STUDY ON WATER-CITY PATTERN STRATEGIES OF SHENSHAN SPECIAL COOPERATION ZONE, CHINA WITH SPONGE CITY CONSTRUCTION AT THE WATERSHED SCALE

This article focuses on the water-city pattern development in the ShenShan Special Cooperation Zone in China and discusses the watershed-based sponge city construction strategy. Specific to the challenges of the zone, this study attempts to establish the correspondence between watershed spatial construction and the control indicators of sponge city, providing rigid norms for future urban development to ensure the safety and health of the whole watershed. At a practical level, three strategies of water-city pattern construction are proposed in aspects of 1) sponge system layout, to increase the proportion of the ecological resources across the watershed by a high-level ecosystem conservation; 2) urban waterway planning, to protect the zone from floods by increasing the water network density as well as introducing infrastructures for flood storage and discharge; and 3) land development mode, to regulate resources to achieve balanced land development by dividing the zone into many "islands," taking full advantage of flood plains, reserving the lakes and reservoirs, and introduce more ponds. As the zone is going to start high-speed development, this article studies strategies of the water-city pattern construction and discusses the innovation methods of promoting sustainable development with sponge city construction at the watershed scale.