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Can a bold new “eco-city” clear the air in China?
Kristi Heim, Seattle Times
SHANGHAI – To the residents of China’s most crowded and populous city, the air on nearby Chongming Island has an unfamiliar quality: It’s fresh.
About an hour’s ferry ride from the edge of the city, the island’s farms and fishing villages are a world apart from the pollution that pervades modern life in China – and increasingly spills out beyond it.
A steady breeze rustles through lush green marsh grass, the only sound besides the chirping of migrating birds at the mouth of the Yangtze River. Fields of watermelon and cabbage stretch for miles.
“It’s the last piece of undeveloped land in Shanghai,” said Yan Yang, who grew up in this city before going to work for Seattle architecture firm Callison. “It’s a treasure.”
The island may be lodged in the past, but it soon could leapfrog into the future. It’s here that Shanghai developers plan to build what they say will be the world’s first sustainable “eco-city” on a plot three-fourths the size of Manhattan.
Called Dongtan, or East Beach, the project attempts to channel China’s voracious demand for housing and energy into a radical new model: a city that eventually supports half a million residents, recycles almost all of its waste, produces its electricity from wind turbines, solar panels and biofuel, and ferries people around in hydrogen fuel-cell buses and solar-powered water taxis.
(25 November 2007)
Rumbling Across India to a New Life in the City
Anand Giridharadas, New York Times
… this was third class on the Pushpak Express, a $6, 24-hour ride ferrying migrants from India’s bleak heartland to the thriving coastal megalopolis of Mumbai, formerly Bombay. And in an echo of the ancient caste system, these passengers are physically sealed off from the compartments of the luckier born.
These passengers are also part of a great migration that is changing the world. Goldman Sachs, which has published projections about the Indian economy, predicts that 31 villagers will continue to show up in an Indian city every minute over the next 43 years – 700 million people in all. This exodus, with a similar one in China, helped push the world over a historic threshold this year: the planet, for the first time, is more urban than rural.
To ride the Pushpak Express from Lucknow, in Uttar Pradesh State in northern India, to Mumbai is to see a snapshot of that global metamorphosis.
… To ride this train was to recall that India remains in many ways a village nation: the effortless involvement of people in other’s lives, the ceaseless generosity.
The migrants showed strange kindness to those just shades poorer than they. Beggars paraded through third class, the only class where the authorities do not hamper them. And yet to beg from the desperate requires special creativity.
Two hours beyond Lucknow, a blind man’s voice began to waft through the car. “Oh, my brothers, if you have no eyes, you have nothing,” he moaned, his hand outstretched. Nearly every migrant offered a coin; upper-class Mumbai residents rarely do.
(25 November 2007)
In Miles of Alleys, Chicago Finds Its Next Environmental Frontier
Susan Saulny, New York Times
If this were any other city, perhaps it would not matter what kind of roadway was underfoot in the back alleys around town. But with nearly 2,000 miles of small service streets bisecting blocks from the North Side to the South Side, Chicago is the alley capital of America. In its alleys, city officials say, it has the paved equivalent of five midsize airports.
Part of the landscape since the city began, the alleys, mostly home to garbage bins and garages, make for cleaner and less congested main streets. But Chicago’s distinction is not without disadvantages: Imagine having a duplicate set of streets, in miniature, to maintain that are prone to flooding and to dumping runoff into a strained sewer system.
What is an old, alley-laden city to do?
Chicago has decided to retrofit its alleys with environmentally sustainable road-building materials under its Green Alley initiative, something experts say is among the most ambitious public street makeover plans in the country. In a larger sense, the city is rethinking the way it paves things.
In a green alley, water is allowed to penetrate the soil through the pavement itself, which consists of the relatively new but little-used technology of permeable concrete or porous asphalt.
(25 November 2007)
Can LEED Survive the Carbon-Neutral Era?
James S. Russell, Metropolis Magazine
The rating system is beginning to gain wide acceptance, but critics now wonder whether the checklist approach can meet the daunting challenges ahead.
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As China chokes on air pollution and the glaciers rapidly recede, green design in mainstream America takes on a boutique sheen. Eco-homes feature a bit of FSC-certified cabinetry, paints that don’t off-gas, fancy air filters. The sell lays the sustainable message on thick: the Web sites and brochures for these projects make the buildings seem like Zen spas, with the bathwater triple filtered and floor-to-ceiling windows opening onto patches of pesticide-free green roofs.
Increasingly, the soybean inks on these marketing efforts include the acronym LEED, for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, the voluntary green-building rating system developed by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). With climate-change concerns growing, the program is on everyone’s radar. After all, buildings use about 70 percent of the electricity produced in the United States, more than half of which is generated by coal, the dirtiest fuel and worst contributor to global warming. In the absence of any substantial federal effort, LEED has almost by default become the primary way American builders tackle our daunting environmental challenges.
And yet the program has only certified about a thousand buildings since its inception in 2000. It’s a tiny accomplishment compared to the 1.4 million homes that will start construction in 2007-a slow year. But LEED numbers are growing rapidly (see map). According to Scot Horst, chair of USGBC’s LEED steering committee, there are 40,000 LEED-accredited professionals. “That suggests the level of market transformation.” Dozens of municipalities now either encourage or require certification for building projects. Companies that did not even know what the acronym stood for a year ago now clamor for a Platinum rating.
Though global warming has made it more relevant than ever, the program has been slow to reflect the importance of climate change, largely because LEED’s vision of environmental sustainability is exceedingly broad, taking in site development, water efficiency, building materials, and fresh air, among other issues. Until this June, buildings could get certified without receiving any of the energy points aimed at reducing carbon emissions. The rating system has suffered many growing pains but appears on the verge of wide acceptance; coping with climate change, however, could threaten the current model.
The primary reason so few buildings have been certified is quite simple: it is not easy. Architects not only have to design a better building, they have to document it copiously and then await the USGBC’s judgment on whether they’ve achieved the rating they sought. And certification is not cheap.
(21 November 2007)
Leaps of faith drive ever-expanding ‘burbs
‘Drive until you find your house’ (text and video)
Charles Leroux and Patrick T. Reardon, Chicago Tribune
…Bob Farley knew it was coming. When he looked back east from the 1,400 acres in southern Kane County where his family has grown corn and soybeans and raised cattle for half a century, there, looming on the horizon, was an unrelenting land rush with suburban pioneers transforming fields and forests into malls and curving streets where houses grew.
“Back in the ’70s,” he said, taking a break from loading a tractor-trailer with corn, “the east side of Aurora blew up [with development], so we thought it could happen here. We had time to prepare for it.”
Farley was 2 in 1954 when his family moved to the farm on Galena Boulevard west of Aurora. It was countryside all around then, but the great resettling outward he would see coming decades later already was stirring. It was a time of great change throughout the region and across the nation.
That same year, the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision was an opening salvo in the civil rights movement. A year earlier, with the very first color televisions flickering in homes across the country, TV Guide debuted with more than 11/2 million copies. Also that year, a revolution in the country’s attitude toward sex was signaled when Playboy magazine began publication.
And the first wave of a mass migration out from its cities began to shape a new American landscape.
This epic flow started as World War II veterans returned home, married, started families and realized home ownership was a major step toward the good life. Widespread postwar automobile ownership made possible a new kind of suburbanization no longer restricted to the rail lines that tied a previous generation of suburbanites to the cities. People were free to settle anywhere across a broad swath of territory, and the countryside began to be blanketed with subdivisions.
(25 November 2007)
In-depth article.
