An artist rendering of China's Dongtan eco-city shows a lakeside dotted with micro windmills and low-lying buildings using special thermal technology to save energy. Originally scheduled to have its first phase completed by 2010, construction has stalled amid political and bureaucratic wrangling. (Photo provided by Ove Arup & Partners/MCT/FILE)
In China, overambition reins in eco-city plans
Chongming Island’s planned community remains a gleam in the eye. But China is making progress on green design codes.
By Simon Montlake | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor/ December 23, 2008 edition
Chongming Island, China
If all had gone to plan, by now the first residents of China’s newest city would be unpacking boxes. An experiment in sustainable living, Dongtan was billed as a urban center where green technologies and smart design could slash the carbon footprint of up to a half-million people.
On recent rainy afternoon, the onsite view was less electrifying: miles of sodden farms and wetlands, and not an ecobuilding to be seen.
It’s unclear if any will be built. The state-owned developer has torn up a timetable to accommodate 50,000 residents by 2010. Some permits for the project have already lapsed.
In a country overloaded with environmental challenges, Dongtan is a symbol of political overreach that straddles nearby Shanghai and Britain, the home base of Arup, the firm that dreamed up Dongtan. Its failings show the limits to getting bold ideas off the drawing board, even in China’s top-down political culture, where outsized schemes get traction.
Housing’s heavy carbon footprint
As the Chinese try to house an urban population that may reach 1 billion by 2030, where and how they live are questions with global repercussions. China is among the world’s largest producers of greenhouse gases, and its demand for new buildings further strains resources. One study found that erecting and running buildings accounts for over half of China’s energy-related carbon emissions.
The proportion of Chinese living in urban areas more than doubled between 1980 and 2005, to 44 percent. As that trend accelerates over the next 20 years, McKinsey Global Institute predicts that China will need to build almost 40 billion square meters of floor space in some 5 million buildings. Environmentalists fear the planet can’t sustain that pace at current levels of energy, water, and soil usage.
“Anyone who hopes for a sustainable future cannot fail to see China as an opportunity for dramatic steps forward,” says Kira Gould, a spokesperson for William McDonough + Partners, a US architectural firm active in ecodesign in China.
The impact of a warming earth – which scientists trace, in part, to atmospheric gases that trap heat – would be felt in Shanghai, a city of 17 million that is vulnerable to rising sea levels. That made the promise of a low-carbon community on Chongming Island, a 30-minute boat ride across the Yangtze River, all the more appealing to former Shanghai mayor Chen Liangyu.
His enthusiasm was catching. Other Chinese cities are planning their own ecocommunities, including an Arup-designed project outside Beijing. While their scale varies, what these proposals have in common is a desire to use renewable energy to heat, cool, and power homes, while discouraging car-oriented sprawl.
In 2005, then-Prime Minister Tony Blair hailed Dongtan as a symbol of British-Chinese cooperation during a state visit to London by President Hu Jintao. Successor Gordon Brown has continued to plug the project – most recently on a visit to Shanghai in February – and frame it as a model for future British ecotowns.
But the arrest in 2006 of Mr. Chen for property-related fraud appears to have sunk the eco-city. Suspicious of Shanghai’s political clout, the ruling Communist Party purged the city’s leadership and changed how land deals are done.
Roger Wood, an associate director of Arup, says Dongtan is still on track even though its developer, SIIC, has put construction on hold. He admits that the change of leadership has “delayed the decisionmaking process” and as a result, “there isn’t much to say” about its implementation.
That hasn’t stopped Arup from promoting Dongtan as a vision of a green future, says Paul French, a director of AccessAsia, a consultancy in Shanghai, and a project critic. “They’re still getting mileage out of it, even though it’s dead in the water,” he says.
Other countries have their own eco-dreams: Abu Dhabi plans to build an elevated, carbon-neutral city by 2016 at a price tag of $22 billion. Like Dongtan, it aims to attract clean-energy companies and research institutes.
