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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."
If this were anywhere but China I doubt this would do anything but fail. Once people have tasted a style of living they do no want to go back down. As evidenced by bank robbers you need to keep on robbing because they are burning tens of thosands of dollars a week on drugs.
Sorry to sound like a cynic, but it's this kind of innovation that our IP laws will obstruct. Someone in the U.S. and the E.U. will get a patent on the very idea of sustainable cities and cause the whole thing to get bogged down in licensing.
The ones where somewhere between 70 and 90% of the population were slaves, where only free-born, sane, non-criminal, adult males were enfranchised, empires routinely extorted vast tributes out of their "allies", that is to say when they weren't enslaving them or committing genocide, foreigners had no rights, respectable women were rarely allowed to go outdoors, folks were happy to take water from cholera-infested public wells, and people sometimes got put to death for free-thinking?
Yes, those are the ones. I suppose I can see one or two similarities ... but I'd rather live in China than ancient Greece any day.
Further online information available for most of the above statements upon Wikipeding, Googling, or if all else fails, upon request (except for the figures on slavery: that's a rather specialised field).
Would such a society benefit from being separated from the outside world? Obviously a city can't be self-sustainable if its citizens wants things from outside the city. 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.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
The only logical way to keep billions of people happy in the future is by using nanotech to manufacture/mantain/recycle every item we need (including cities). Our current technological state, both in material manufacturing and medical technologies will be viewed and stone-age tech in about 15 to 20 years from now. We'd had better hurry and develop advanced nano as we are currently running out of resources and our oil-based ecomomies cannot stand both North America/Europe/China/India all vying for the same resources using current tech. We also need nano to advance us out of the medical stone age we currently find ourselves in and gain control over the geneome and using nano to repair our bodies. Anything else is a waste of time and the limited resources we now have.
What is really annoying is 60% of a cities space is dedicated to cars.
That could be easiler utilized by small farms...
Sustainable cities have been dreams since the 60s. Even a half-assed one, but well done in existence, especially since it hasn't received much funding.
http://www.arcosanti.org/
If what you are reading sounds funny, or sarcastic, lame, or stupid
it is because it is supposed to be. just laugh
not to say that some sources are not contaminated with whatever, but that's not the reason most of the time.
that advice is usually given to all foreigners going anywhere but the most developped countries. the fact is, the water is not cleaned (if it is) the same way as what your system is used to.
locals can drink and abuse it without getting sick because they're used to it. your system, weakened by years of overtreated water, simply can't cope with it.
The Greeks are a bad choice of example. Here's what Plato had to say about a once fertile region, destroyed by the kind of irrigation now being heavily practiced in California, among other places:
What now remains compared with what then existed is like the skeleton of a sick man, all the fat and soft earth having wasted away.... Mountains which now have nothing but food for bees ... had trees not very long ago. [The land] was enriched by the yearly rains, which were not lost to it, as now, by flowing from the bare land into the sea; but the soil was deep, and therein received the water, and kept it in the loamy earth ... feeding springs and streams running everywhere. Now only abandoned shrines remain to show where the springs once flowed.
(Quoted in A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright. Go read it. A complete English translation of Critas is here.)
Has it never seemed strange to you that the area called the "Fertile Crescent", mostly Iraq and Israel, is now anything but fertile? It's that way because of too little long-term vision in farming practices. We have been stressing our environment for a long time.
Would the "green"/"sustainable"/"quality of life" innovations of living in this city happen to include not being beaten when taken into police custody?
Just curious...
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
people who make the "when the oil runs out" argument always presume that the current known deposits of oil are the only ones in the world. That, of course, is stupid. Not only have we not tapped all the known oil wells, we havn't even begun to find the vast number of ocean located oil deposits. Finally, should we actually run dry all the crude oil wells, we can still make plastic by manufacturing plants.. just like we can make biodiesel and other hydrocarbons. Hell, with advanced genetic engineering we can make bacteria pump out plastic directly. 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.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I'm with P&T on most of their "Bullshit" episodes, but P&T missed some of the most important points of recycling. You really don't want to be dumping used motor oil, mercury thermometers, and lead-acid car batteries into landfills.
For the biodegradable stuff, fine. Dump it and let it rot. Or burn it as fuel. Whatever. But a lot of stuff isn't biodegradable -- plastics and glass for example.
