Slashdot Mirror
China Planning For Sustainable Cities
TapeCutter writes "In a BBC article William McDonough says, 'The Stone Age did not end because humans ran out of stones. It ended because it was time for a re-think about how we live.' The Chineese appear to agree with him and have commissioned McDonough's company to create an environmentally sustainable village as a pilot project for the more ambitious idea of sustainable cities. McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart have also written a book on the subject, Cradle to Cradle, previously reviewed here on Slashdot."
China would have a much easier job of planning like this when the people there can't challenge the government.
In a free country that lived by the rule of law, the people have a right to object and challenge such reshaping of the land. Not in China, sadly.
seeing as most of there current cities are polluted beyond repair. Clean drinking water from the tap? I guess if you're cholera-resistant.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I guess China is preparing for the peak oil event. We should be doing that same in North America.
But the innovation will continue, as China is both influential and strong. They will simply move to disregard both American and European claims of intellectual ownership.
Do you like German cars?
Yup, you're a cynic. A realist would know that it's the vested interests (real estate developers, big box retailers, and purblind NIMBYism) that will keep this from happening in the U.S.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Profits drive innovation sadly.
In the case of sustainibility, survival drives innovation, not profit. Or, in the immortal words of Plato, "Necessity, who is the mother of invention."
It's not about what citizens want, it's about what they need. A city can sustain itself with or without access to neat gadgets from Japan. A city cannot sustain itself without water and food.
It seems to me that this concept just isn't practical, mainly because of the level of interdependence and globalization we've developed in the more modern nations.
Practical compared to what? Compared to the status quo, where there is plenty of fossil fuel to go around? Probably not. Compared to starving to death because you didn't plan ahead for clearly forseeable problems? Very practical.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Penn Jillette and Raymond Teller's (Penn & Teller) great show Bullshit did a great show last season on recycling.
You know, I really wish Penn and Teller would do an episode of Bullshit about themselves. Seriously doubt it, though. One common characteristic I see in self proclaimed skeptics is that they rarely apply their craft to themselves.
Sometimes I think they just have run out of ideas and just need to make filler shows. In the case of that particular episode, they were attacking a strawman the entire time. A ten year old could refute their argument. They constantly harped on the "recycling takes more energy" argument, while completely ignoring that lower energy usage is not the point of recycling. Not to mention that it's painfully obvious that, if you put effort into reusing a nonrenewable resource, you will expend energy in that effort. Duh.
Survival drives nothing currently.
People are too apathetic and see our extinction as too far off to warrant changing their lives.
in my area if you want to recycle plastic bottles you need to take off the lids, remove the labels and make sure they are empty. What am I, the milk lady?... Who the hell has glass bottles? Can I put jars in here? Oh, only if I remove the lid and the label and clean out the jar. To hell with that.
Wasn't it you that said something in a grandparent post like: "People with no imagination see any change to the status quo as the end of the world. Thank god there's people who see change as an opportunity and a challenge." ?
I think it's that kind of reasoning that has kept the bulk of American city development going in the wrong direction. People don't just make decisions based on total cost. If that were the case, nobody would buy steak when a perfectly acceptable and much cheaper soy based meal is available.
People make decisions based a lot on perceived value, as opposed to outright cost. Many Americans live in a city with mass transit available to carry them wherever they need or want to go, yet they'll still choose cars. The cost of monthly transit passes is significantly lower then the cost of purchasing a car, buying insurance for it, filling it with expensive fuel and having routine maintenance performed on it.
Despite being cheaper, the perception most Americans have is that mass transit is something beneath them (only poor people take the bus, right?). They see the automobile as a symbol of freedom and independence, and in their minds auto ownership has a much better value despite the higher costs of a car compared with utilizing transit systems.
It's because of this perception that American city expansion and development is done almost exclusively to accommodate the automobile, leaving alternative means of transport like walking (which is both cheaper and better for you then driving) forgotten or a cursory afterthought.
New housing developments are laid out in such a way that it becomes very easy to quickly and efficiently take your car to the market to pick up milk, but incredibly difficult to walk or bicycle to the very same store. Is it any wonder why Americans are so fat?
If we started building cities with pedestrians and mass transit in mind, ultimately the cost savings would be huge for the typical household. But it would fail unless work was done to modify the popular perception that traveling by a car is better then walking or taking the bus.
So when someone says "People will never switch to environmentally friendly hybrid cars because they're too expensive, so we're going to stick with the internal combustion engine for a long time", they would be better off saying "owning any automobile is too expensive. Let's start building our cities with non-car owners in mind".
The Internet is generally stupid
Survival drives nothing currently.
I suspect that the average Chinese villager is a bit closer to survival mode than you.
Actually, yeah. When it comes to people who see the idea of any obligations to anything other than themselves as evil, I do consider myself better than them.
Most of those people seem to have trouble realizing that there is such a thing as cost aside from what they pull out of their wallet. And yet they continue to make their glorious, "free" decisions, despite happily fettering themselves in their own ignorance, something which seems to be the rage these days.
'Cause, see, thinking of anything other than yourself (like, for example, the neighbors, or your grandchildren's ability to hit middle age in their forties rather than their twenties) must be tyrannical communistic doom, false dichotomies also being the rage these days. If it involves any sense of non-personal responsibility, it's bad bad bad!
Do I have contempt for that attitude? Yes, I do. Am I better than people who trumpet it? Yes, I am.
-PS
"All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke