10-Day Sustainable Cities & Green Transition Leadership Camp

Morning — West Lake by Bicycle
Take the high-speed rail from Shanghai to Hangzhou (about 1.5 hours) and rent a bicycle at West Lake to ride leisurely around its shores. Pass famed spots such as Broken Bridge, Bai Causeway, Solitary Hill, and Su Causeway, enjoying lake-and-mountain scenery and the legends behind each site. West Lake, a UNESCO World Heritage site since 2011, is the heart of Hangzhou's beauty.

Afternoon — Lingyin Temple
Visit Lingyin Temple (Temple of the Soul's Retreat), one of China's most famous Buddhist monasteries, founded in 326 AD. Admire ancient Buddha statues, towering trees, and exquisite murals; burn incense and pray if you wish, and feel the profound Buddhist atmosphere. Stroll the surrounding scenic area's tranquil natural setting.

Evening — Music Fountain & Lakeside Dinner
Head to the West Lake Music Fountain Square for the evening fountain show, where water dances to music under colored lights. Afterward, dine near the lake on Hangzhou dishes such as beggar's chicken (baked in lotus leaves and mud) and Longjing shrimp (fresh shrimp stir-fried with tea leaves).

Morning — Xixi Wetland
Xixi is a patch of low-lying land west of West Lake where a network of ponds, embankments and mulberry fields survived because it was too wet to build on. It was made a national wetland park in 2005, and the restoration work since then has been about two things at once: recovering habitat and keeping the eastern edge of a growing city from filling the site with concrete. You walk the boardwalks and the raised paths with a guide who explains the water regime - how the ponds are flushed, why the reed beds are cut on a rotation, and which birds returned - and why the park is zoned so that the least disturbed third has no public access at all.

Late morning — a city built around water
Hangzhou has been managing water for a very long time. West Lake itself is a managed body, dredged repeatedly since the Tang dynasty and fed by diverted streams since the eighth century. The Grand Canal, begun in the fifth century BC and extended under the Sui in the seventh century AD, runs 1,794 kilometres from Hangzhou to Beijing and was inscribed by UNESCO in 2014; its Hangzhou section is now a freight route, a water source and a walking corridor. The modern additions are more recent and more visible: a public bicycle system launched in 2008 that became one of the largest in the world, an electronic payment economy that made the city famous, and the sponge-city drainage measures that keep storm water out of the combined sewers.

Lunch
A restaurant by the canal, with Longjing tea and freshwater fish; the group eats outdoors when the weather allows.

Afternoon — canal systems and a green corridor
The afternoon combines a boat leg on the canal with a walk on the riverside green corridor. The point of the exercise is to look at three things at once: freight and tourism sharing a waterway, the flood walls that define how the city meets the river, and the way a continuous pedestrian path changes property values and land use along its length. Teams are asked to record evidence as they go - photographs, counts, costs where signs give them - because the evening exercise uses their own numbers.

Evening — policy exercise and dinner
Each team presents a short proposal for one of three problems: reducing storm-water overflow, cutting transport emissions in the old city, or financing further wetland restoration. Proposals are assessed on cost, on who bears it, and on whether anything can start without new legislation. Dinner in the city, then the evening is free. Walking distance is easy today, and there is an option to return to the canal after dark when the bridges are lit.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
In Hangzhou.

Morning — West Lake Cruise
Begin with a boat cruise on West Lake, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and Hangzhou's crown jewel. Glide past Leifeng Pagoda and the tree-lined Su Causeway, framed by willows and lotus, while your guide shares the legend of the White Snake. The lake has inspired Chinese poets and painters for a millennium.

Afternoon — Lingyin Temple
Visit Lingyin Temple (“Temple of the Soul's Retreat”), one of China's oldest Buddhist monasteries, founded in the 4th century at the foot of Feilai Peak. Marvel at its grand halls and the 1,700-year-old laughing Buddha, then explore the Feilai Feng Grottoes with their intricate rock-carved Buddhist sculptures.

Evening — West Lake Music Fountain
End the day at the West Lake Music Fountain near Hubin Park, a free choreographed display of water, light, and music. Arrive early for a front-row view of this blend of tradition and modernity.

Morning — High-Speed Rail to Suzhou & Smart Manufacturing
Transfer from Hangzhou to Suzhou by high-speed rail, then visit smart-manufacturing companies in the Suzhou Industrial Park — a flagship China-Singapore cooperation zone established in 1994. Explore AI applications in industrial scenarios such as smart factories and intelligent production lines.

Afternoon — Return to Shanghai
Return to Shanghai by high-speed rail, arriving at your hotel to rest after the day's travel between cities.

Evening — At Your Leisure
The evening is yours to enjoy at your leisure in Shanghai.

Morning — a park built for manufacturing
The Suzhou Industrial Park was started in 1994 as a joint venture with Singapore and is now one of the largest manufacturing concentrations in China, with electronics, biotech, precision machinery and, increasingly, electric vehicle components. Its relevance to a green transition is straightforward: for a city to decarbonise, the factories have to as well, and this is the kind of place where the problem is technical rather than symbolic. The morning is spent with practitioners arranged through our local partner - the specific companies are confirmed before departure - looking at three things: how a factory measures its electricity and process emissions, what a green building standard requires of a new plant, and where the waste heat and the scrap actually go.

Late morning — circular economy in practice
The second block follows the material. Solvent recovery, water reuse in plating and cleaning lines, waste exchange between neighbouring plants, and the growing market in recycled plastics and battery materials are all unglamorous and all decisive. Participants see where the incentives bite: a company pays for its own energy and water, so efficiency pays, but it does not pay for the carbon it emits unless a price or a customer requires it - which is why so much of this is driven by export-market requirements rather than by local regulation. The team exercise for the afternoon is set at this point.