Quite a misleading post. The headline of the article actually reads: "A senior Chinese general has warned that his country could destroy hundreds of American cities with nuclear weapons if the two nations clashed over Taiwan". Generals always have that hawkish attitude, but really they're just playing the same game as the Russians did in the cold war - conflict is avoided because both sides know it would be mutual destruction. we should keep in mind the lengths to which the Chinese would be willing to wage war against us Americans Just garbage. There is zero motivation - they are far too dependent on the US economy to want to destroy it, and the younger generation is pushing hard for US-style education & human rights.
And one nice thing about upcycling (McDonough & Braungart strongly object to current recycling models) plastic is that it frees companies from the variability of the oil market. Having a ready supply of pure and perpetually reusable plastics will help keep product costs down -- the grandparent can't possibly be suggesting that pumping from deep oceans or making bacteria produce plastic will be more efficient than melting and remolding pure, ready to use existing plastics. The key is just ceasing to churn out tainted plastics like PVC and turning instead to a model using purer technological ingredients from the start.
I had the opportunity to talk with McDonough at a design conference last year, and he pointed out that plastic futures were steadily rising. I don't know if that's still true, and I'm too lazy to check now, but regardless companies are going to be looking for steady plastics supplies, and upcycling makes the most economic sense.
That could be easiler utilized by small farms...
No.
No no no no no no no no no.
This is a really, really, really stupid idea.
Small farms suck. We had small farms for about 8000 years, and they sucked. 90% of the population was trapped in back-breaking labour and poverty.
Now we have big farms. Big farms allow us to use big machinery, which makes farming roughly one hundred times more efficient. The result of that is that I can get paid (by comparison) a small fortune to sit at a desk and fiddle with databases, and never have to look at the rear end of an ox. Food is good, cheap and plentiful because we don't have small farms.
The reason people throughout the third world are heading to the city (even if they end up in shanty towns) is that small farms suck. Living in a slum on the outskirts of Bombay or Mexico City may suck, but living on a small farm is even worse.
And even if you think the peak is wrong, it doesn't matter. Even if there's infinite oil, its consumption is still destroying the planet.
And if you think the peak doesn't matter globally, think again. The trade balance is dependent on the US importing foreign oil. US oil dollars prop up many nations around the world. And if you think the implosion of Saudi Arabia doesn't matter, think about how many terrorists come from there, and think about how many more will be recruited if the country is thrown into a depression that makes 1929 look like a dress rehersal.
There are so many scenarios for global destruction from the peak I don't want to think about them all. This is some serious stuff, and we can't take it so lightly that it's just another fad or something that can be ignored.
I have more karma than God.
That's because God posts anonymously.
The enemies of Democracy are
The problem in Greece, the formerly fertile crescent, northern Africa (the bread basket of the Roman Empire) and similar areas is deforestation. Clear the trees for your pastures, and sooner or later you'll find that the land has degraded to the point that your pasture is too poor to support cattle anymore. So you bring in sheep, and they degrade the land even further. You end up herding goats, which can live on anything, but prevent the land from ever recovering.
The solution is to come up with something that does for goats what myxomatosis did for rabbits.
I heard a really interesting theory that locals can cope with the local water because of the bacteriophage in their stomaches. If a local in an area with bad water moves to a far removed area with bad water, they get sick themselves since they don't have the right phage to protect them.
It offers an interesting, as yet unutilized solution for 'montezuma's revenge.' There's a clinic in N. Mexico on the border based on S. Georgian technology from Tblisi which is the closest I've seen to offering this stuff to the US. We really need a worldwide phage network and repository. It would solve so many problems so cheaply.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Anyway, the main hope that I have for China is that capitalism is alive and well there. People are free to earn and spend money, with all that entails.
Right, because Capitalism unfettered by a Representative Democracy would be awesome.
Take every abuse you've ever heard of in a capitalist system. Then take every abuse you've ever heard of in a totalitarian system. Then combine them, and multiply the capitalist abuses by the lack of accountability the totalitarian system provides.
Western companies have invaded - including McDonalds and WalMart, in this case defining a new standard and experience for consumers and stimulating local competiton. China is open for business.
Yes, a new experience as consumers but what about as workers? I already hate Wal Mart for their labor practices in the U.S. -- they are essentially creating a class of working poor by trying to work around minimum wage laws. They employ a plurality of people in the States, and these people are only going to have enough money to shop at Wal Mart.
