Making cities work

[imomus]

Urbanism and sustainability are subjects I just can't seem to get enough of. This year, for the first time in the history of humanity, more people will be living in cities than outside them. But the future of the city isn't particularly rosy: in many places, shanty towns of the ultrapoor have sprung up, containing up to 35% of the population of cities like Mexico City. These are places without basic amenities or law and order; meanwhile, the rich retreat to gated communities.

Making Cities Work, a three-part series by Deyan Sudjic for BBC World Service, explores these and other issues. After the grim scenarios sketched out in Mexico City and Moscow, I particularly liked the third programme, on sustainabile design experiments in China. All the shows can be downloaded as mp3s, I link them below. (The image shows Cai Guo-Qiang's "Clear Sky, Black Cloud".)



1. Mexico City
A page about the show.

2. Moscow
A page about the show.

3. Huangbaiyu
A page about the show.

I leave you with two thoughts from the third programme.

"One way of measuring sustainability is something called ecological footprint, which is actually the area of land that's needed to support a person's life, to generate food, to generate power and electricity and energy, and to absorb waste and to provide water. In the UK and Europe we typically have an ecological footprint of 6 hectares per person, which is about 3 planets' worth, if you take the total number of people in the world. And in the US it's about 10 to 12 hectares, which is about 5 or 6 planets' worth. In China, at the moment, if you average right across China -- if you take all the people and all the land area -- the average is only about 1.5 hectares per person." Peter Head, director of ARUP Dong Tang sustainable city project.

"In order to imagine sustaining cities, we have to speak of the future in the present tense. And we have to imagine what the perfectly exquisite would look like in order to achieve the practically impossible. So we look at the future of cities and imagine that we could take all the earth and raise it up onto the roofs and farm the roofs, so that from a bird's perspective nothing has happened. Then we still maintain our farmland. If China's urban development will mean that we lose 25% of Chinese farmland by 2020, then wouldn't it be marvellous if the cities could lift the soil up and we could farm the roofs." William McDonnagh, chairman of group building sustainable houses.

Comments

[dignified-devil.livejournal.com]

"Hmm. The third part of the BBC series China paints an ugly picture of China's ecological attitude, and a largely un-encouraging one for its future. I think it's around and about for d/l. Good watching (as are the other three episodes)."

The Chinese now have one of the world's largest EPAs. And yeah I know it's a big country, but their EPA is propotionally now bigger than the U.S.'s EPA and is like one employee for every 3000 people vs 1 for ever 15000 in the U.S. I forget the figure, I calculated it once. Comparatively though, China is hardly India which has massive subsidides for alternative energy hence wind power is quickly becoming a massive industry in India becuase it can be constructed in relatively little time, is local, and by passes the ineffecient national grid. I just finished reading Jim Hansen's review of An Inconvient Truth in the new york review of books though in which Jim calculates that if CO2 emissions aren't reduced by 2010 then the existing damage + future damage to the atmosphere will kill off 20% of animals on earth so really almost all environmentalism doesn't look like enough to me at the moment.

"Well, if you take a country the size of China, I would have said so. That 1.5 hectares per people is likely due to the poverty of a large proportion of Chinese people - not romanticized, simple-life poverty, but absolute destitution. And the apparent plan to pump water up-hill from south north to Beijing... I dunno. Doesn't sound that rosy to me, in the short term if nothing else."

While it's true that China is scary I mean I once walked past the corpse of an 80 year old woman who seemed to have been left on top of a footbridge for at least a week, the concept of extreme destution hardly seems applicable, North Korea's faminines or a Mugabe led farm policy are seriously povery stricken, but life ain't to bad outside of the metropolitian Chinese grid, in fact it's good enough now that the inner-cities have labor shortages and people are staying at home.

On a final note though, a lot of the more imaginative Chinese sustianability projects such as the "eco-cities" strike me as green washing. Anyone who's been to or lived in China knows that Government projects aren't popular or well used all those space age buildings are showcases for China's future while the average Chinese still lives in state built apartments or Hong Kong high rises (that russian needle building in Shanghai was vacant in 2005 for instance). Shanghai is building a skate park for instance despite a relatively low skater pop (although it's definitely bigger than some places in Asia). Chinese development projects have a tendency to focus on building things so they can pump money into the economy easily. Construction pays well and can employ uneducated cats easily and train them vocationally, it's best not to assume that Shanghai's eco-city will be populated by hip-environmentally conscious urbanites, as much that the Chinese see this as killing two birds with one stone, the poor get decent jobs building construction, and the Chinese get a better image abroad while possibly solving some of their power problems. The future of China has been encased in steel, but the concerns of the Chinese have yet to reach the intricarcy or care of their cities designs.

[marksound.livejournal.com]

Any ideas where one might find these for watching? Would be most appreciated.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

They're radio shows, not TV! And the links to the mp3s are right there in my piece.