This report provides a ‘handbook’ approach to ecological and water-­sensitive design in order to
guide the incorporation of environmental resilience into the work of SPD (Beijing) International
Urban Planning and Design Co., Ltd., a planning and design firm located in Beijing. SPD
requested the development of an urban and landscape design strategy to incorporate with water
sensitivity (scarcity and pollution) and ecological design for its projects in China. More
specifically, our project and this handbook focus on their design work in Baihe township, Hebei
province, where our team spent ten days on a charette alongside SPD’s landscape designers.
This project, and SPD’s work more broadly, present a unique opportunity for the growing firm to
provide innovative, dynamic, and sustainable urbanization approaches in one of the world’s
fastest-­growing economies, and play a major role in establishing the inception of ecological
design in China.
Our handbook analyzes and evaluates approaches to water-­sensitive urban design with an
emphasis on urban, agricultural, and industrial areas. Where relevant, we examine opportunities
for ecological solutions through the lens of pollution at the air, water, and land levels. This report
finds that while SPD requested a ‘drop-­in’ solution approach to ecological and water-­sensitive
design, each site and its particular geological attributes, contamination status, positioning within
a watershed and other characteristics must determine the specific design that is implemented.
In the absence of a drop-­in solution for ecological and water-­sensitive design, we seek to
provide frameworks, methods, and tools in order to optimize SPD’s ability to best influence the
physical environments in which it operates.
This project seeks to inform SPD’s work while also acknowledging the inherent limits of a design
firm to improve long-­term environmental conditions given that design firms end their work often
before construction of a site even begins. Given the fact that design firms generally do not
remain involved at sites after the design has been implemented, we emphasized the importance
of incorporating ecological expertise in situations where SPD plans to incorporate ecological
and water-­sensitive design. Limitations to our work included difficulties with communication
across languages and over distance;; a lack of alignment between the master’s capstone project
and SPD’s own deadlines for the Baihe project;; and our client’s limited financial resources that
have thus far limited their ability to incorporate ecological expertise among their staff. To this
end, we provide recommendations for resources SPD should add to their practice to best
implement technologies and concepts from this guidebook into their future designs.