Wired Magazine: Pop-Up Cities: China Builds a Bright Green Metropolis
Wired Magazine: Pop-Up Cities: China Builds a Bright Green Metropolis
A really interesting idea. Instead of trying to rebuild a city to fit better in our modern worn why not start from scratch? china has started and considering the environment damage there rapid rise has caused it seems thy are setting the example of what we should be doing everywhere.
To Summarize:
Mao Tse-tung believed the natural world was all that stood between Communist China and its industrial future. His country, he said in a 1940 speech, “must use natural science to understand, conquer, and change nature.” And conquer it did. Forests were razed, up to 90 percent of the trees in some provinces. The government, in a scheme to accelerate steel production, forced Beijing residents to smelt metal in hundreds of thousands of polluting backyard furnaces. New factories dumped untreated waste into the rivers until they turned a deep, noxious black. When China’s economy began to take off in the 1980s, conditions got worse. Foreign firms put their most toxic manufacturing operations in China. Sudden prosperity, and a rush to boomtowns like Shanghai, drove energy demand well beyond what the grid could provide. Today, China opens an average of one new coal-fired power plant per week, the main reason it will pass the US in the next two years as the world’s biggest source of CO2 emissions. Since 2001, China has increased its emissions more than every other industrialized country in the world combined.
Shanghai’s bureaucrats let it be known that Chongming Island must stay green, and SIIC agreed. The developer commissioned a series of ecological studies. Then it invited Philip Johnson, the late icon of American architecture, to design a master plan. SIIC showed Johnson’s staff the site and briefed them on the environmental constraints. For months, designers flew back and forth to the site, making plans for a leafy, low-density garden suburb built around a huge man-made lake. Finally Johnson’s team arrived in Shanghai to present its plan — and found it was not alone. London-based Atkins and Paris-based Architecture-Studio, both giants in the architecture world, had also created master plans for SIIC. Nobody knew it was going to be a competition. Dinner afterward was awkward, and none of the proposals went anywhere.
Founded by engineer Ove Arup in the 1940s, London-based Arup has 86 offices in more than 30 countries and a staff of nearly 9,000, including 1,500 in China. The firm dispatches engineers and architects but also economists, environmental scientists, MBAs, energy experts, transportation gurus, and cultural anthropologists to projects around the globe. Still, its work is often anonymous: When a famous architect designs a dramatic skin for some big building, Arup designs the guts. It engineered the overlapping shells of the Sydney Opera House and figured out how to turn a building inside out when it worked on the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
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