Sustainable City Blog » urban design

Broadway Goes Car-Free

Jesse Fox — Wed, 27 May 2009 15:58:07 +0000

No kidding: 7 blocks of Broadway have been closed to traffic, transforming Times Square into a pedestrian mall.

(Photo via Tri-State Transportation Campaign.)

Manhattan closed off seven blocks of Broadway to traffic over the weekend, creating a series of new pedestrian spaces where only last week traffic chaos reigned. Earning praise from pedestrians, tourists and even The New York Times’ architecture critic, the move drew plenty of flak from impatient taxi drivers, truck drivers and commuters.

Broadway before Memorial Day weekend (above) and after (below). (Photos via NYT.)

Aaron Naparstek of Streetsblog.org, a blog that has long advocated for urban improvements like pedestrian streets in New York, visited Times Square this week and liked what he saw. Check out his post entitled The Crossroads of the World Goes Car-Free.

Left: Sections of Broadway closed off to traffic in red (via NYT).

Though officially defined as experimental pilot project at this point, the pedestrian street is rumored to be just the first step in a larger project to pedestrianize most or all of Broadway. The lawn chairs are expected to eventually be replaced by more permanent design elements, as planners closely observe the way New Yorkers react to and utilize the space.

An excellent article in the New York Magazine shed some light recently on the thinking behind the project. The article profiles New York City Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, the project’s mastermind, describing her as a “hipster bureaucrat” and a combination of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs (referring to the highway-loving official and author/activist whose rivalry shaped much of the city’s physical and theoretical development).

Says Sadik-Khan: “One of the good legacies of Robert Moses is that, because he paved so much, we’re able to reclaim it and reuse it. It’s sort of like Jane Jacobs’s revenge on Robert Moses.”

Sadik-Khan has spent much of the last two years as head of the DOT attempting to reclaim public space from cars, something NYT Magazine describes as a “peculiar new culture war – over the role of the automobile in New York.” So far, it’s been an uphill battle, as car-lovers and shop-owners lodge vehement objections to every change in the status quo and critics bash Sadik-Khan’s “elitism.”

However, as the article notes, such interventions are already common in European cities, where the convential wisdom is the opposite of what it is in the US: “Many transportation experts now recognize that adding more lanes to a traffic-clogged road is a poor long-term solution for gridlock, because over time more lanes just attract more cars.”

Re:Vision Dallas Seeking Visionary Designers

Jesse Fox — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 17:13:09 +0000

I’ve been following Urban Re:Vision and its innovative design competitions for a while now. Urban Re:Vision is an organization whose goal is to redefine sustainable urbanism one step at a time (Check out my interview with founder Stacey Frost here). First, they set out to rethink the basics: energy, community, transport. Now they’re out to put the ideas they’ve collected into action.

Re:Vision Dallas, their latest competition, which challenges visionaries to design a radically sustainable city block, is open for entries. The site is a drab parking lot in Dallas, Texas, just a few steps from City Hall. The reward: $25,000 for the top three entries. But hurry up, the competition closes May 8.

What is Re:Vision looking for? What is a sustainable city block anyway? From Re:Vision Dallas’ website:

Re:Vision Dallas is a chance to propel design beyond the typical, beyond the norm and to lay the foundation for a future of sustainable development we all hope is inevitable. It’s a chance to create a block that does no harm, to people or place. A chance to encourage and value relationships, while fostering respect for nature and our neighbors, privacy and resources, economy and consumption. It’s a chance to change how we live and connect, how we interact and collaborate—how we live in a space throughout our life and the lifecycle of the space.

Re:Vision Dallas is real. The land is purchased. The Mayor of Dallas has granted his support. Thousands of hours have been devoted to setting up this competition. We’ve consulted experts like RMI. Led conceptual charettes with industry experts. Brainstormed with local officials on essential issues to consider. This block will happen.

Will you be a part of it?

Next Stop: San Francisco

Not content with simply reinventing the city block, Urban Re:Vision, along with the City of San Francisco, University of California, Architecture for Humanity and other organizations, will be hosting a design charrette in San Francisco later this month. The event will address that city’s Civic Center Plaza, and explore ways to transform the area into a “vibrant and sustainable district.”

