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

[sunfell.livejournal.com]

I like the idea of combining urbanism with sustainability, and I plan to watch these shows when I get home. Living in a city or already 'built' place preserves the land, and repurposing places instead of building out makes a lot of sense.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The national league table of ecological footprint results (2002) is here (http://www.footprintnetwork.org/gfn_sub.php?content=footprint_hectares). A few results (hectares) are below. You can work out how many planets each nation would require to sustain it if everyone in the world consumed at that level by halfing the hectare result to get the number of planets:

Japan: 4.3 (just over two planets)
Germany: 4.4 (2.2 planets)
UK: 5.6 (2.8 planets)
US: 9.7 (almost five planets)
China: 1.6 (less than one planet)

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

Ah, I've heard of this before. But I never thought that we would need different amount of planets depending on which country we did the math with. Someone said it was "only" 3 planets. Looks like they where wrong.

I will listen to it shortly but do "they talk" about the possibility of suburbs being "assimilated" by the larger cities?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The problem with Mexico City is that the shanty towns actually fall outside the city's authority and are -- supposedly -- governed by the national government. In fact, nobody ends up governing them at all.

Workshops, summits, conferences, etc.

[(Anonymous)]

Nick, I'm still trying to get you into Image, Space, Object conference as a speaker. I failed this year. In the meantime I went to the Aspen Design Summit. I was part of the Sustainable Community team. Both these workshops are put on by the AIGA. Any chance of leveraging your contributing writer status for free a attendance? Where most conferences are passive, these offer the opportunity of collaborating in multidisciplinary teams, which result in a presentation at conference end.

Also, are you familiar with John Thackara's Door of Perception?

Re: Workshops, summits, conferences, etc.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Are you trying to make me wear ecological banana boots by getting me on a plane?

Don't know about Thackara.

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

There is a place of Kenya, outside Nairobi I think, which is a shanty town. However, I've heard that once the government sent tons of bulldozers there wrecking the entire shany town to the ground. But when the bulldozers left the people who had lived in the (by then) mashed down shany town came back and started to rebuild it again.

And those who live in that shanty town are peasants from the countryside who tried to get jobs in Nairobi too. But they only had enough money for a one way ticket unfortunately.

[(Anonymous)]

Peter Head has a good point. Hectares are becoming scarce. The only way to solve this problem is to wipe out China and India with nuclear warheads.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The view from North Carolina, apparently.

[hunchentoot.livejournal.com]

I heard the program on Detroit, the metro in which I reside, last week and it was very good and accurate. If the series is as fair to the rest of the cities it will give a very compelling overview.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I found that the least interesting of the four, realtors dominated it too much. I planned to link to it, but there isn't an mp3 yet and the rm file (http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/meta/tx/nb/docu1_au_nb.ram) stopped working halfway through the day.

[jimyojimbo.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).

"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."

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.

[dignified-devil.livejournal.com]

a couple follow ups:

the blog worldchanging.com (http://www.worldchanging.com)
is a fairly constant source of information
on sustianability mostly becuase it's written by a bunch
of sustianability and energy effecient designers around the world.
secondly, Mike Davis wrote a book on shanty towns (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1844670228/sr=8-1/qid=1152649689/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-0636667-3626244?ie=UTF8) and Robert Neuwirth went and lived in them. (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0415933196/sr=8-10/qid=1152649689/ref=pd_bbs_10/103-0636667-3626244?ie=UTF8) Neurwith's book is perhaps a bit different than the anaylsis given by the BBC program. He takes a more positive approach to shanty towns from a review: "His ghetto epiphanies include impeccable civility, self-organizing local governments, bustling economies, modest crime rates, and squatter millionaires". Robert also has a blog (http://squattercity.blogspot.com/)

Re: Workshops, summits, conferences, etc.

[(Anonymous)]

Banana boots are always optional. I'm trying to get you to speak to the Mile High City. Come as you are! The opening to the new addition to the Denver Art Museum, designed by Libeskind, was another event I was lobbying you for. It opens in October.

Honestly, the AIGA is late in coming to these 'urbanism and sustainability' in design ideas, but sincere in their intention. John Thackara is moving faster. Thackara is many things, but I'm interested only in one of his projects called, Doors of Perception. I think you might be too.
http://www.doorsofperception.com/

[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.

