Faced with the urgency of the climate issue, awareness has grown and substantial progress has been made in recent years in the design of green and blue spaces in the megalopolis of Beijing. This trend intended to be in favour of biodiversity and the well-being of city residents continues as a further milestone in a long-term strategy for balanced development between man and the living world in the city. We contextualise our research with regard to the place of nature in Chinese ancestral culture and the green and functionalist policies implemented since the 2000s. The 2016–2035 Urban Master Plan is an extension of this, with more ambitious ecological and humanist objectives that we see as an echo of COP 15. Three field studies of recently developed riverbanks in this framework, all located in the densely populated built area of Beijing, allow us to suggest that China has moved towards a contextualization of landscape project, even if attention to the living world is still mainly ornamental. Nevertheless, these developments have enabled residents to appropriate these spaces in their own way. Three years of restricted mobility as part of the global pandemic have undoubtedly had a hand in these new forms of expression in public spaces. They reflect new links between citizens and nature in the urban area, which we believe will be decisive in the coming decades.