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Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle
Alex Steffen, WorldChanging
Our cities could be seen as machines for transforming water, biomass and minerals into people and pollution. If we’re serious about building a bright green future, we need to redesign those machines, keeping the people, but bringing the mechanism into a balanced cycle with the Earth. That’s going be a bit challenging.
One thing we can do to increase our odds of success is to understand how our cities grew into the complex systems they now are. Indeed, not understanding what accidents, choices and forces shaped our cities almost guarantees that the new designs, policies, plans and technologies we introduce will either fail or produce monstrous unintended consequences. As Wendell Barry once said, “All good work remembers its past.”
The past explored in Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle may have unfolded on the shores of Puget Sound, but this new book’s insights are both cosmopolitan and timely. Matthew Klingle has made a hugely important contribution to the field of environmental history. More impressively, he’s written a book that at once pushes the cutting edge of scholarship and yet will speak deeply to the people actually working to build more sustainable cities.
Klingle (disclosure: we went to graduate school together, but haven’t spoken in years) crafts a straightforward but engrossing story about how in the late 1700s, Europeans encountered Native Peoples living in an ecosystem of almost staggering natural abundance — “the most lovely country that can be imagined” — and, over time, in fits and starts, aided by the Klondike Gold Rush and industrialization, intentionally and yet with profound ignorance, changed that place into a city that today is prosperous, high-tech, scenic and teetering on the edge of ecological disaster.
(23 August 2007)
China Eco-Cities Update
Mara Hvistendahl, WorldChanging
In 2005, green architect William McDonough and British engineering firm Arup separately announced plans to build ambitious eco-cities housing up to 500,000 inhabitants on the mainland. For a few months following these announcements, coverage was enthusiastic (we have written about these cities a number of times, with early articles here and here). Much of this coverage was deserved. Designers are, after all, devising solutions to what promises to be one of the largest rural-to-urban migrations in history.
But in recent months, journalists have begun to look at how these cities are shaping up.
…That is precisely the problem in China. People in developed countries have had a few decades to try out and reject excess. It isn’t just an awareness of environmental degradation that pushes us to go green; it’s a knowledge, gleaned from firsthand experience, that conventional living generates a level of waste that makes us uncomfortable. In urban China, however, bigger is still better. Most middle-class Chinese are still preoccupied with finding ways to display their wealth, not minimize its impact on the world.
Such attitudes — which are understandable, if not admirable — are behind the problems now surfacing in the transformation of urban China. To accomplish their goals, Western designers working in China might partner with local government officials, as McDonough has done. But such officials might be more concerned with project success than with enforcing land rights or securing public participation — also critical to creating healthy, enduring communities.
..But the stream of Chinese eco-cities won’t stop. Last month, New York architect Kevin Kennon announced a green community for the resort island Sanya. We should expect — and hope — to see more in years to come. Why? For people interested in seeing China go green (and, given its share of global emissions, we all should be), there isn’t any other option. The alternative to massive eco-cities is not slow, organic development but massive conventional cities, with all their attendant ills. Urbanization is simply occurring too rapidly in China to allow for anything else. The hope for China now is that is that its designers — Western architects and local politicians alike — will learn from their mistakes.
(22 August 2007)
