Landscape architects McGregor Coxall has won a competition to design a wetland sanctuary in Tianjin, offering migrating birds a stopover to fatten up and breed.
The Lingang Eco Park contest called for a landfill site in the city's Lingang area to be transformed to create pockets of wetland, parkland and an urban forest along the East Asian?Australasian Flyway (EAAF).
This route sees 50 million birds make the return journey from the Arctic Circle, through East and South-east Asia, to Australia and New Zealand.

Spanning 60 hectares, McGregor Coxall Bird Airport scheme is designed to support the needs of more than 50 species of birds in three different water habitats, including an island lake with shallow rapids, a reed zone and mudflats. A high-tech education and research centre called the Water Pavilion will cater to the 500,000 people expected to visit the site each year. Topped with a green roof, inside the centre visitors will be able to monitor the animals through cameras inside 14 bird hides.
A walkway will lead to a trio of raised observation pods where visitors can watch birds flying past.

"The proposed Bird Airport will be a globally significant sanctuary for endangered migratory bird species, while providing new green lungs for the city of Tianjin," said the studio.
Organised by the Asian Development Bank and the Port of Tianjin, the Lingang Eco Park responds to the loss of bird foraging habitat on the shores of China's Yellow Sea ca...