This time too the city’s political leadership is on board. “We are transforming our Civic Center into a global model for how we achieve a more sustainable future in an urban environment,” said San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom about the initiative. Watch for more updates on this project in the future…

This post was originally published at TreeHugger.com.

Paris in 2030

Jesse Fox — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 13:38:12 +0000

“In every man there is a poet, and in the city in which he lives there should be mystery, secrets, and surprises.”

After 9 months of work, ten architectural firms presented their proposals for a “Grand Paris 2030″ to French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Friday. Sarkozy had asked the firms to “project 20 years into the future and dream up the world’s most sustainable post-Kyoto metropolis,” according to an article in the Telegraph. France 24 noted that three themes were common to all of the plans: sustainable development, transportation, and connecting central Paris with its suburbs.

Some of the proposals include:

Building 20 “sustainable towns” of half a million people each in the Paris area, while doubling the amount of forested land and integrating agriculture into the landscape on the city’s outskirts.

Extending the city all the way to the Channel port of Le Havre via Rouen along the Seine, thus maximizing the potential of the Seine waterfront and realizing Napoleon Bonaparte’s idea of a city with the Seine as its main street.

Uniting cut-off communities by replacing the rain lines that separate them with green spaces to bring them together, while filling the city with renewable energy production and redesigning areas so as to limit commute times to a half hour.

Paris architect Roland Castro, whose team included a sociologist, a writer and a philosopher, said:

“We applied the philosopher’s concept that in every man there is a poet, and in the city in which he lives there should be mystery, secrets, and surprises.”

At this point, the proposals are all very conceptual (Sarkozy reportedly gave the planners “the absolute freedom to dream”), but as Nicolai Ouroussoff notes in the New York Times: All forsook flashy imagery for a deep analysis of the city’s diverse communities and the fraying tissue that binds them together… all of the projects recognize the strong link between urban policy and social equality.”

Next, the plans will be presented to the public, and a public exhibition of the plans will open April 29.

Via The Telegraph, France 24

An Interview with Richard Register, Author of “Ecocities: Building Cities in Balance with Nature”

Jesse Fox — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 21:39:37 +0000

Author, theorist and philosopher Richard Register is one of the pioneers of the ecocity movement, with 35 years of experience advocating for cities that facilitate humanity’s “creative and compassionate evolution” while contributing to the health of the planet. Richard is the author of several books, including Ecocities: Rebuilding Cities in Balance with Nature, and the founder of two nonprofits – Ecocity Builders and Urban Ecology.

TreeHugger: Richard, you are a 35 year veteran in the still-evolving field of ecocity building. What led you to formulate your philosophy on the subject?

Richard Register: Growing up as a young artist (drawing and sculpture) with an architect father in beautiful country (near Santa Fe, New Mexico) with the end of the world perched on the mountain across the Rio Grande Valley, namely Los Alamos – where they designed the atomic bomb. Probably the other biggest influence was running into Paolo Soleri at 21 years of age and seeing his enormous positive energy, commitment to building and clear conceptualization of the problem: two-dimensions bad, three-dimensions good in complex systems such as higher organisms and the city.

Putting the city into context with evolution, given my appreciation and enjoyment of nature in a beautiful place like the US Southwest, was a natural for me and wanting to rescue ourselves from the insanity of war too, inclusive of the war of humans against nature – the shock troops being cities. That Santa Fe was originally a pedestrian city and the best parts of it still are… that probably was of some “ecocity” influence too. They are proud of their solar energy accomplishments in the Santa Fe region, but their history of compact pueblo architecture nearby and the pedestrian origins of the whole thing, the whole city, are far more important than even that. Of course, the two fit intimately with one another and in a very healthy manner – ecocity and solar – and both make sense there in Santa Fe, which is one of the saddest places in the world for me to visit these days. That’s because it has spread out into the usual far flung, car-dependent sprawl that infects the present and threatens the future now virtually everywhere.

How would you define an ecocity?

