When you think of China you think of smog filled cities and people wearing breathing masks everywhere.
And the cities themselves will not neglect to inform you of their highly visible challenges. When you visit, You will not be disappointed, you’ll see your pollution measures expectations justified. Chinese people are wearing gauge masks, their cities are growing frantically, and their populations are blooming.
And then you take the calculator and add up all the emissions involved in CO2 emissions intensive city living, their huge energy needs, constant building and growing, artificial weather, HVAC systems always on, cement intensive construction, ever lasting traffic jams, tying up millions of internal combustion engines into the expanding city’s smog cloud, and all the new coal-fired power stations being built to light up and run the never sleeping metropolis…
You start wondering.
In theory at least, cities are better for the environment. Yet the real physics of urbanism only now dawn on us. Advanced cities and old ones, that evolved over time with density and happy dwellers using public transport systems and a thoughtful growth pattern are good and some maybe great. But not the beastly Hydro-cephalus monster of pollution and unhealthy living that Los Angeles – the proverbial LA LA land – or the Tricity area, represent.
Am speaking of the ”Normal Healthy Cities.” Cities with well defined limits, good public transport, density, open spaces, monuments, capital buildings, art, commerce, transparency and good public services for the citizens. Usually that means well meaning older cities. Cities that matured over centuries are best. Cities based on the ancient Greek concept of Polis. Athens in the classical period or Beijing or Rome are the best ones coming to mind.
But what of the new cities?
What can we do about them?
Does it still help the Earth if we all cluster together and huddle?
Can the Climate Change be addressed thus?
Is this the solution?
What model of city?
Is city a city without services and only if a conglomeration of suburbs?
Maybe…
And you struggle to believe that this is better than living in small communities in the countryside. The ideas of Rousseau, the naturalism of the Olmstead brothers and the ideals of Thoreau, ”On Golden Pond” all come to mind…
They come to rebel against the City.
How can cities have lower carbon footprint when they are such a mess of pollution?
And you wonder how Asia can change its habits and escape Carbon intensive energy consumption for an equitable future?
How can we reconcile the Energy and Economic growth aspirations of a nation and continent with their responsibility to be a steward of the earth and it’s climate?
How can we reconcile the Energy control and efficiency with a country that saw it’s energy consumption, more than triple this last decade alone?
And how can we do this within a continent – Asia – that grew it’s energy consumption by 78% in the ten years till the end of 2009?
And how can we do this before it is too late for all of us?
All these questions have one answer: Smart efficient Cities is how we can do all of this and within our Lifetime.
And the world’s hopes of putting carbon emissions on a manageable path depend exactly upon how developing Asia urbanises in the coming decades. The scale is staggering. According to the Asian Development Bank, 44m people join the city populations each year. Every day sees the construction of 20,000 new dwellings and 250km (160 miles) of new roads.
In theory, urban living can be greener than other ways of life: people need to travel shorter distances, for instance. The practice is not so simple. Most poor people coming to the city aspire to higher standards of living and consumption. Ill-planned public transport reinforces car use. Most striking, putting up and using buildings accounts for a big part of developing Asia’s carbon emissions—perhaps 30% in the case of China, where nearly half the world’s new floor space is built each year. What’s more, the buildings do not age well. Many thrown up in the 1990s are already being pulled down and replaced.
Tianjin is a really cool city in the mainland Northern China.
Yes a cool city in China. Not free of pollution or anything like it, but cool nonetheless.
And it has been helped to it by the famously good thinking of the development community of Tianjin as a whole. It is prosperous, technologically advanced, the seat of the summer Davos – where the economic forum – holds meetings in Asia.
China’s history, has allowed cities to grow organically. And that still holds true for the older cities where neighbourhood streets and alleys have an enriched urban life. The environmental impact, however, is already apparent. Gated blocks with a single entrance force not just residents to abandon cycling or walking for the motor car whenever they need to go anywhere. Outsiders, too, face a vast, fenced obstacle in the way of where they want to go. Congestion, pollution and traffic accidents rise. Then the city decides to build another ring road and expand outwards without fail. So instead of building a second or third or fourth ring road – maybe they should rethink the urban core.
Tianjin has a thoughtful future growth system in which during the near future, the high-density neighbourhoods would generate nearly all their energy and water needs – locally. First, “greenways” were marked out that gave pedestrians and cyclists a way to get to the nearest mass-transit station without being run down or choked. Meanwhile, good use of sunlight, shading and ventilation would cut heating and cooling loads. Photovoltaic panels and windmills would provide four-fifths of electricity needs. The rest, as well as gas for cooking and hot water, would come from biogas generated from sewage, waste food and plant clippings. Rainwater would flush lavatories. Storm-water run-off would be collected for irrigation, including for allotments and the trees that reduced the “heat-island” effect. Something of China’s traditional urban scale would be echoed by community blocks within the greater scheme, accommodating 100-300 families each in urban density clusters – communities.
Yet even this forward idea is still birthed in China…
And the idea appears to have run into the sands because of the radical approach it requires. Developers are ill-versed in thinking about energy, water and sewage as a seamless whole. Utilities think like central planners. Government are centralized and their heavily bureaucratic agencies struggle to operate beyond their traditional remits. What is more, the costs are up to a fifth higher for such developments.
And the cost overrun is significant even though these community urban developments more than pay for themselves in the long run. Short-termism reigns… Governments acknowledge the challenge. Green codes in China mandate energy-saving standards for heating, cooling and lighting new buildings. The aim is to cut new buildings’ energy use by 65%. But many new buildings are designed first and greened later, which represents a cheaper but less effective approach.
So that brings us to the short term: Enlightened developers say that they should be putting up greener buildings without waiting for Asian governments to set the tone.
Environmental Parliament think-tank, argues that large amounts of energy can be saved with little effort, dramatically improving efficiency and that along with Energy controls can sort out all the Energy problems in China. If we extend this to Asia and the rest of the world with focus on Control and Efficiency, we can sort out all of ur emissions problems and the CO2 green house effects.
In Energy, Power and Electricity Consumption, Control is far more important than just efficiency; but together they work miracles.
Miracles that will prove useful to all Cities. New and old alike.
Yet the major obstacles and the limitation to what can be done are set by the perverse economic incentives the governments throughout the world are setting.
The governments militate against the Climate and our Atmosphere. And that applies in most parts of Asia.
Developing new renewable energy infrastructure even for a city like Tianjin, is a big part of the solution.
Yours,
Pano
PS:
EP is working with Green Capital to that end in Tianjin, but we struggle to make a profitable case for the short term. Yet now with the help of Green Bonds in turning old Power and Utilities green with a lower carbon footprint we have validated the long term case and the investors are winning.
Still, the major obstacle is that Governmental favouritism, whereas all fossil fuel energy sources are subsidized and the costs of pollution are grossly and unevenly priced, favouring old-fashioned coal burning and unfettered CO2 emissions spewing utilities.
And they treat the atmosphere as an open sewer, where they want to be able to dump all their toxic emissions unfettered and without a cost to them….
For a better financing scheme for Urban Heavens and Cool unpolluted cities let’s invest in Green Bonds.
Learn more here: http://www.environmentalparliament.org/greenbonds/press