[(Anonymous)]

Can I just interrupt this broadcast to say that Syd Barrett's dead...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/5169344.stm

[hunchentoot.livejournal.com]

The governmental and infrastructural forces at play are still very much against repopulating the city, and the realtors are still taking a genuine risk even with lavish incentives. There are lots of suburbanites who would like to see the city revive, but crime and all of the other problems outweigh the hipness of occupying a former industrial building as one's primary residence. Many hip young people do move to the city, but then move on once more after they have kids or are the victim of a crime one time too many.

I'm always amazed how so many medium-to-large cities in the U.S. are deserted or blown out yet some still allege we're the shiny-bright happy-land beacon to the world. Manhattan alone can't make up for the rest of the country. Look at Detroit on Google Earth to see former neighborhoods returning to pasture (my favorite local blogger documents this often (http://www.detroitblog.org/?p=287)), and see that repeated in Flint, Saginaw, Toledo, Cleveland, Gary, and even tracts of Chicago, the Midwest's brightest point of optimism.

Is it this country? Or is it the nature of the city to fail in stages? Maybe I'll listen to the rest of this series...

[imomus.livejournal.com]

That's a pretty great blog about the greening of Detroit. America's decline is producing some nice poetry! Reminds me of that Talking Heads song "Covered in Flowers".

[imomus.livejournal.com]

(Nothing But) Flowers.

C2C

[(Anonymous)]

If interested, check out the work of William McDonough, (author of the last quote) especially his writing. He has become a sort of mouthpiece for sustainability on the global scale. Check out Cradle 2 Cradle, which a very thought provoking read on how we current design not only architecture but common objects and systems in which we produce these objects (and rejecting our current cradle to grave thinking).
http://www.mcdonough.com/writings.htm
Also, Brad Pitt is hosting a series of pbs programs in the states called e2...

[constructionism.livejournal.com]

I must object here. I grew up near Gary, and as I keep insisting, its worst days (cocaine wars) are behind it. Yeah, we have all of those abandoned lots and fields, but being close to Chicago, there is a lot of potential.

The so-called "decline" of the industrial Midwest has a lot to do with port cities and the drug trade. Right now we are not so much in a period of "decline" and death (though it may look that way to outsiders) as a period of recovery.

My father, among others, used to work for repair and maintenance firms in the steel industry. Currently his work has taken him to reconstruction and repair efforts around the southeast side and port of Chicago, where a lot of federal money is going into both reparation of the infrastructure and into ecological projects. Only a matter of time before other industrial cities see a similar effort.

In short, a lot of this "damage" has to do with the careless economies of the eighties and nineties, which left these communities vulnerable to a drug market which is considerably smaller these days.

[cheapsurrealist.livejournal.com]

Now he can stop being Roger.

[hunchentoot.livejournal.com]

I didn't intend to be entirely pessimistic or to slam these cities. Detroit, too, with the right vision, has magnificent potential and there is indeed a lot of repair being done. Look here (http://www.modeldmedia.com/) for some of the good stuff that's happening or even browse my good friend's blog (http://vegan27.livejournal.com/) to see how enthusiastically he is restoring his historic Detroit home. Some development news can be a little too rose-colored, but the blight reports are also often too grey.

I agree that the 80s and 90s seem to have been the worst of the decline and in some cases the end of it, but this positive seedling of new life and reinvestment is still delicate and vulnerable. I've heard it has sprouted a bit more outside of Michigan.

[polocrunch.livejournal.com]

Is it really possible to farm on rooftops? My immediate thought is that it would require expensive fertilisers to be hauled up and water pumped up to rooftops, making it unprofitable economically and ecologically.

[constructionism.livejournal.com]

Oh, of course, and I didn't mean to mis-read you. It's just that I am from the area and our biggest "enemy" right now is one of perception.

I get frustrated because people think that twenty years of damage = permanence. I don't think so, because these are urban areas - even the suburbs around Gary are more urban and have better infrastructure than areas of sprawl, and I think these would be good places for urban "spillover". In short, they are underused, even though some of them are half an hour or forty-five minutes from downtown Chicago.

Cities like Flint, Michigan, however, may face an entirely different set of problems. In our case, it's a matter of a ecologically valuable area (sand dunes, rivers, wetlands) being misused and wasted.

Thank you for your links, though - I saw your friend's blog and will keep an eye on it. Being from a similar area, I have a strong interest in Michigan.

I haven't been to Detroit since I was a kid, but we always felt a kinship with them.

