Between Land and Water : Narratives of Water-based Rurban Landscape

Between Land and Water reveals topologies within the changing rurban landscape of the Yongning river plain in China. It explores the interwoven relationships between the cultural meanings of places associated with water, the ecological conditions of a water-based landscape, techno-natural water infrastructures, everyday water practices, and rapid urbanization processes in a formerly rural landscape. The authors carefully weave together cartographic narratives about land use and industrialization, water scarcity, housing resettlements, and state administrative redistricting practices. This careful re-reading of the landscape raises questions about the sustainable water-based future development of the rurban landscape of the Yongning river plain. Visually narrative yet analytic in focus, the volume draws on historical cartographic records and extensive empirical field data to trace the dynamic interplay of technical visions, cultural heritage, ecological conditions, and migration in the creation of a water-based rurban landscape.

• Reveals the intrinsic logic of a rurban landscape balanced between land and water
• Extensive empirical field data and historical cartographic records of the Yongning river plain
• Part of the “Urban-Rural Assembly” research project, funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research

Yulin Zhang is a Researcher in the “Urban-Rural Assembly” project and PhD candidate at the Chair of Landscape Architecture and Landscape Planning at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Her research focuses on the decoding of the landscape transformation process in urban-rural areas from a constructivist view.

Maria Frölich-Kulik is a Senior Researcher at the chair of Landscape Architecture and Landscape Planning of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and part of the “Urban-Rural Assembly” team. She specializes in researching “rurban” landscapes, the effects of urban-rural transformation processes and collaborative and co-creative planning formats and strategies from building to regional scale.

Yuting Xie is the Deputy Director of the Institute of Landscape Architecture at Zhejiang University and a Principal Investigator in the “Urban-Rural Assembly” project. Her research focuses on regional design, flood risk management, and biodiversity conservation through blue-green infrastructure planning.

Karl Beelen is a Senior Researcher at the Chair of Landscape Architecture and Landscape Planning, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. His work combines urban and landscape design, ethnographic fieldwork methods, and exploratory cartographic approaches for urban resilience and climate adaptation design.