Following the visit to Qingdao, Prof. Dr. Harald Zepp was guest to the Tongji Urban Planning and Design Institute (TJUPDI) on 13 and 14 December 2025, carefully and thoroughly arranged by Prof. Dr. Nannan Dong. TJUPDI is a spin-off of Tongji University and acts as an independent, leading institution in the fields of urban and planning and landscape architecture. Recently, it was awarded highest level of recognition (class A) for excellent environmental management by the Chinese Ministry of Natural Resources. It processes planning orders from the province and the city of Shanghai.

The goal of the meeting was to exchange mutual learning from the application of EnhancES in real-case planning in Shanghai. A focus for the coming years is ‘Rural Ecological Space Planning.’ Thanks to the great effort Prof. Dong put into policy advice, EnhancES as a tool for assessing ecosystem services is now integrated into a workflow for conservation and restoration projects in Shanghai’s peri-urban areas. Ideally, this will be followed by ‘Post-Evaluation Monitoring.’

In Germany, our project aims to achieve a similar goal: integrating the multi-scale assessment of ecosystem services into a workflow for spatial planning, with a particular focus on urban areas. In this context, the approach demonstrated in Shanghai serves as an exemplary role model.