An ecocity is an ecologically healthy city. That also means the city design is strongly informed by knowledge of ecology and its design principles. The “anatomy analogy” is very instructional in the enterprise of trying to build ecologically healthy cities. As in living organisms with different functions arranged close to one another in an appropriate spatial relationship, so too for cities.

Do any existing cities fit this definition?

Only pieces exist, though some like Curitiba, Brazil and Portland, Oregon have a fair number of the pieces assembled. Ancient cities have “mixed uses” and spatial relationships based on human dimensions and needs for cultural and creative opportunity, such as Kathmandu, Nepal in its older sections, Indian pueblos, old European city cores and so on. On larger scale and getting into recent times, energy systems like solar and transportation systems like bicycle paths and streetcars enter the formula.

How does your conception of ecological cities compare with the New Urbanism or Smart Growth movements?

New Urbanism is a small step in the right direction refusing to go further over the “bridge” it claims to be a “strategy” to… to what?! They never say. I say: the ecocity. New Urbanism’s proponents’ slavish commitment to cars and the cheap energy system, that make cars possible, in denial of the fact that cheap energy is going away forever soon have turned them into urban planning fossils. They speak out of both sides of their mouth saying transit, especially rail is great (it is), and cars have to be accommodated too (they don’t).

That’s a big contradiction there that needs to be straightened out. “This town (planet) ain’t big enough for the two of us!” heard in old western movies is more like it: “cars or car-free cities. Choose.”

The New Urbanists’ four-story height limit makes no sense in an overpopulated world and shows no love of flamboyant architecture with rooftop gardens, terraces, bridges between buildings, buildings that ARE bridges, etc. as in my writing and drawing.

The “Smart Growth” people, in their embracing of higher than New Urbanist densities and building heights is another step toward ecocities, and they may actually get there someday. Their commitment to higher-density mixed-uses and balanced-development is a kind of cold planners’ language way of leading into the sort of flamboyant architecture I imagine investing in, instead of parking structures, freeways, gas stations, garages and wide driveways, etc. etc. Their main problem is in embedding themselves in the infinite-growth-in-a-finite-environment capitalistic nonsense, simply by calling their effort “Smart Growth.” There is nothing smart about infinite growth of the sort they embrace.

What they want to build physically is on the way to ecocities, if lacking most of the subtleties. How to jettison the economist’s bizarrely ecologically ignorant basic assumptions about human economy being real and nature’s incidental, and how to get the people with the money – let’s face it – to invest in ecocities, I have no idea! I’ve been trying for years and it isn’t working. Ideas anyone? Maybe saying climate change and Peak Oil are coming to get their children will finally get to them, but I don’t have that much confidence in that either. The positive alternative I’ve been putting forward for 35 years certainly has gathered little favor and support. So far.

Where are the hot spots of ecocity planning and building in the world today? Where will the next wave of ecocity building come from?

The hot spots of ecocity planning and building are in my head and yours and anyone else’s willing to entertain these thoughts. It amazes me how few people will even listen, how people can’t string more than two links in a “chain” of causes and effects together, how the idea of a network of interconnections can find no purchase in their minds at all, despite wonderful spider webs in everyone’s experience. Pull on one strand and all the others move around the whole web. The science like that is called ecology and it’s been around a while already – and almost nobody gets it.

As far as geographic locations, Chicago and London have a lot of good things going. Car-free cities like Venice, Italy and Gulongyu, China have structures that go way back to pedestrian roots in physically constricted island locations and though they are not consciously developing in an ecocity direction, they have a lot to exemplify. Arcosanti, Arizona and Auroville, India are heroic attempts by still starving young city experiments, young as cities go, ignored like the insane panhandler down the street, but in this case real geniuses nobody pays any attention to. Solar and wind technologists are making hardware to harmoniously provide energy for such cities and organic farmers raising their food. But does anybody put all these pieces together? Not yet.

“Part of the new New Orleans rebuilt above the floods on 20 feet of elevated fill . A good solution that’s possible with pedestrian compactness and streetcars and bikes, but not possible as a scattered car infrastructure which would require far too much fill.”

Will these ecocities be affordable to the average person, or will they turn into gated communities for the rich?

