Local Beijingers like to give colloquial nicknames to the prominent architecture in the city. In the period leading up to the Beijing Olympics, the more notable were probably the “Bird’s Nest”, “Watercube” and the “Giant Underpants” (new CCTV building), but the 2008 Games also left behind a pair of “green lungs and kidneys” for Beijing: the Olympic Forest Park.

Amidst the numerous reports on Beijing infamous air quality, perhaps overlooked by many foreign media was Beijing’s biggest project to show its dedication to improving air and water quality in its natural environment. Indeed, the Olympic Forest Park was also a feature to sell Beijing’s commitment to environmental issues in the Olympic bid. And, unlike the temporary closing of nearby factories and strict car bans to improve air quality during the games, the Olympic Forest Park is here to stay, a permanent symbol of China’s intent to better its environment and utilize nature resources more efficiently.

Plans for the Olympic Forest Park began in 2003, with an official decreement on the development of the park in accordance with Beijing Municipality’s development goals. The park, which occupies an area of 680 hectares, was planted with over half a million trees, and reused 4 million cubic meters of soil from the construction of the Beijing National Stadium (The Bird’s Nest) and the Beijing National Aquatics Center (The Water Cube). It is designed to not only have zero carbon emissions, but to also act as an urban carbon sink, cutting down Beijing’s air pollution by absorbing up to 7,200 tons of carbon each year. In addition, the park also abosorbs 32 tons of sulfure dioxide, purifies 5,400 tons of oxygen and retains 4,905 tons of dust for the city annually, thus the nickname, “the green lungs of Beijing”.

Besides being a green haven on Beijing’s central axis, the park also incorporates traditional aspects of Chinese landcape design, balancing bodies of water with rock, mountain and green space to produce the epitome of a fengshui garden to the north of the city’s center. According to traditional fengshui belief, mountains at the north of the city and a southern flow of water toward the city center is very auspicious. For this reason, the park was placed right at the north end of Beijing’s North-South Axis, linking China’s environmentalism and symbols of modernity such as the Brid’s Nest and Water Cube, to its rich history with the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square at the southern end. The flow of water to complete the fengshui masterpiece was key.

However, Beijing suffers from severe water scarcity problems. While the plan for Olympic Forest Park called for a dragon-shaped lake, the source for the water to fill the lake was an issue nobody could overlook. In order to address this problem without placing more stress upon the municipal water supply, the Olympic Forest Park is designed to use reclaimed water from Qinghe Wastewater Treatment Plant. The effluent from Qinghe Secondary WWTP which is rated as Category V by national standards, has high levels of the nutrients nitrogen and phosphorous and could therefore lead to the eutrophication of the proposed 20.3-hectare lake. To address this problem the secondary reclaimed effluent is designed to first flow a system of integrated vertical flow wetlands before entering the lake. Water from the lake is also periodically pumped back through the wetlands, which are able to uptake excess levels of nitrogen and phosporous to ensure that the water in the lake meets national standards for Category III surface water. The 4.15-hectare wetland system, which consists of 6 parallel integrated vertical flow wetland units, has been in place for close to three years now, and has been confirmed to raise the quality of the lake water by processing about 2,600 cubic meters of reclaimed water and 20,000 cubic meters of cycled lake water per day, thus the nickname “the green kidneys of Beijing”.

In 2009, The team for Olympic Forest Park was the only Chinese company to receive an ASLA award. The team was led by Tsinghua University Associate Professor Dr. Jie Hu. Hu is currently spearheading a movement in China called “Water-Mountain” Cities (山水城市), that incorporate the tranditional balance of Chinese nature into urban design.

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