The Triple Bottom Line Blog

I'm fascinated by this article from Globe-Net News about the future of urban design--specifically, about the wave of "sustainable city" projects now being built in some of the world's fastest-growing regions, from China, India, and Korea to the Gulf states of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. And while the little boy in me thrills at the science-fiction stylishness of some of the architects' renderings of these cities of the future (of which the picture above is a sample), another part of me wonders whether the promises now being made about these projects have even a chance of being fulfilled.

To explain my built-in biases: I'm a New Yorker from the generation that visited the 1964 World's Fair as children and marveled at the late-post-war visions of urban futurity on display at places like the General Motors pavilion, with its models of gleaming high-rise cities where cars glided soundlessly on highways suspended in space--mid-century versions of Corbusier's famous vision of the "Radiant City."

Then I got a little older, saw how the post-war high-rise apartment projects dotting New York's outer boroughs had become pockets of loneliness, crime, and decay. I read how attempts to build entire cities along modernist visionary lines (like the centrally-planned Brasilia) produced lifeless, boring failures. And I read Jane Jacobs, who explained how the technocratic dream of the centrally-planned city was really a quasi-fascistic nightmare that destroyed neighborhoods. (This is obviously a somewhat simplified whirlwind summary of the issues.)

I became a convert to what I understood to be "the new urbanism," which was all about human-scale, mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods that captured some of the charm, variety, and freedom of traditional city communities like Jacobs' beloved Greenwich Village.

Today of course human civilization is at a crossroads due to global warming, peak oil, population growth, and the challenges of rapid development in what used to be called the Third World. Around the globe, tens of millions of people are pouring into cities in search of economic opportunity, meaning that hundreds of new or enormously expanded cities will be sprouting up in the next twenty or thirty years.

This creates a wonderful opportunity for us to try to leverage the advantages of higher-density living by trying to construct the world's first truly sustainable cities, using all the latest knowledge and technologies for energy conservation and renewal, waste recycling, efficient transportation, and so on. The idea that urban planners, in cooperation with governments and businesses, are already designing and building such sustainable cities is truly exciting.

Yet the images I am seeing and the descriptions I am reading make me a little nervous.

The artists' renderings of such cities-in-the-making (or re-making) as Dongtan, Guangzhou, and Harbin in China, Gugaon in India, Songdo City in Korea, and King Abdullah Economic City in Saudi Arabia (the one pictured above) look a lot like "Radiant Cities" right out of the old Corbusier playbook--right down to the isolated high-rise dwellings that, in my experience, relatively few people actually want to live in.

These supposedly sustainable cities of the future, with their glittering towers and pristine open spaces that appear devoid of humans, look all too much like the regimented visions of the mid-century planners whom Jane Jacobs wrote about so scathingly. The fact that these cities are being built in countries with authoritarian regimes strikes me as another worrisome symptom.

I'd like to be unreservedly enthusiastic about this new trend, and it's quite possible I am at least partially wrong. Herbert Girardet, a widely-respected expert on urban sustainability, is a consultant on the Dongtan project and has written glowingly about its potential as a truly eco-friendly city:

Dongtan's design is based on the principle that all its citizens can be in close contact with green open spaces, lakes and canals. Its buildings will be highly energy-efficient, and the city will be largely powered by renewable energy--the wind, the sun and biomass.

Most of Dongtan's waste output will be recycled and composted. The bulk of its organic wastes will be returned to the local farmland to help assure its long-term fertility and its capacity to produce much of the city's food needs. Chongming's existing local farming and fishing communities will have significant new marketing opportunities with the development of Dongtan, ensuring a high degree of local food self-sufficiency and enhancing the island's long-term environmental and social sustainability at the same time.

It sounds good! And surely something like this is what we need to build in order to house the hundreds of millions of people who will be joining the world's urban population in the next generation.

It's probably dangerous and misleading to lump the various "sustainable city" projects together (as the Globe-Net News article does). It's quite likely that some will prove to be really sustainable--in human, social, political, and esthetic terms as well as in technological and economic terms. But I suspect that some others may fall prey to the problems that have plagued past attempts at heavy-handed, top-down, utopian city planning, ending up as vast, lifeless ghost towns that no one with free choice would willingly inhabit.

I hope this post will attract a few comments from people with deeper knowledge of the subject than I have.

Labels: city planning, Corbusier, Dongtan, Green Buildings and Construction, Herbert Girardet