In capitalism as it is trying to grow and extend itself into the future: gated communities for the rich. In a system that I’ll call tax the rich and build for future people, plants and animals on a healthy Earth – which is very different from industrial socialism – not just the average person but the low-income person too.

I have been vilified by some “social justice” people for ignoring the poor. I have to say categorically that this is a lie and that furthermore I’ve generally been far lower-income than my accusers! I like low-income people – I am one! The raw beginning of the advantage of ecocities for low-income people is that the city becomes accessible, at least physically, to everyone without the requirement to invest $10,000 a year in a car and its support systems.

That’s helpful but it doesn’t solve all problems. Racial, religious, ethnic and other divisions sew seeds of poison so bad that even in the best designed cities you could well have jerks swilling martinis behind guard walls and security forces with guns one foot of concrete and steel away from starving untouchables. Can’t solve everything I’m talking about here, though a lot has to do with the city and its design and functioning. Oddly, some people believe city design could solve everything. I for one make no such claims.

In fact I’ll say this at this juncture: aside from design of the built environment, the other two big ones are over-consumption and over-population, probably followed by eating too much meat. Those are the big four assaulting the planet. None of those stand alone, but then none of them, if ever largely solved, implies the others will be solved because of that as well.

When I read your book Ecocities: Building Cities in Balance with Nature only a couple of years ago, the ideas you put forth seemed visionary, yet way ahead of their time. It was difficult to imagine their application on a large scale. Yet, today, these issues seem to have entered mainstream discourse almost overnight. How has this affected your work? How do you see the ecocity concept evolving and developing as awareness of our environmental predicament continues to grow?

First of all, “green building” is all the rage, but a green building is easy compared to a green city. There are many supposedly wonderful examples of great buildings getting the limelight – but to drive out to them completely destroys whatever “sustainability” they were supposed to embody in the energy and pollution involved in the drive. Other green buildings are in the right place, in a mixed-use city, and that’s a good step.

But beyond the coincidence of a green building appearing in a healthy relationship to the rest of the city, interest in sustainable cities, green cities and even ecocities, such as the purported “World’s first ecocity, Dongtan, China” has been growing for sure. Some of this is real and some is smoke screen, or more up to date: green screen. As long as these places have lots of cars, they are far from what they claim to be, and all of them but Venice and Gulongyu have lots of cars or lots of cars planned, even if somewhat de-emphasized.

My work has picked up pace only very little – with constant efforts to raise money and spend time trying to convince people to listen. I’m spending far more time doing that than writing and drawing pictures to illustrate what I think would be healthy and happy. This is largely my fault because I’m self-consciously fighting a battle against a rapidly rising tide of climate change, “Peak Oil,” species extinctions and misconceptions about ways to solve those problems with palliatives. I’m probably acting desperate instead of thoughtfully reasonable and strategic. Only one foundation has come to me with significant help in the last five years. Otherwise I’ve been beating the bushes furiously! Three individual patrons and Kirstin Miller, who is my co-conspirator in this work and has been for several years now, have been extraordinarily important. A handful of others who have been friends to this effort for years are still on board. But for sure there has been no breakthrough.

I suspect that after our conference, the Seventh International Ecocity Conference in San Francisco in April, people will catch on more easily and the ironic result might well be me getting much more “successful” after 65 years of age, hired to do this and that planning workshop and seminar, pontificate about ecocity principles and reminisce about the early days of ecocity theory and practice. Some of my drawings might even lead to a built project or two. But maybe all that will be too late to have helped stem the tide of climate change and the beginning of the age of no cheap energy, which is likely to be a most unpleasant time. It may well – right now – be too late to build the foundation that could have been built if myself, Soleri and some of the other earlier proponents of ecocity development had been given the chance to thrive 35 years ago.

We’ve burned up about half the world’s oil without building the foundation in physical structures and energy systems for future ecocities. Most of that last half of the oil is likely to be used resentfully trying to secure the last dregs, Dick Chaney style, and keep out the neighbors, Idaho Survivalist style. But we may salvage something of civilization yet if we immediately stop expanding highways and shift the money over to ecocity mixed use building and transit and bikes.

