving through town Yu passed a cluster of empty villas, waiting for the lakeside they'd overlook. Nearby, on a fenced-off piece of grass grazed an elephant and a giraffe, both made of plaster.
Back at the town office, the officials presented their plan. They played a DVD that showed pictures of large lakes in other places. Changgou's lake would be the center of a new resort, they told Yu. They would have windsurfing, golf and maybe skiing. The DVD played a montage of flowers opening in time-lapse followed by pictures of ripe fruit and beachside cottages. "This is our concept," one official told Yu, as the screen filled with hot-air balloons.
When it was Yu's turn to speak, he smiled. "I think you have a very good idea," he said quietly. "But I don't think your lake needs to be quite so big. What you have here is very rare. You're one of the only places in North China with spring water. If you use it up to make a giant lake, no one will come here. Right now I'm worried you're going to spend a lot of money, but lose value. Other places have lakes. Why not do something different? You could be a model of innovation."
Yu showed some slides of his work. "Wild grass," he said, pausing for emphasis. "It can be beautiful. It's very modern." Before long someone brought him a box of children's markers and a map, and he went to work sketching in islands of existing rice paddies within the planned lake's neat, rectangular perimeter. The official in charge of the project (who asked not to be named) winced. "I have plenty of paddies in this town," he told Yu. "If people want to look at them, they can go somewhere else. I don't need paddies in my lake."
The power of Yu's designs is the succinctness with which they communicate his ideas. His parks pair bushy tufts of native plants (which don't need to be watered or trimmed) with angular paths and minimalist sculptures in brightly-colored metal. The contrast between these rustic and futuristic elements is intended to attract people to the natural landscape, while changing it as little a possible. Yu studies the sites of his projects intensively before he starts planning and tries to work with what's already there—an approach he calls "anti-planning."
In Shenyang, when an architecture school moved to the suburbs, Yu designed its campus to incorporate the rice paddies of the farms it had displaced. The rice became both a decorative element and a kind of literal food for thought—a reminder that landscaping needn't be expensive and that even agriculture can look modern. In Taizhou, Yu un-channeled a local river, removing cement barriers and letting it flood into a wetland through which he snaked bicycle paths, docks and terraces. In Zhongshan, Yu's shipyard park, which like the campus was honored by the American Society of Landscape Architects, has quickly become a local landmark. On a recent weekday afternoon, the park was full. Toddlers climbed happily over pebbled railroad tracks, men played chess on a platform surrounded by tall reeds, a bride posed for a portrait amid some (deliberately) unraked leaves, and two vanloads of officials on a study tour listened to a guide talk about environmental protection.
Despite his success as a designer, Yu sees himself primarily as an educator. In 2003 he founded—and personally funded—China's first graduate program in landscape architecture (at Peking University) and he serves as its dean. He writes prolifically and, again at his own expense, has mailed copies of his book, The Road to Urban Landscape: A Discussion with Mayors, to some 3,000 city officials. The book is a direct but gently mocking assault on monumentalism: its illustrations show absurdly massive plazas and people squatting on low fences designed to keep them off mosaics of hedges that can only be appreciated from the sky. Recently, Yu's ideas have gained new traction in high places. Environmental sustainability, green growth and resource conservation were major themes of last month's meeting of the National People's Congress. And Yu has been approved to help Shanghai rehabilitate a decrepit industrial stretch of its main river for its 2010 World Expo and to create a corridor of parkland along 1,700 m of the Grand Canal.
But it's the smaller victories that seem to excite him the most. The day after his visit, Changgou's leaders called to say they'd accept his plan. "I'm putting in islands and bike paths," says Yu. "The rice paddies are staying. They'll be beautiful."
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评论: 俞孔坚：自然的力量(访谈)