A Tale of Four Cities

Prologue
Those who have been following my adventure from the beginning will know that it started with a proposal written last October, over a year ago now, to travel the world following the green sun from east to west as it casts its light on the dawn of the Ecological Age. The hope for this new Age, a term coined by Peter Head of Arup, is embodied in the design, construction, and occupation of “Eco-Cities.” Following the utopian trends of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City of Tomorrow, Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City, and Jane Jacobs’ model for New York, these new towns are meant to inspire citizens and politicians to actively seek a better, safer, cleaner, more productive life for all. The difference, though, between these new utopian dreams and past visions is that eco-cities are the first utopian worlds to seek a life liberated from the shackles of CO₂ emissions. The ultimate goal is an entirely self-sustaining, thriving community that is powered by nature—sun, wind, rain, water, plants—for every aspect of life from housing to transit, food to waste disposal. If anything is emitted, it should be cleaner than the original byproduct.

The literature on achieving this new way of life seems to be growing exponentially. Walk into any Borders or Barnes and Noble in the US and you will find an ever-growing section stuffed with tomes on the 365 Easy Things you can do to save the planet or comedic chronicles of one man’s attempt at producing biodiesel for his car in his garage. For a bit more academic work, proponents of the eco-city model will direct you to William McDonough’s and Michael Braungart’s Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. In this work, you can learn about the concept of upcycling—taking raw materials, making them useful products, and then when they are destroyed reforming them into better quality “technical nutrients” than the raw materials which they initially were. For those looking for a really academic paper, you might turn to Peter Head’s paper, "Entering the Ecological Age: The Engineer's Role." From the founder of the “Ecological Age,” this work describes the need for and tenets of low-environmental impact buildings covering topics from building design and technology to transportation and even food production.

Eco-cities take this concept one step further. The term was originally coined in conjunction with the Arup project for the Dongtan eco-city on Chongming Island, about an hour and a half outside of Shanghai. As applied to Dongtan, the term is as I described above—a vision of an entirely self-sufficient city which was zero net-carbon. Yet for Arup, the ultimate metric was the ecological footprint of the city. The World Wildlife Fund states that for us as a species to live sustainably, each of us must have the ecological footprint of 1.9 hectares. Currently in the US we are about four times that, and in China, about 2.2. Dongtan’s residents would have had a footprint of 2.2 hectares. Though not quite at the WWF level of sustainability, Dongtan nonetheless would have been the closest city on the planet to achieving this lofty goal.

Since Dongtan’s inception in 2006, China has rapidly planned eco-cities—in my trip I’ve heard various numbers of planned eco-cities ranging from 104 to over 170. The exact number is not important—what is important is that the concept of an eco-city is rapidly being spread in the country and being demanded by politicians looking to satisfy the need for growth in their cities. But as the concept has spread, it has also morphed. Anyone familiar with the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City will know that it is not striving to be zero carbon, but it still uses the eco-city brand readily. So the question now is what does the label mean? And can these cities really be achieved? If so, will they serve as beacons of hope and models on pedestals for future planning and development or are they green gimmicks to attract foreign investors?

The question does not affect just China—the concept of eco-cities has spread to other nations as well (hence why I have funding to study the topic for a year in more countries than just China). Masdar City in the United Arab Emirates, the Clonburris infill blocks in Dublin, Ireland, an eco-block in Mombasa, Kenya, and cities in Brazil, India, Germany, and England are all now using the eco-city label, and all sport different features and targets.

This is the first in a series of posts about the four eco-cities in China I learned about in detail during my time there—Dongtan, Huangbaiyu, Tangshan/Caofeidian, and Tianjin. They are four unique situations and stories, each with its own lessons to teach about sustainability and the future of urban planning both in China and in other parts of the world. Over the next few days, I will explore each of these in turn, presenting both the facts and my thoughts, insights, and lessons learned. I hope that these posts inspire thought about the nature of sustainable development, what an eco-city should look like, and what it will take to get there. I welcome opportunities for discussion and feedback on my ideas and conclusions.

As a last note in this prologue for my series, I will quote the inspiration for the title of this post. Though written over 100 years ago to romanticize Paris and London, Charles Dickens’ words are appropriate here and now when thinking about sustainable cities. Reading his beautiful language through the lens of assessing the challenges associated with sustainable cities, one realizes that we really do have everything before us and nothing before us—all the hopes, dreams, and ideas of an eco-city and not a single completed project yet. And the comparisons don’t stop there, but I’ll leave the rest for you to ponder…

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of believe, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way..."