“A possible downtown San Francisco - biologically, as well as economically and culturally, intensely alive. This is a highly mixed use community with no cars. Streets, alleys, hallways and bridges link pedestrians efficiently through the whole structure. Runs on one tenth the energy of conventional car-dependent cities.”

On that note, many people are predicting that the next administration in Washington DC will have to follow a completely different path than the current one regarding to its outlook on the environment and ecological, planning and economic issues. Do you expect a completely new set of rules when someone else takes the helm, or will the playing field remain more or less as it is?

If the slide into resentment from power shortages that are likely to start in two to four years, of the sort we are seeing in South Africa right now, is slow, things will stay pretty much the same as far as government structure, rules and habits go. The cartoon characters of greed and violence that have been the administration of this country for the last two terms are leaving an almost incomprehensible mess for those who follow. It’s truly challenging to figure out how to repair their damage, much less move in a creative and compassionate direction. Maybe there will be some hopeful surprises. I’m trying to lend my efforts in that direction, of course.

If we enter a free fall collapse – which has happened to many head-strong societies in the past – our disappearing act will define the coming of a new geological and ecological age, one that paleontologists say we just started anyway in the “extinction spasm” we are still furiously engaged in. The extinction species de jure is the horseshoe crab right now and last year about this time the last River Dolphin expired in the Yangtze River.

You have to remember that on December 18, the United States Congress voted in an insane energy policy, insane relative to our energy and biological realities on this finite planet. Both parties voted not to help wind and solar energy and to give major further support to oil, coal and nukes. The one renewable source they did favor – biofuels – is the one that puts the last of the agricultural land and last of the biodiversity in forests and grasslands into your car’s gas tank. Utterly insane! There are hungry people out there and extinctions are spreading like ink through blotter paper and they want to do that?! And, repeat, both parties are for it.

How much money will go into Amtrak as versus private car supports such as highway building? The ratio is about one to fifty. Again, that’s insane. Amtrak works with ecocities and the freeway system supports cities suffocating the planet.

City building is an almost monumental task, and is usually carried out by a complex web of competing interests and ideologies, most of which can seem completely inaccessible to the average person. How can people who are not involved with these official processes affect positive change in the built environments in which they live?

That’s a serious misconception. Everyday NIMBY’s the world around are as sophisticated and engaged as any of the best trained planners in city governments and almost all of them are working to keep the same system that makes them comfortable in their owner-occupied neighborhoods and secure in their well-paid jobs. They are busy shaping cities and they know that “complex web” of applications, approvals, hearings and so on inside and out. That’s what the first group does as a self-defense avocation and the second professionally. And anybody can join them in the work but take a different direction.

The notion that it is hard to change the city is a notion the NIMBY’s and professional planners promulgate to their own benefit like the dark ages Catholic priests speaking Latin among themselves and being as mysteriously obscure as possible to conceal the scam of their indulgences from the impressionable masses left out in the dark.

We know how to build the ecocity. It’s easy if you want to: up-zone for more density and diversity in the centers and withdraw from sprawl. We are replete with tools. We are also in denial about their use and spinning all sorts of excuses for not getting on with the only thing that can possibly be strong enough to save our asses!

Originally published on TreeHugger.com on February 14th, 2008. All illustrations by Richard Register.

Abu Dhabi Unveils PRT “Podcars”

Jesse Fox — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 15:01:49 +0000

New “personal rapid transit” electric taxis will be in operation by the fall.

PRT car designed by Zagato, unveiled in January at the World Future Energy Summit.

The designers of Masdar City, Abu Dhabi’s new post-petroleum city, are not bound by the usual set of rules and constraints. Money is not really an issue, and the political leadership is always willing to try out innovative ideas that the rest of the world regards as unproven, unorthodox or just plain fantasy.

One of them is PRT, personal rapid transit, a system of transportation featuring compact, driver-less “podcars.” In Masdar, where the streets will be entirely free of automobiles, a network of these compact electric taxis will provide clean and quiet transportation to the city’s residents, as well as commuters. The first PRT cars are set to begin running later this year. Admittedly intrigued, TreeHugger sat down with one of the system’s designers recently at the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi to hear more about the project.

