Dutch resilient/sponge city experts go to Zhuhai

Zhuhai is a coast city in southern China, next to the famous city Macao & city Shenzhen. Especially the longest bridge in the world with a length of 55 km (Hongkong –Zhuhai -Macau) has been just completed in 2018.  However, Zhuhai is very often threatened by typhoons and cyclones, part of the city has been flooded every time when they came.

Therefore, how to prevent the flooding and how to get rid of water as soon as possible are the main issues that Zhuhai municipality has to deal with.

Experts from World Water Authority (Amsterdam) & PalmBout Urban Landscape have been invited to Zhuhai to give their advice on revision of Zhuhai Urban Planning Technical Standards & Guidelines. Furthermore, the Dutch expert team is also invited for working on following pilot projects:

• Resilient planning and design for Qianheng coast area
• Fushan Industrial Park –industrial waste water treatment
• Zhuhai eco –industrial Park – improvement of solid waste treatment

In their 5 days’ Zhuhai visit, they have presented their ideas on resilient city/rain proof for Zhuhai as a whole, and also have given some good examples of how Dutch cities’ approaches to solve the problems. In order to be able to give advice on the Zhuhai situation, they have exchanged ideas intensively with Zhuhai technical experts.  The next step is that the Dutch experts will work further on their advice on these themes. All these activities are under the European Commission project –Europe China Eco City Link project.

Moreover, other European cities like Valencia & Bologna will also join Zhuhai pilot projects from different aspects, e.g. historical building preservation and environment improvement.

East West Urban Consultancy is responsible for coordination of different EU-China partners and the control of projects’ quality & progress.