Where are New Green Cities and How Can They Curb Asian Greenhouse Gas Emissions?
WorldChanging Team, 14 Sep 09
by Warren Karlenzig
Masdar Headquarters, Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
In my previous post, I highlighted how growing Asian urbanization is expected to contribute more than half of the world's growth in greenhouse gases over the next 20 years. Now I will review what's being attempted in Asian cities and elsewhere in order to positively alter that disturbing forecast.
The US and other Western nations are by no means immune from culpability in global climate change, since the US and Europe have contributed most of the existing excess greenhouse gases (GHGs) in our global climate over the last 100 years.
Because of that history, the onus is upon more developed parts of world, including North America, Europe and parts of Asia, to help plan and develop models for new cities in Asia. These models need to take into account climate change, local culture, the latest IT and communications technologies, and more.
New cities or districts must not be only be low- or zero-carbon, they must also address climate change adaptation, which in practical terms means designing for water and food security and natural disaster risk management.
What are the best global models that Asia should draw upon? Masdar, in the United Arab Emirates (Abu Dhabi), is one good model, though its small expected total population (50,000) and unique design can't scale up to Asian-sized growth requirements.
Masdar is piloting scores of new designs and technologies that reduce energy use, particularly in passive energy reduction (cooling and solar) and PV solar. Masdar also reduces water use with information system-linked leak-detecting sensors and by recycling dew. This desert-located site even recycles ambient moisture in the indoor air, which includes evaporated human sweat.
Besides the techno-wizardry, Masdar offers economic sustainability, through a viable financing "eco-system": it has created a tax free-foreign enterprise zone that has drawn in support from General Electric, Credit Suisse and the United Nations' Clean Development Mechanism.
South Korea's Songdo International Business District is planned to reduce energy use 30 percent in every building through the use of double building skins combined with sophisticated information technology and communications control systems. Songdo is on a scale to which China can relate, with 60,000 residents and 300,000 workers expected by completion in 2015.
Songdo rises in South Korea (New York Times photo)
Some Chinese green new city false starts (so far) have included Dongtan and Qingdao Eco-Blocks, both of which were approved or studied by the national and local governments but have so far failed to be greenlighted.
While Dongtan was to be on a scale of 20,000 inhabitants to begin and was mainly to be powered by renewable energy, it had plans of increasing to 500,000 by 2030. That still wasn't necessarily big enough for the needs of China, which may add 800 million or more people to its cities over the next 30-40 years, many of them in new cities or new city zones of 500,000 to 5 million. Because of local corruption, ground for Dongtan was never broken despite ambitious plans and international project participation from ARUP Engineering.
Qingdao Eco-Blocks, with 2,000 to 100,000 housing units and mixed-use, transit-oriented development, meanwhile, did have modular applicability to Chinese new city development. The Eco-Blocks project, though, did not get slated into Phase 1 of the city's development pipeline, according to Harrison Fraker, retired professor from UC Berkeley's Institute of the Environment. While at Berkeley, Fraker and the Institute helped devise the plan for the resource (water, waste, energy) "self-sufficient" city.
It seems the Eco-Blocks were too complex at their present stage of planning to fit into China's massive national new city construction mechanism, which is constrained by the need for speed. The Eco-Blocks are now being considered as a prototype for NASA Ames research, Fraker said.
The immediate fate of Tianjin Eco-City has greater potential in China. A Chinese and Singaporean cooperative has been holding design competitions for a large section of Tianjin, the third largest municipality in China, which has an overall population of more than 8 million.
Besides cultivating financing, the Tianjin Eco-City is attempting to develop sophisticated software that can model the use of materials, energy, water, land, transportation and other resources, in addition to carbon and waste outputs.
Other noteworthy green community models beyond Asia include the Kalundborg (Denmark) Eco-Industrial Park; Hammarby, Sweden; and Kronsberg, Germany.
Hammarby, Sweden
Kronsberg, a community of 6,600 near Hanover, addresses the critical element of local food with greenhouses using renewable energy, which can offer a large-supply of nutrition requiring less carbon than the transport-heavy global food model.
Combined with the myriad waste re-use and energy generation
opportunities that can come with sustainable organic agriculture and
food processing, the food element has been a significant missing
element in most "eco-cities."
Kronsberg reduced its greenhouse gases by 45 percent compared to average new construction.This was accomplished through the use of advanced building insulation in concert with district heating systems, which use waste heat from municipal processes to warm water that is piped throughout the community for everyone's use. The suburban area cut overall per capita CO2 by an estimated 60 percent through
transit oriented development including major bicycle infrastructure.
Reducing the life-cycle impacts of construction and infrastructure materials is another area not being well addressed by current eco-city planning and design--no large-scale pilot projects exist that precisely measure and manage life-cycle material impacts.
If new cities can combine integrated planning for better carbon management, regional food systems, life cycle material impacts, water scarcity and biological/ cultural diversity, they will be much better prepared to host the world's new majority that is headed their way.
This piece originally appeared on the Common Current blog, Green Flow
This is a nice review of all "green city" initiatives outside the US, I like it. Good to hear about who's doing what in urban planning. China was going gangbusters throwing up whole cities nearly overnight for a while, from what I saw in my travels there. This didn't turn out well in some cases with buildings falling over such as in Shanghai recently.
Cambodia developed similarly at least for the tourist mecca of Siam Reap. In Thailand, a similar story. Tourist housing worldwide is now overbuilt but perhaps can be re-purposed and multi-purposed for local needs.
In the US, I see continued "flight" back into cities by the remaining upper classes. In San Francisco alone, we now have a Ferrari clothing store. But like London and Tokyo's most elite shopping districts, I expect these over-consumptive affairs to wither away as people get back to basics at every socio-economic level.
Asia would do well to avoid our hyper-consumerism, while also avoiding the Soviet no-consumerism. I think they are in a happy medium, though could use moderate adjustment, just as we are facing here in teh States.
Berkeley, CA I hear is having no real budget problems like most California cities owing to its historically dense development, continued "fresh imports" of monied freshman uni students, and its many historical small business districts with all their job creation potential. Berkeley also has strong local food advocates and relationships with local/regional farms.
Like many US cities who are re-discovering the full economic value of well-run public transit (not buses), Asian nations are on the right track building out and maintaining their train transit systems. In the hyper-local future, trains and sailing ships will probably be the "ultimate" in transport, not the Concorde or any other fast flight technology. Every city worth visiting will need to recycle and re-use its waste stream just as Edo Tokyo did with their teams of "nightsoil" collectors. Whoever can do this with the most sanitation and cleanliness will win bragging rights to "best city" and most livable city.
Cheers.
Posted by: Ken O on 15 Sep 09
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