What do you think WalMart is going to do in a country like China? You think they are going to raise the standard of employment practices, or are they going to scream with orgasmic joy at being free of those few restraints the U.S. had imposed on them?
This is my fundamental problem with the way our businesses are whoring themselves to China. We are selling them our fundamental production capacity, but requiring nothing in return except more money for the executives of these companies. Every dollar we send them without a demand for democratic reform is a dollar that just entrenches the current system in place. And the whore executives don't care at all. They just see the delta between U.S. labor and Chinese labor as dollars flowing into their pocket.
Here's my prediction: If China becomes the enemy that some fear it might, you will be able to look back and see the hand of the business elites of the capitalist democracies propping them up the entire way. If China does not become that enemy, it will be because we stop allowing this to happen.
The enemies of Democracy are
I think more than anything a modern city needs to find someway to manage multiple means of travel and keep them seperated. IE have a pedestrian system that does not impinge or become obstructed by vehicle travel.
I would like to see a system that could allow for 4-5 types of right of way. Say
1- Pedestrian. Except for residential there would be no mingling of pedestrian right of way and vehicle right of way. The pedestrian right of way would be non-powered only. Foot/pedal etc... Maybe powered in the class of segway/electric bike/scooter. Say 20/mph limitation.
2- Light vehicle. I mean Golf Cart light. Strict HP/speed max limitation on the vehicle but not on the paths themselves. Use elevated and sunken tram ways as much as possible to avoid intersecting traffic. max of 40mph
3- Regular Vehicle traffic. Highway through traffic, right of way to parking lots etc... Max 100mph. Again avoid intersecting traffic as much as possible.
4- Frieght. Transfer trucks busses etc... access to industrial and commercial areas for delivery or perhaps central unloading zones that utilize lighter vehicles for last mile pallet delivery.
5- Mass Transit. If mass transit were isolated and designed from the begining to have its own right of way then scheduling can be far more consistent and if designed from the get go far more possible to solve the point to point travel inefficiency most systems face.
You would have to pretty much build a city from the ground up to manage something like this as it would require multiplane usage to enable roughly equivalent access to almost all points. You could probably have pedestrian and light vehicle more or less in the same plane and use tunnels and light strcutures for elevating the traffic out of each others way. Then utilize deeper/higher structures for the other. Mostly I would suggest burying the heavy/transit/regular vehicle traffic which would allow you to route the exhaust fumes for management. Require electric or other non-polluting method of power for light vehicles and keep it above ground.
Regulate speed largely via hardware limitations rather than operator limitations and do as much as possible to avoid intersecting traffic. By this I don't mean regulators on the equipment. I mean keep like vehicles in similar zones of travel and keep them headed the same direction. If you have roughly equivalent vehicles together traveling at similar speeds and rarely if ever encountering intersecting traffic then speed isn't much of a concern.
The primary idea would be to make light vehicle traffic the primary means of personal transportation around a city. Cars as we think of them would become more of a long distance/rural solution for personal travel essentially limiting them to primary arteries and as possible off ramps into common areas of commerce (ie the mall/grocery store etc...). The design limitations and requirements of the light vehicles would be the ability to survive most any concievable wreck possible. IE the intersection of technology to protect passangers in Head on/T-bone collisions. This should drasticly reduce the amout of traffic deaths. No more pedestrian/vehicle interaction. NO more massive inequality of mass interactions and largely reduced chances of intersecting traffic creating worst case scenario crashes. Also with keeping the light vehicles cheap and that much safer would reduce insurance and maintenece costs.
Freight keeps the craziest mix of vehicle classes apart. No more massive 18 wheelers and honda civics mixing it up. Also should allow again for tighter schedules and create less congestion. Also having them on specific roadways would mean not having to over engineer general right of ways to handle their level of stress. Mass Transist systems almost HAVE to have their own right of way else they are useless (see most buss systems in any congested metropolis)
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
...both by Hundertwasser and by South American engineers. It's good to see scaling-up attempts.
t m
There was this Austrian chap (he's dead you see) who called himself Friedensreich Hundertwasser (his real name was Friedrich Stowasser) who had all sorts of wonderfully wonky ideas about how to design living spaces in synergy with nature.