[(Anonymous)]

In the 1970s Paul Ehrlich predicted death on a massive scale from the unsustainability of food consumption at that population rate. Well, we all witnessed the massive death that occured in the 1980s and 1990s. I would similarly heed the concerns of this post as well.

organic rooftop farms, not factory farms

[pop--kandy.livejournal.com]

If you want "quickie" results, then sure, use fertilizers and irrigation, but it completely wrecks the soil. (There's a whole passage in Thomas Frank's What's The Matter With Kansas about just that.) Rooftop farming would require actual soil farming (i.e. using beneficial bacteria, mulch, compost etc.) to keep it conditioned, maybe something more like shade plantations to grow crops between rows of trees and to maintain soil integrity. And a lot of hand-labour, vs. heavy machinery. The concept of a big community garden vs. Archer Daniels Midland combine harvesters applies here.

It's been done in Cuba extensively, especially after the Special Period following the fall of the Soviet Union. Combination chicken/rabbit coops - rabbits eat grass, chickens eat rabbit pellets, the rest composts to refertilise the grass etc. City parking lots and former parkland were converted to farms or raised-bed gardens...all operated with considerable freedom by various groups, with either collective or profit-motivated structures.

green roofs

[maybeimdead.livejournal.com]

http://www.greenroofs.net

water

[pop--kandy.livejournal.com]

oh yes, about water - you can use rainwater barrels for that, and on a higher-tech scale, they're refining techniques to use membranes to essentially farm moisture right out of the air (as many desert creatures do). Imagine a building like the Sears tower essentially becoming a giant raincatcher - the water collected could then flow downwards to other, lower rooftops for free. Alternately, a modest windmill or solar generator could supply adequate power to bring water up to the roof. Anyway, The real issue isn't skyscrapers but the millions of modest flat-roofed buildings - apartment buildings, offices, duplexes and triplexes, for instance.

[byzantinefaith.livejournal.com]

Living in Rio de Janeiro I can say that the main problem with managing the shanty towns here is that no-one has the slightest notion of how to even engage with the situation. Like you mentioned in the Mexico City case, there is little or no formal authority capable of implementing sustainability/development plans, regardless of how elegant or brilliant they might be.

Rio (and other cities in Brazil, for that matter) is getting to the point where a separate social and urban order is being consolidated, and by now things have snowballed to a point where the success of any programs designed to affect, change or reverse shanty-town growth is highly questionable. Not to mention the bitterness that develops in shanty-towns towards the gleaming, ultra-high-class condominiums all around them.

Apparently in the next few decades shanty town population should be around 2 billion. Like I said, it's a problem we don't even know how to approach.

Organic Architects

[instant-c.livejournal.com]

Nick, check out OrganicArchitect. (http://www.organicarchitect.com/) Sustainability has been a very popular issue here for quite some time. I have seen some nice recycled car parts used in architecture around as well!

Licht und blindheit

[darthkronos.livejournal.com]

Like the new video form the new album "cock milk"

Ever seen Phantom of the Paradise? Talk about faulted beauty. Faust, Dorian Gray and Jessica Harper(before Suspiria). It makes you think if truely failed art is just art out of time.

Anyways the movie hit me like a bolt of light, lets have music like Bernard Herrmann and Angelo Badalamenti swirled up into a pixelated first person view of man's journey to hell*.

Germanic root meaning concealed.**

Heart and Soul

[marksound.livejournal.com]

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

Re: Licht und blindheit

[(Anonymous)]

Like the new video form the new album "cock milk"

Nick, maybe you should change "Ocky Milk" to "Cock Milk." Sex sells, does it not?

[mcfnord.livejournal.com]

i really like that picture.

[mcgazz.livejournal.com]

Nah, I reckon we wipe out the people whose way of life is least sustainable. Fried Americans in the morning and fried rice for dinner ;-)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

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

[(Anonymous)]

you should read some jonathan porrit. what a clever fellow.

:)

[(Anonymous)]

wow that's a nice picture but i'm affraid.. it is E.T ?


Dave (http://www.hammsgarage.com)

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[(Anonymous)]

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[(Anonymous)]

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Teams for cities

[(Anonymous)]

This is sobering stuff. But I think we need to cautious with numbers / averages from China. Already, the young and becoming-richer in China are wanting more than a bicycle and a tiny one-roomed apartment that was all their grandparents could aspire to under Mao. From poor villages, which have land locked into family ownership disputes and no meaningful work for the educated, the steady, growing stream of migrants began soon after the reforms of Deng. Poor people outside Europe and the US aspire to -- the lifestyle of Europe and the US! However, we need to build teams of researchers and future-thinkers and do some serious work on this problem. Good team building ideas (http://www.teamworx.cc) are going to be needed to get this concept move, IMHO.