Luca Guala is a transportation planner with Systematica, the firm that drew up the plans for Masdar’s PRT system. According to Guala, Systematica’s planners spent months working with Foster + Partners, the city’s architectural planners, to integrate sustainable transport solutions into the city’s design.

In addition to PRT, he says, a light rail line will snake through Masdar, most likely running between Abu Dhabi’s international airport and the city center, some 20 km away. Although no cars will be allowed into Masdar City, nine multi-story parking lots will be scattered along its perimeter. Residents, commuters, visitors and buses will all have dedicated parking spots there, allowing them to own and use cars outside the city walls.

Jesse Fox: Would it be fair to describe PRT as a system of transportation which combines the sustainability of a light rail with the convenience of the private car?

Luca Guala: The PRT system in Masdar City will be a complementary system to the light rail, which will cross the city. PRT is not a system that can move huge masses of people, for that you need a light rail or a metro. A metro can move 60,000 passengers per hour – that’s equal to about 20 lanes of highway.

One of the differences between car travel and public transportation is the experience of traveling at rush hour. On the highway, you may be stuck, but you’re sitting in the comfort and privacy of your car. Meanwhile, on the subway you’re in motion, be you’re packed in with hundreds of other people.

Masdar City’s PRT system will have no rush hour congestion. When the computer sees that the network is approaching capacity, it will simply not allow cars to leave stations. This will not happen frequently, and when it does happen, passengers will be asked to wait for a few minutes.

Generally we foresee no more than a three minutes wait for passengers at a station, but there may be special occasions when the wait time is longer. If the Rolling Stones have a concert in Masdar, an event like that is bound to create congestion, and you may have to wait for more than three minutes. But we do not expect anything like that on a normal workday morning. You won’t be late to work in Masdar City because of traffic.

The PRT vehicles will travel at speeds of approximately 7 meters per second, with the longest routes in the city being perhaps 2.5 km. So let’s say you reach a station, wait maybe 1.5 minutes for your car to arrive, travel for 5 minutes if your destination is relatively far away, and then exit the station, which will take around a minute. So the longest trips in the city will be around 7, perhaps 10 minutes long.

PRT cars will move along rights of way, approximately 6 meters under street level. [Masdar City’s streets will be raised off the ground, but buildings will be built at ground level, with the first couple of stories serving as basements and space for technical equipment.]

We decided not to build elevated tracks in Masdar. Elevated tracks would put the cars between the first and second floors of buildings, and no one wants to see cars, even silent ones, zooming past their window. Plus a spaghetti grid network might not be so nice to look at from below, and could become a real visual issue in the city’s narrow streets.

What will it be like to travel on the PRT system in Masdar?

Guala: Passengers would descend a flight of stairs or an elevator to the station – perhaps an escalator in larger stations, but we decided to use only a few escalators, since they are more energy intensive. Elevators are necessary for the mobility disabled.

You will swipe a smart card through a machine, and a welcome message will appear. One option is that the system will recognize you and greet you personally: “Good morning, where do you want to go today?” Perhaps the system will remember your usual path, and offer it to you as an option. After you click on your destination, the system will say something like, “Your car is arriving in 2 minutes at platform number 3.” You may have to stand on a line, and you will be able to identify your car by its number.

The second option is that you will enter your destination into the system when you are already sitting inside a car.

Initially, the system will be very simple, with only a couple of stations. During this period, the system will function kind of like an elevator – you press a button and go to the third floor. Think of it as a horizontal lift. Later on it will be more sophisticated, and passengers will be able to get within 100 meters of any destination.

The cars will not run on tracks, but will operate within a kind of grid network, and take the shortest paths to get where they need to be. The cars will have wheels, and will be battery powered.

What kind of history does PRT have in practice?

Guala: PRT systems have had problems with things like cost overruns in the past. Few systems have actually been fully built and implemented. The one in Morgantown, West Virginia is the only one currently in existence. There is also one under construction in Heathrow airport in London.

Morgantown was built some 30 years ago, and was extremely expensive. They had to invent many of the components of the system from scratch, including the computer system. It was a prototype in every sense. Today, the computerization aspect is almost trivial. If your laptop had been around back then, it would have been powerful enough to implement Morgantown’s control system.