While ecocities offer a bold leap forward, China is making tangible progress in other green design issues, such as building codes to promote efficient use of water, soil, and energy. Some developers are applying international standards to construct and retrofit buildings, though these are voluntary, and such buildings are few. Many cities have their own codes.
Over time, energy-efficient buildings recoup their initial higher investment in lower bills. But few developers in China hang onto their projects after completion, says Kevin Edmunds, an executive of Hong Kong’s Business Environmental Council, a nonprofit organization.
What qualifies as ‘eco’?
Nor is there much clarity in China about what exactly is green design, as eco-labels are freely applied to apartment complexes with parks and sea views. On Chongming Island, which has a new bridge and tunnel link to Shanghai, developers are trying to sell vacation homes as ecocommunities.
The Dongtan master plan, by contrast, envisions living and working on the 8,600-hectare site. Mr. French and others argue that CIIC is more likely now to turn it into an upscale dormitory town for Shanghai. CIIC declined to comment.
On a more modest scale, William McDonough + Partners designed an ecovillage of 400 households in northeast China, of which 42 houses have been built. The plan called for affordable solar-powered bungalows using local materials in a bid to free more land for farming. Instead, the developer built suburban-style tract homes that most local families have shunned, according to a PBS documentary earlier this year.
Ms. Gould concedes that mistakes were made in the design and construction of Huangbaiyu, the village. One complaint was that it didn’t create enough jobs. But that was never part of the project, says Gould. “We came to learn that economic development and sustainable development were often being used interchangeably,” she says.
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Comments
2. Shannon May | 12.24.08
As “r” wrote, the desire to be a “model”, to work at “scale” and speed before even testing out whether one’s assumptions are correct, and leaving the research on local needs to a government that is not invested in such knowledge, is a Faustian bargain that always fails. But Arup and McDonough+Partners took the bargain anyway, in hopes that just this once, for each of them, ambition without work would be enough. The experiences of both Dongtan and Huangbaiyu are warnings of hubris, and all too common. While each of these cases has become famous, there are hundreds of other international, joint projects to bring “sustainable development” to China that while called “models” and “demonstrations” demonstrate little other than that while such highly lauded projects garner fame and money for the foreign firms, and promotions for the local government officials, they leave the population they were supposed to serve behind. And usually few people ever question the details of the project, because it now politically incorrect to raise the curtain on projects that seek to ameliorate global warming. All too often a “green light” is given when people shout “green!” But at least in English, we should always remember that “green” is a double entendre, and that as with most things in the contemporary world, if you want to understand what is happening, when someone says that a project is “green,” follow the money and see what that tells you.
It is also disingenuous for Ms. Gould to say that a problem with the project was that economic development and sustainable development were being used interchangeably. First, McDonough himself has held that economic viability is foundational to sustainable development, as noted in his manifesto, Cradle to Cradle. Second, throughout written documents and spoken engagements between McDonough and his Chinese counterparts, sustainable development always included, economic, social and environmental sustainability. But Ms Gould may be correct in that perhaps McDonough + Partners never considered how residents of their new eco-city would have household income, being much more concerned with the shell of the house, rather than how lives would be lived inside. That would demonstrate a grave lack of disregard for the population that one was supposed to be serving, and highlight that it may be unwise to employ an architect to design a town or city. The architect is a critical specialist for the design of structures, but how do you design a community? To design a town without ever considering how people would survive there is to assume that a town is just a conglomeration of buildings. Empty. So perhaps Ms Gould’s firm got what they planned for, if it is true that they never considered how any people could live in their eco-town: an empty place, and one that contributed significant emissions of carbon dioxide equivalents through its planning and construction without any benefit accruing either to the local population or to the Earth’s ecology. Yet her firm has sought extensive work in China, benefitting from networks forged through relationships made during the life of this project.
I do not think that all the responsibility for failure resides with McDonough + Partners, but it is unfortunate that they are so eager to seek simple answers, shift blame and revise the history of the project.
For an extensive listing of press on the Huangbaiyu case, see my website. I lived and worked there throughout the course of the project.