An absolute lack of square angles is definitely a trademark of his, along with an abundance of colours. There are a number of exhibits and presentations about the man and his works -- here is the home page of the official museum in Vienna, which is definitely worth a visit.
http://www1.kunsthauswien.com/english/mainindex.h
As you can see, Hunderwassers ideas were revolutionary (perhaps too much so), but it has set a trail for other people to follow.
"Other people" recently turned out to be architect Shah Jaafar and professor Kamaruzzaman Sopian of the Advanced Engineering Centre at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, who have shown (sorry, no link available) that it is indeed possible to make housing that gets by exclusively on solar power and hydrogen, both of which are natural and infinitely renewable resources (okay, maybe not infinitely, but I'm sure you'll agree it's close enough). This is interesting reading, and sheds a positive light on the future. Maybe there's a way around the current energy- and pollution-related problems of our world after all?
"Good news, everyone!"
This is one point that I utterly disagree on. When the chinese prime minister was here, during the Clinton years, and was asked about human rights violations in China, you know what his answer was? He said, yes, freedom and liberty are important, but he believes, to a chinese person, even before he gets his full freedom, he'd rather have an education. That sentence struck me very much, at the core of my belief system, which was freedom above all. But he's right - after all, what is freedom good for without wisdom, what is freedom good for if you don't know what to do with it? I personally witnessed the fall of communism in the eastern block countries, and the fingerpointing, blaming and lynching of each other that starts whenever people free suddenly "free" and run rampant without self control, because there is no longer a secret service that's watching and comes takes you away. Remember the french revolution and guillotines? A temporary fix could be freedom+religion, fear of God, God is watching instead of the secret service, but the Chinese don't have Gods. Yet their culture is the most outspoken preacher of self control - wax on, wax off - remember? Wouldn't inner self control be a much more dignified way to be a human being, than an external self control, such as secret service or God?
Don't write off the Chinese so easily - they somehow put a stop to the explosive population growth, in a culture that values huge families. As far as sustainability goes, they hold the record - they have maintained a continuous existence for almost longer than any other culture - though heavily violent at first, the philosophies of Confucius and Lao Tzu from millenia ago, that still dominate today, sound very nonviolent and sustainable, even if not perfect - e.g. father as an absolute "tyrant." The Chinese were also not perfect in the sense that they too had an emperor until very recently, corruption, etc., but still, it's worth paying attention to what they are saying. They are not convinced the Taiwanese system that we pump so full of cash and resources to showcase it to them as bait, will lead to good. After all, they know what kind of opium-plague the free market can lead to, that scar in their memory is still very recent. When I see internet censoring stories about them, I'm not fully convinced that it's done simply out of a need to maintain corrupt power, or to keep China from succumbing to the inflow of miseducation and sex-opium-n-rocknroll that you get from the liberated, freemarket, human-rights promoting Clearchannel-RIAA western media.
The reason China's economy is growing really fast is because they stopped centrally planning it. Yes they do have a lot of state sponsored works but the real dynamo of China's economy is that a lot of a generals in the Chinese army took their military contract funds and opened up factories to produce goods bound for America. Chinese banks now underwrite this production dramatically, so that, anyone in China can get a loan to start a factory if they can convince the bank they have a buyer in America for the goods that it produces.
This is my sig.
We're not talking about "perpetually sustainable" cities that will last until the end of time. Yes, there will be natural disasters - glaciers will appear at some point and wipe out a lot of the earth's surface. But in the short (human-lifespan) term, there's no reason to think we can't design sustainable cities that can survive all of the short-term disasters that will be thrown at us.
And if we ever want to get off this rock, we're going to have to design the technology anyway. You honestly don't believe a moon-base is possible, regardless of advances in technology?
Last post!
"Yet their culture is the most outspoken preacher of self control - wax on, wax off - remember?"
Please don't make cultural judgements made from low budget 80's teen movies, especially when you can't tell the difference between China and Japan.
The very reason it is faster for you is exactly that US city planners almost exclusively focus on making it convenient to get around by car vs. public transport.
Mass transit works well even in countries like Norway (average population density: 13 per square kilometer) - they just don't work everywhere. I don't think anybody suggests that someone living in a rural area should rely entirely on public transport. But vast areas of major population centres in the US consists of out of control sprawl because public transport hasn't been given priority.