The only pure PRT systems going up today are the ones in Masdar and Heathrow – different systems which work according to similar logic. One of the companies involved in developing the system here in Masdar, 2getthere, has developed a system for transporting freight containers in the Rotterdam port in the Netherlands that works exactly like PRT. In Masdar, cargo will also be transported by PRT, using special freight cars.

How was the system planned out?

Guala: We used the same “predict and provide” models that are used to plan new roads. We had rough data about things like population size, arrival times, etc. We ran a few models and found that a few areas came out congested, so we interacted with the town planners and tried to get the best placement for various land uses.

For example, something like a conference center, which attracts a lot of people all at once, could become a local generator of congestion. So we said: let’s move it slightly to the side. The end result is a large patchwork of land uses, with none of the city’s districts clearly defined by a single use, like offices, residential and so on. That is ideal from a transit perspective, because it diffuses demand [traffic.]

In Masdar, you will be able to live very close to where you work. The districts will be in use at all hours. There will be nodes of activity at the intersections of routes, but the trick is that each nodes does not serve people doing the same thing and traveling at the same time – thus no traffic is created.

How did the specific cultural context in Abu Dhabi affect the planning?

Guala: Well, I am Italian. I bring with me a certain cultural model – namely the good parts of the Italian city. I think it is possible to apply the Italian city model in Abu Dhabi to a certain extent. But you can’t just transplant something to another culture and make it work.

The classic Arabic city has many similarities to the Italian city. There was a common way of living in the Mediterranean Basin, in Christian as well as Muslim areas. From a town planner’s perspective, the classic Arabic “medina” [dense Middle Eastern city with narrow streets and interior courtyards] and Venice are similar. Masdar City takes its inspiration more from the Arabic medina than from the Italian city.

There are other cultural preferences involved here as well. People in Europe are used to taking public transport. It’s not necessarily like that here. Plus there is more sensitivity here to the privacy of the family, which led us to suggest a different kind of system, more suited to the local cultural context.

Is PRT cost-efficient?

Guala: This will be an expensive system. It has to be that way, because it’s a prototype. From an energy perspective it’s extremely cost-efficient, which is what Masdar [the Masdar Initiative is the corporate body that is building Masdar City] wants. The maintenance of a system like this is more expensive than that of a system based on buses, but the level of service is absolutely unreachable by other forms of public transportation.

The huge advantage of PRT is that it is “on demand,” including during off-peak hours. During peak hours, PRT is less efficient than public transport. But PRT is a 24-hour service, just as available during off-peak hours as it is during peak hours. This is much more efficient than running empty buses all night. There are advantages in terms of personal security as well – no long waits in the middle of the night, for example.

I don’t really know about the financial aspects in detail, it’s not really part of our job as planners. It is technically possible to cover costs with ticket fees. A fee roughly equivalent to the cost of a taxi ride would cover the costs of the system. There is a huge investment cost in a system like this, but after it is prototyped, the costs will come down. The actual cost of PRT is lower than the costs for a light rail of the same capacity.

What kind of prospects are there for PRT in other places?

Guala: There is a lot of interest in PRT right now, especially in new developments. In existing cities it’s a bit trickier to make it work. The optimum place for a system like PRT could be in smaller towns and in contained, controlled environments, like hospitals, universities, new business districts, places like that.

Originally published at TreeHugger.com on February 1, 2009. Photos by the author.

What Sank Dongtan?

Jesse Fox — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 21:22:37 +0000

A revolution in green city design or a modern-day Shangri-La?

On this increasingly urban planet, it’s becoming clear that the solutions to our problems will come from our cities. But what happens when it is our cities themselves that are creating most of these problems?

The emergence of the ecocity concept has been one of the most exciting trends in city design in recent years – intelligently designed ecological cities that would revolutionize the way we thought about the environments in which we dwell. As the idea gained traction and exposure over the past few years, a string of ambitious ecocity projects were announced to create new ecocities from scratch.

One of the most famous, and perhaps the most ambitious, was Dongtan. Created by prominent design and engineering firm Arup, the city was supposed to set the standard for building cities that harmonized with their surroundings and respected their inhabitants, present and future.

