Utopian cities, few ever get built and the track-record of success of those that did get built is subject to strong debate (e.g. Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasilia). (For a historical overview of ideal cities, be sure to check out Ruth Eaton’s fascinating book ‘Ideal Cities: Utopianism and the (Un)built environment’.) New challenges and a more integrative worldview and tools (cf. Arup’s homebrewn integrated resource model software) in the process of design are advancing new solutions for new city design and development. Which better place to look than China …

“We have to make cities, as much as we can, future proof” says Alejandro Gutierrez, one of Arup‘s top architects & urban designers working on the design of an eco-sensitive city or rather ‘eco-system’ Dongtan (‘East Beach’) for China’s ChongMing Island, near Shanghai. Arup shows itself brave and determined in addressing the challenge, by taking a different angle on the design than some of its peers (some of the world’s leading architectural offices). Gutierrez’ critique: “[...] they’re not addressing the central problem of this age — resource efficiency — and how it relates to cultural, social, and economic development.”

The futureproofed eco-city will feature an 80% efficient (fuel conversion) renewable energy plant (in the centre) running on rice husks and piping waste heat directly throughout the city, a plug-in energy grid with smaller biomass, wind and solar energy infrastructure, underground ‘plant factories’ (highly-productive organic food growth), a linear public transit corridor, a twin water network (for drinking and for flushing), consolidation warehouses where trucks from the mainland ‘plug-in’, zero-emission transport, waste recycling and waste-to-energy conversion. “It’s a green island that shows you can decouple economic development from environmental impact”

Arup, not unfamiliar with foresight or scenario studies (see also here), also seems to have looked into a few scenarios (of use) for their Dongtan city with a tourism-inflated city on the dark side of the spectrum and a sustainable labs/industries mixed work/live/recreational environment on the brighter side.

Dongtan has been designed as a sustainable city from the ground up, or rather, from scratch, but the world is littered with existing and growing megacities. When Gutierrez says “We can program into its [Shanghai] DNA a sustainable growth pattern”, the greater challenge for large cities around the world can be reformulated as a need for a kind of gene therapy to alter the DNA of our existing cities. How can we turn London, New York, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Tokio, Brussels (we know it’s not that big, but we’d love to see Europe’s (and our) capital as a sustainable example) etc. into more sustainable infrasociostructures.

Obviously large cities face challenges far beyond mere energy and resource efficiency. Sustainability also has a socio-cultural, economic, political-institutional side. As they grow, city complexity increases and we are challenged to come up with ever more clever solutions. At TED 2006, Steven Johnson gave a talk about John Snow’s famous cholera map for the city of London and the following changes this triggered in the way people thought about the relationship between cities’ ‘sustainability’ and the (upper limits of) number of inhabitants. Other TED talks of interest with respect to the topic of sustainable cities are those of William McDonough and Robert Neuwirth.

Inspired by Wired

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 16th, 2007 at 10:04 and is filed under design, future, sustainability, technology, trends, visions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.