Lunch
A canteen lunch inside the park, which is the most representative meal of the day: the park employs several hundred thousand people, and most of them eat like this.

Afternoon — canals, floods and the water city
Suzhou is built on water and has been since the Song dynasty, when the grid of canals inside the walls was laid out with the streets. The Grand Canal skirts the city and the inner network drains it, and the whole arrangement now has to handle a much larger and harder-surfaced city than it was designed for. Starting from the Grand Canal and the Panmen gate, the group walks and takes a boat through the inner canals with an engineer's brief: how the pumps and gates are operated, why the 2007 Taihu algae bloom, which cut water supply to a large part of the city, changed the region's environmental policy, and what a sponge-city retrofit means on a street of Ming-era houses where nothing may be excavated.

Evening — supply-chain exercise and dinner
Teams return to a meeting room to trace the emissions of one product - a laptop, a bicycle, a pair of shoes - through its supply chain, using the park data from the morning, and to propose the two interventions with the best ratio of reduction to cost. Proposals are defended against a challenge from another team. Dinner is in the old city, and the evening closes with a short walk along the canal when the lights are on.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
In Suzhou.

Morning — Humble Administrator's Garden
Suzhou's largest and most celebrated classical garden, a UNESCO World Heritage Site built in the Ming dynasty. Its pavilions, lotus ponds, and zigzag bridges embody scholarly landscape design, including the “borrowed scenery” technique that frames distant pagodas. The Hall of Distant Fragrance is a central highlight.

Afternoon — Suzhou Museum & Pingjiang Road
The Suzhou Museum, designed by architect I. M. Pei, pairs a minimalist water-themed structure with ancient Chinese art and artifacts. Then stroll Pingjiang Road, a 1,200-year-old canal-side lane of whitewashed houses, silk shops, and teahouses, where you can sip Biluochun tea and try squirrel-shaped mandarin fish.

Evening — Flexible Evening
The evening is yours to enjoy at your leisure in Suzhou.

Morning — High-Speed Train to Shanghai
Your guide and driver will transfer you to Hangzhou Railway Station to board a high-speed train to Shanghai, covering the journey in about an hour. Sit back and enjoy the changing scenery as you travel between the two iconic Yangtze Delta cities.

Afternoon — Arrival and Hotel Check-In
On arrival in Shanghai, your guide and driver will meet you at the station and transfer you to your hotel, assisting with check-in so you can settle in and freshen up.

Evening — Nanjing Road & the Bund
In the evening, visit Nanjing Road, Shanghai's oldest and most bustling shopping street, lined with malls and restaurants. Continue to the Bund, the city's historic waterfront along the Huangpu River, where colonial-era buildings glow against the futuristic Pudong skyline across the water.

Morning — the arithmetic of a green transition
The workshop opens with the numbers a city actually manages: buildings account for roughly a fifth of Shanghai's emissions, transport for another fifth, and industry and power generation for the rest. From that starting point the session works through five levers - the grid, buildings, transport, waste and carbon pricing - and what each one can realistically deliver by 2030. Shanghai has pledged to peak its emissions before the national target date, which makes it a useful case study: it is a manufacturing city as well as a financial one, and the two halves want different things.

Late morning — instruments and incentives
The second block looks at the machinery. China's national emissions trading system began operating in July 2021 and the exchange that runs it sits in Shanghai, initially covering the power sector and expanding outward. Electric vehicles passed a third of new car sales nationally within a few years, and in Shanghai the share is higher because a licence plate for a combustion car is auctioned while a plate for a new energy vehicle is not - a policy that changed consumer behaviour faster than any subsidy. On the building side, mandatory green standards and a large stock of 1990s housing create a retrofit problem rather than a new-build one.

Lunch
A set lunch near the workshop. Participants are asked to walk the last fifteen minutes rather than ride, and to note what the street does about shade, drainage and bicycles.

Afternoon — a low-carbon district
In the afternoon the group visits a low-carbon demonstration area on the Pudong side of the river, built on or around the former 2010 Expo site: district heating and cooling, building-integrated solar, sponge-city drainage that holds storm water in planted basins rather than in pipes, separated waste collection with an incineration plant that generates power, and a street layout designed around public transport rather than parking. Your hosts are practitioners, arranged through our local partner; the specific site is confirmed before departure. Expect to be shown a control room and a dashboard, and to be told honestly which measures pay for themselves and which only work because they were mandated.

Evening — team exercise and dinner
Teams return to the workshop room to cost a package of five interventions for a Shanghai neighbourhood of their choosing, using the afternoon's numbers, and present it in ten minutes. The judging is on realism and on how they handled the trade-offs they could not avoid. Dinner follows; the evening finishes with a short walk on the Bund to look at the lighting load on both banks of the river.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
In Shanghai.

Morning — Zhujiajiao Water Town
Depart Shanghai for Zhujiajiao (about 1 hour) and take a guided walking tour through narrow ancient streets, stone bridges, and old merchant houses. Visit Kezhi Garden and local museums, then enjoy a relaxing rowboat ride through the canals beneath ancient bridges.

Afternoon — Lunch & Leisurely Exploration
Enjoy lunch at a local restaurant featuring fresh river food and regional dishes. Continue exploring at a leisurely pace: visit handicraft shops, watch local artisans, and taste specialties such as green bean cake and candied fruit; stroll the lakefront for peaceful scenery.

Evening — Return to Shanghai
Return to Shanghai, ending your serene day trip to the water town.

Morning — Departure Transfer
Your guide and driver will pick you up from your hotel and transfer you to Shanghai Pudong International Airport (PVG) for your departure flight home, bringing your journey to a close.