In our “History of our Future” issue of Spacing, we ran several articles about ideal, sustainable city ideas, including an “arcology” in the stadium-formerly-known-as-Skydome.
Well, it looks like the Chinese are on their way to actually building an utopian sustainable city, Dongtan, on an island in the mouth of the Yangtse river. According to the Guardian, it will look something like this:
None of the buildings is more than eight storeys high. Turf and vegetation cover the roofs, a natural form of insulation that also recycles waste water. The town has six times more space for pedestrians than Copenhagen, one of Europe’s airiest capitals. Pollution-free buses, powered by fuel cells, run between neighbourhoods. An intranet service forecasts travel times and connects people who want to share a car. Traditional motorbikes are forbidden, replaced by electric scooters or bicycles. The roads are laid out so that walking or cycling to work is quicker than driving.
The contracts have already been signed and design is apparently underway.
It’s interesting, though, that the whole thing still has a kind of “megaproject” feel about it. I wonder whether that might undermine the execution of what seem to be good intentions.
4 comments
It would be fantastic to see this kind of “eco-building” in all of the new large-scale projects in Toronto – Regent Park, Don Mount, the “Donlands”, the Portlands, etc., etc.
A green city by fiat. China has so much weird potential and it will be accomplished through soft dictatorship. Sigh.
Dictatorship’s are so damn efficient though! This democracy is so slow, like a minority gov’t.
Even terrible Muammar Qaddafi in Libya is a crazy environmentalist now. Long live the things Cretien or Clinton (before Newt controlled congress) could have done!
What a disaster. In a country overrun with people, setting up a brand new city in currently unmolested territory is “eco-building”? And since there will and can be no oversight, no public participation, and few environmental guidelines for the project the chances of it having any vague relation to anything “eco” is extremely small. What will happen to any small scale landowners currently on the site? They will likely end up in tenements outside some major city. I would also venture to say that massive city-building on this scale cannot possibly serve an ecological purpose since all decisions will be made by a centralized and centralizing body. Copenhagen in its current form represents individual small decisions built up over years, and more evolutionary approach to city building.
As for the building height limit, the accompanying graphic already shows tall buildings. I suspect this proposal all relates to corruption and land ownership.