The celebrated Beijing-based landscape architect Kongjian Yu died on September 23, 2025. He was filming a documentary when his plane crashed, killing Yu and the filmmakers, Luiz Ferraz and Rubens Crispim Junior, as well as pilot Marcelo Pereira de Barros. With the passing of Turenscape‘s founder, the world has lost a visionary, a proponent of the “sponge city” approach to rehabilitating neglected landscapes into thriving places for plants, wildlife and people — a “holistic, nature-based solution,” as he told the audience of Azure’s Human/Nature conference last year.

As we prepare a tribute to Kongjian Yu’s life and works, we revisit his inspiring keynote talk.