The Idea: A Green Island off Shanghai

China is experiencing a massive migration from the countryside to cities; one projection sees 5 million new buildings being built in China over the next 20 years. With such an explosion of development on the horizon, some designers saw an opportunity to shape a sustainable design revolution from the ground up. Dongtan, a low-carbon city, carfree city on Chongming Island just off Shanghai, was supposed to be the opening shot of the revolution.

Here is how Arup described it back in 2005:

“Dongtan will produce its own energy from wind, solar, bio-fuel and recycled city waste. Clean technologies such as hydrogen fuel cells will power public transport. A network of cycle and footpaths will help the city achieve close to zero vehicle emissions. Farmland within the Dongtan site will use organic farming methods to grow food.”

The plan fired the imaginations of development professionals and journalists alike. In 2007, Wired Magazine wrote a glowing account of this “great green leap forward” in China, discussing in depth the technical and political challenges facing the designers. The piece concluded optimistically:

“If Dongtan lives up to expectations, it will serve as a model for cities across China and the rest of the developing world — cities that, given new tools, might leapfrog the environmental and public health costs that have always come with economic progress… Even old American and European cities may find bits and pieces of Dongtan that they can use, especially when they redevelop industrial plots or build out at the edges.”

Smoke and Mirrors?

It wasn’t long before a few skeptical voices joined the discussion. In 2007, Ethical Corporation, a website on responsible business practices, came out against Dongtan. Calling it a Potemkin village (a reference to a Russian story about fake villages erected to impress the Empress Catherine II) and “a masterpiece of greenwashing,” Ethical Corporation claimed that Dongtan was never intended to become a reality.

Rather, as a mythical green Shangri-La, Dongtan would serve China as the ultimate greenwashing tool, greening the country’s image abroad while in practice allowing its cities to continue to develop unsustainably at breakneck speed. The contractors and designers involved in the project, according to this theory, had nothing to lose by cooperating, and invaluable connections in the Chinese government to gain.

No Progress on the Ground

In late 2008, a couple of well-known newspapers sent reporters over to Chongming Island to get an impression of how Dongtan was taking shape on the ground. The resulting articles pronounced the project a “pipe dream” and a mere “gleam in the eye.” One Chinese farmer, whose fields lie within the borders of the planned building site, told the UK’s Telegraph that he had never heard of the project.

As it turns out, the plans for Dongtan began to falter in 2006, when Shanghai’s former mayor Chen Liangyu – Dongtan’s most enthusiastic supporter – was arrested for “property-related fraud.” In the wake of the scandal, China’s Communist Party reorganized the city’s leadership and planning structure, leaving Dongtan orphaned.

Since then, the project’s permits have lapsed, and the global economic crash has brought construction projects worldwide to a standstill. Back on Chongming Island, a number of high-rise apartment buildings have gone up, but not in the area earmarked for Dongtan. Despite the fact that these buildings contain no discernible green elements, their developers, in a blatant attempt to take advantage of Dongtan’s hype, are marketing them as green buildings.

Knowledge Transfer

With actual implementation of the project nowhere on the horizon, Dongtan has been recast as a valuable contribution to the global discussion about ecocity design, a “knowledge transfer” in the words of one project manager.

In a 2008 interview for TreeHugger, Arup’s Director for Global Foresight and Innovation Chris Luebkeman told me:

“It’s not a matter of this or that project compensating for all future change – every little bit has to help. What we are trying to do with projects like Dongtan, and ecocity projects elsewhere, is to continually raise the bar.”

Dongtan’s plan and concepts have in fact raised the bar in the theoretical discourse about ecocity planning, and have influenced plans for other new eco-developments that are currently being built. Just by existing in its paper form, Dongtan has a lot to teach the world about the art and science of planning green cities.

However, if Dongtan’s fate is to serve as a strictly conceptual model, perhaps its designers should consider making more of its planning documents public, so that future cities can benefit from the enormous amount of thought that went into this unbuilt city.

This post was originally published on TreeHugger.com on January 5, 2009. Dongtan renderings by Ove Arup and Partners, via The Christian Science Monitor and Wired.