Slashdot Mirror
Chinese Eco-Cities
opencity writes "The Guardian is reporting on a deal by Arups, a British consulting firm, to build four eco-cities in China. The cities are to be self-sufficient in energy, water and most food products, with the aim of zero emissions of greenhouse gases in transport systems. The press release hints at some of the technology."
As China is one of the biggest polluters and is not bound by the Kyoto environmental treaty, having them take this step on their own initiative to create cleaner cities is certainly a welcome sight.
The cities are being developed by a British group, and I'm not sure how well that bodes for the final designs. Britain has some of the most "natural urban growth" cities in the Western world. It will be interesting to see how well they will be able to come up with something that is both ecologically friendly and unique and attractive.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
A situation such as this is virtually impossible to achieve in a free market situation. Hence this is showing the benefits of a planned economy. China (economically) has come a long way in the past 50 years and will probably go much further as they gain more influence over their super power buddy the US.
Imagine the US if the govt didn't give businesses money for jobs and everything else?
The ability to do these things is probably the strength of China. Because the economy is run by the government, it has the ability to pursue these large-scale and exciting projects such as sending a man to the moon or creating ecological cities.
Every country has its strengths and weaknesses. I actually think these "ecological cities" are a fantastic idea, and I am very happy that someone is modelling them for future modification/reference. On the other hand, China has its own weaknesses (poverty of so many & massive industrial pollution to name two big ones), but I don't think these weaknesses should detract from what is fundamentally a great potential achievement.
Unity in Diversity
Well, this would turn out to be another Biodome if not for Dr. Mills patented cure-all energy tonic.
How timely!
Rather than trying to save energy, we should find ways to produce more energy cheaply without causing pollution. Expensive energy is the root cause of global poverty and reduced quality of life. Cover the deserts with solar panels.. make energy dirt cheap.
This is about both saving energy (by making more efficient use of it) and producing more energy (new energy generation for the city to make it self sufficient). Put most succinctly it is about sustainability. Efforts to "save" energy are not about stopping doing things, but about doing possibly even more than we do now, just doing it all more efficiently so that it doesn't use more energy.
To put it in terms of a rough economic analogy, it's like figuring out how to spend your money more wisely so you can get more out of it. Sure you could simply keep spending flagrantly with ever increasing expenses and just take out larger and larger loans, but eventually you have to sit down and work out what your current income level really is, and then see how you can spend that most efficiently. That doesn't mean you stop trying to get a raise, it just means you try and get "living within your means" as a basepoint.
Sustainability and efficiency do make sense, no matter what your standpoint. I think you're simply constructing a straw man with claims that "The supposed environmentalist "final solution" is to eliminate people" and generally implying that energy self sufficiency is about giving things up, rather than what it is really about: doing even more with what we already have.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
You mean like most of the world's great cities? Here in NYC, for example, our government "plans in advance" where you can live and work (zoning laws), what we can do there (labor law and industry incentives), how we get to work (automobile restrictions and public transit), what products we can buy (consumer safety), where to buy them (business regulation), and where to dispose of the wrappers (litter law, trash pickup, mandatory recycling).
Of course, if you prefer to live in a libertarian shithole like Houston, Texas (no zoning laws, few social services, motor vehicle free-for-all, etc.), that's entirely up to you--and so much the better for the rest of us in livable environments, as we won't have to waste time talking down all the suckers at the teats of Ayn Rand.
Because bio-spheres didn't work and because a building that people can and will live in are not made from the same materials as a space craft.
Buildings are heavy, going into orbit takes LOTS of fuel.
Most of the planning in NYC has been done after the fact. For most of its history, it was a "libertarian shithole" much like Houston is now. In fact, that probably had a lot to do with its phenomenal growth.
Most planned cities, Brasilia, Washington DC, end up being little more than monuments to their creators. Anyone who has anything to do with these cities and has any sense lives in suburbs.
Successful cities create themselves. People move to be closer to some resource, such as a trade route or mine or otherwise strategic location. If there's time for some authority to do any planning at all, there's not really any strategic resource nearby. Most attempts to create successful, self-sustaining cities have been failures.
