This is the best summary I could come up with:

JINHUA, China — In the shade of a willow tree, Li Tao and his buddy dabble lines in a slow-moving river channel and occasionally pull out a tiny fish.

So far, Yu has succeeded against long odds to popularize the concept in China, where the government has been fixated on development as a top priority and where the percentage of people living in urban areas has risen from less than 20% when economic reforms started in the late 1970s to around 65% now.

One of Yu’s early projects was Yanweizhou Park, located a few miles from where he slipped into the creek as a kid, in the city of Jinhua, in eastern Zhejiang province.

About a decade ago, Chinese leader Xi Jinping endorsed the concept of sponge cities in the wake of floods in Beijing that killed 79 people.

Some even call him the Frederick Law Olmsted of China — a reference to the man who designed New York’s Central Park about a century and a half ago and put landscape architecture on the map.

In a town called Wangping, in the Beijing suburb of Mentougou, a barren swath of mud, rocks and debris stretches alongside a river.

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