The times I've visited the parts of Virginia near D.C. for instance, I've constantly been shocked at how hard it was to get around even by foot. I stayed in a hotel what should have been a 15 minute walk away from a restaurant, and we were faced with having to cross several 4-6 lane roads and several sections where there was no proper sidewalk.
This was an area with a population density far higher than anywhere in Norway (where I'm originally from), yet so pedestrian unfriendly and with such a useless public transport system that the typical 5000-10.000 inhabitant village in Norway would have more people using public transport on a daily basis.
I've never owned a car or gotten a drivers license, because I've never had a reason to. Perhaps I'll get one whenever I get kids, but for now public transport serves 95%+ of my transport needs, and the rest is solved with cabs, and I end up saving both time and money that way. However it always makes it interesting whenever I visit the US (going again this weekend, and will be staying in Palo Alto).
To be fair, some areas are quite good - the D.C metro was quite nice when I went there, and SF has a reasonable transport system, though it's still slow and inefficient if you want to go out to any of the smaller towns that don't have rail links.
But to claim that you need "very high population densities" for mass transit to work is bullshit, as anyone who has visited some of the European countries with lower population densities can tell you. Once density drops down you may need to have access to a car now and again, but there's a huge difference between having a transport system you can easily use for 80% of your journeys and not having one at all.
I also find it interesting that in Europe, most families will own a car, but will still take train/buses/undeground etc. into account when deciding how to get somewhere, while in large parts of the US (outside some of the major metro areas like NYC) it seems that the assumption is that if you have a car it will be your sole mode of transport apart from planes, regardless of whether a particular trip might be just as convenient or faster or cheaper with public transport.
That unwillingness in many areas to consider public transport unless you are forced to by not having a car fascinates me - it's very clear that there is a social status consideration in what mode of transport you consider in the US, which is much less pronounced in Europe, and that is more important than whether or not public transport is convenient, cheap or fast.
I'm not sure what you mean here, but you seem to be saying, "Aluminum recycling is more cost-effective than refinement of aluminum ores, but there are plentiful supplies of aluminum ores, so we don't need to recycle aluminum" You realize that doesn't make sense, right? I assume you meant something else.
Also, besides aluminum, even consumer level recycling is very efficent when applied to any metal, including copper, lead and steel.
No, I will not argue that there has been no climate change over the past ten thousand years--in fact I said that I wouldn't argue that point. I will strenuously argue as to the causes of the changes, and indeed the extent.
Point 1--the area is a STILL a fertile crescent. The entire region is a semi-arid zone. This is due not simply to the (lack of large amounts of vegetation) but ocean currents--among them, the monsoon winds, as well as physical geography. Mountain ranges that "bottle" up from the red sea (a plate boundary) north into Turkey, along the Zagros in Iran, etc. This makes much of the region lack rainful. However, you can view Satellite imagery--there are incredibly fertile areas. These are linked to water resources, and expanded by man through canals, irrigation etc.
I'll admit that I've never read (nor ever heard of) Thom Hartmann, however as I see other books he's written include "The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights" I immediately suspect that h'es more of an activist writer than an actual historian, and one should be careful with the average armchair historian. I can't say this with certainty though, as I said, I've never heard of him--but I can say I take his writings with a rather large, excuse the pun, grain of salt.
You can't argue with it because you've apparently never bothered to do a whit of research on the topic. But I suppose you're more learned than Jared Diamond, or just about any other ecological scientist on the planet?
No I of course wouldn't make such a claim, but I am a Middle Eastern historian, so I like to think I have some basic knowledge of the region. As I've pointed out, we have no direct evidence of any human impact on the environment (and indeed, similiar changes happening worldwide--I'll especially note the case of Northern China) makes the argument that human civilization created one of the greatest semi-arid zones in the world utterly ludicrous. If you examine the types and methods of agricutlural developed in this region, it all falls into place--these are areas which NEVER (at least not within the "civilizational timeframe") experienced the amount of rainfall you claim. Herodotus--Egypt is the gift of the Nile. Likewise, Mesopotamia, etc.
Actually I think I just realized what you might be getting at--yes, human causes CAN have temporary effects on the environment that are quite nasty--actually, read my other post. the key is TEMPORARY. Salt in the soil may have been a problem 4000 years ago, but it's easily fixable, and indeed is. The BIGGEST reason it's a problem is that the rivers were the only source of water. After all, you don't get salty soil from rainfall.
and the expression Fertile Crescent is NOT at all ludicrous today.