3. TONY LIVOTI | 01.04.09
The prospects of Dongton Eco-City in China and the Masdar City eco-friendly city in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emarites are great undertakings with global friendly footprints. The $22 Billion price tag on the first phase development of Dongtan is a hefty chunck of money and it will take years to compelte.
CH2MHill, the lead contractor in Masday City and ARUP for Dongton are building these new 21st Century cities with new technologies for energy, waste management, agriculture, etc. However, their approach is from the birds-eye view of major corporations utilizing their existing 20th century mentodologies in the deveopment process.
That is to say, they will employ Green construction in their living and working buildings, however, their approach to architectural design and the kind of materials used in the actual construction process fall short of what must be done to meet the population boom now upon us.
We believe that new kinds of space age materials and new architecutral building methods using modular parts in a ‘legos’ type of approach needa to be employed in our global quest for ’21st Centurey Cities’ of the future. This approach will result in tremendous savings in development costs making ‘eco-cities’ a reality and not a distant dream inhibited by economic downturns, government regulations and bureaucratic methodologies.
We will be discussing all of the above in the upcoming 2nd annual Green Trade Network Summit conference to be held in Santa Cruz, Ca. on Sep. 24-25, 2009.
4. James Miller | 01.08.09
When I interviewed Arup’s project leaders in Shanghai in April 2007, one innovative feature of their design process was their emphasis on “cultural planning.” The idea here is that urban design is not simply about structures and residents, but about cultures, contexts, ecologies and environments. In the Dongtan project, Arup was not simply creating a new type of city, but was also testing out new ways of thinking about sustainable design in ways that engineering firms had never traditionally considered. In this and earlier Chinese projects, they had employed philosophers and anthropologists to help understand local traditions and cultures so as to work with existing cultural resources to ensure that their designs would be successful. Whatever happens to Dongtan, it is clear that Arup has gained the chance to experiment with new forms of planning that bridge the gap between culture, society and engineering.
5. Timothy Lesle | 01.12.09
[Note, I am attempting to post a comment that I attempted to submit about two weeks ago.]
I’d like to thank Simon Montlake and the Monitor for mentioning the investigative piece I completed for FRONTLINE/World (PBS) earlier this year. But I must clarify one point raised in this article about my story.
The residents of this farming village currently live spread out in a long valley, near their crops, with livestock on their property. The plan created by William McDonough and his partners on this project outlined a single, dense community for the entire village.
While it is the case that the local developer built suburban-style tract homes, it is fair to say he did so based on the plan he received. (His modifications of details of the design are a point to debate.)
The planners recognized, before construction began, that the yards of the new houses would be smaller than those that currently exist. As noted in the narrative that accompanied the master plan: “The yards may be too small to support the number of livestock that currently occupy many yards in the village.” In practice, this meant the farmers could not keep their livestock–a major source of income–if they moved in.
And that, simply, is why no one wanted to. There was a fundamental flaw in the design: it neglected to account for this basic element of village life. The cause of this oversight is, to some extent, a mystery because no one from William McDonough + Partners would comment for my story. But the more important point to remember here is that villagers saw that this eco-village would require them to trade in their lives as farmers for lives in factories or offices or whatever would fit this suburban-style tract home design.
Who could blame the villagers, then, for hoping that some new jobs would come along with this high-profile international eco-village project, since participating in it would force them to give up their old ones?
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1. Cleaner Greener China | 12.23.08
Fantastic article.
Covering a dynamic environment like China, and the many steps people are trying to take, there are going to be steps in both directions.
Anytime one finds their projects in China heralded as the “model” anything and heavily linked to a very political process, the risks of the project failing grow. Vested interests kick in very fast, and programs can experience internal breakdown very fast.
My personal and professional opinion is that there are many opportunities to be involved in Chinese steps to a more sustainable existence. The key to succeeding is to take the time to learn about the needs, bring products to the market that are needed, and avoid all the press.
r
http://www.cleanergreenerchina.com