Chongqing Tongnan Dafo Temple Wetland Park

The Tongnan Dafo Temple Wetland Park occupies a ninety-nine-hectare artificial wetland on both banks of the Fu River in the central district of Tongnan, Chongqing, immediately adjacent to the Grade IV Dafo Temple scenic area to the south. Positioned at the core of the city's civic image belt, the park is a rare riverside tidal-flat oasis within a dense urban fabric. Designed by Turenscape for the Tongnan Planning Bureau, the project pursues the overarching goal of building a flood-adaptive riverside benchland and restoring the Fu River wetland. The designers preserve as much of the natural tidal-flat environment as possible, compress the boundary of the urban balcony, and install pedestrian corridors to expand citizens' direct contact with the wetland. Guided by the vision of drifting along a floral embankment and wandering through three thousand acres of mist, the scheme draws on two local cultural threads: the region's long river-navigation heritage and the Buddhist culture centered on the Dafo Temple. The site itself is an alluvial sand-and-gravel benchland with high infiltration, ringed by an existing twenty-year flood embankment, which posed the central challenge of designing a landscape that can coexist with periodic inundation. Four strategies structure the project: a flexible, flood-friendly design that keeps most activity areas above the flood line while allowing lower zones to flood naturally; ecological bank stabilization and the restoration of wingnut groves, meadows and tree islands for bird habitat; a lively urban living room divided into sports, balcony and temple-wetland zones offering bathing, waterfront viewing, floral stairways and meditative clearings; and a layered interpretation of local shipping and Buddhist traditions through site furnishings. The resulting park has become a new civic landmark for Tongnan, demonstrating how a central-city wetland can be protected, ecologically restored and activated as public space through a design philosophy that befriends the flood.