Look at the location planned here, for instance, "farmland", the absolute worst place to put a city unless you're a government looking to herd citizens into factory jobs.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Does this remind anyone else of the facade of the Potemkin Villages? China may build several self sustaining communities, and they will undoubtedly be models for the rest of the world. However, I would be far more impressed with this effort if it were to be applied nationally. Otherwise, this is naught but an exercise in hypocrisy, and merely deflects attention from China's appallingly serious polluting.
Hey, shouldn't people be allowed to produce pollution they breathe themselves? Do you care if I smoke and ruin my own lungs, so long as you don't have to breathe it? That is, doesn't the offense of pollution, if offense there be, come from producing pollution that other people have to breathe?
In which case, the way to measure the obnoxiousness of pollution by country X is just to divide the pollution by the population of the rest of the world, everybody except those who live in X.
By this standard, the Chinese may not do so well, because the non-Chinese population of the world (everybody but the Chinese) is much smaller than the non-US (everybody but the Americans), non-Canadian, non-Australian, et cetera. That is, the amount of US pollution the average non-US citizen must breathe might be less than the amount of Chinese pollution the average non-Chinese citizen must breathe. Oh well.
This is a common conceit.
It didn't work because they were stupid. Surely it'll work this time -- we're not stupid, are we?
Have you never seen the films of early attempts at heavier-than-air flight? There are lots of ways to construct a plausible looking aircraft, but the few that are actually flightworthy are in fact the result of less-stupid designs.
how about canberra, in australia? highly planned. albeit a little boring, but still a pretty good city none the less.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World" 1 John 4:14
Well you can laugh because I know something about sustainability and I am not left wing. I can grow TONNES of organic delicious gormet food and it normally sells wholesale for over $12 bux per kilo. So - maybe I'll just get rich eh?
To a large degree it is all about knowledge and engineering.
BTW - I could NEVER sell any of this stuff in China for a price like that because they've known these technologies for over 1000 years.
Often people pay dearly for food because they are either lazy or simply have no idea of the real costs of production. A sack of dried beans for instance costs less than 20 cents per pound. Dried peas are even cheaper. So for about $10 bux I can pretty much fill a 45 gallon drum with beans with pork. If you buy this at the supermarket I suspect $10 bux might get you a case.
Of course beans with pork are not gormet. However if you live in a poor 3rd world country then maybe beans with pork will have you dancing in the streets being it is the musical food.
I think there is a lot we in the western world can learn. We have been very wasteful of our natural resources. I suspect this will hit you right between the eyes this winter and the next when you look at your gas heating bills and wonder why the people who built your house designed it to exclude all free energy and instead replaced it with inefficent non-renewable sources (such as your furnace) where you have to buy the fuel month after month after month.
Check out the Solar Decathalon. The work presented there is very exciting.
Then look around you and try to figure out if there is anything in your house that doesn't have to be torn apart to be rebuilt.
In this city if I go to the new construction areas I see the contractors have not learned much in the last 50 years. They still think houses need furnaces for instance. I know for a fact they do not.
No, you can worry about self-contained bio-spheres AFTER getting the ships out of the planet's atmosphere. The problem of getting cargo into outer space is the number one issue at this point in time. A bio-sphere isn't too hard to designed and built by college students. (Hydroponic farms anyone? Water for the plants and astronauts, plants will grow all necessary food, carbon dioxide is recycled through the plants and back into oxygen. Solar power for electronic devices. You'd have to be a vegetarian but thats a small price to pay to be a space pioneer.)
It all depends on who you hire to design and build your house. The contractor who remodeled my parent's home was a lazy bastard. The only thing I'm satisfied with is the networking and telephony system - and that's because I put it in myself. Unfortunately, now that I need to make modifications, everything's been sealed up - no conduit was run between floors, there are no access panels for junctions, crap that was miswired is buried god knows where. I'm VERY certain that the electrical plans and what actually went into the walls are NOTHING alike.
Of course, I was only screaming about needing a mains junction in both the attic and the garage, for solar power and a garage workshop. What did I get? A 220 socket in the garage (which was subsequently blocked up by cabinetry), and NOTHING in the attic. Let's not even get into the roof...
Mark my words, watch your contractors like a hawk. It turned out the general contractor was paying his buddy $3k to babysit the jobsite, and all he did was make runs to the local Home Depot to pick up stuff the subcontractors ran short of.