[ta da: eco city]

So, what do you do if your population has grown by millions and instead of 90% of people living in the countryside, they've moved into the cities? Well, you create an eco-island. This is what Shanghai is in the process of doing. Here is an excerpt from the recent article in New Scientist.

"Shanghai is already bursting at the seams. In downtown Shanghai people live at a density of 42,000 people per square kilometre - more than four times that of New York City, which has a similar size population. Shanghai already has more than 4000 buildings taller than 30 storeys. In 15 years of breakneck growth, the city's planners have built a modernist cityscape reminiscent of the film Blade Runner, centred on the Pudong business district.
Around Shanghai, 10 satellite cities are under construction, of which four will have a population of at least half a million. There will be a university city; a "motor city" that will house car manufacturing plants and already hosts an annual Formula 1 Grand Prix event; and a harbour city to service the world's largest deep-sea container port being built on an island 30 kilometres out in the South China Sea and connected to the mainland by a bridge. The fourth will be on Chongming.
Later this year, construction workers will move in to begin building the new city, to be called Dongtan, close to the island's exposed eastern shore. The master plan, drawn up by British engineering firm Arup, envisages a city of 86 square kilometres with a population of half a million people by 2040. Ma promises that Dongtan will be a zero-pollution, largely car-free, renewable-energy powered, sewage-recycling, green-fringed utopia that will give full protection to the millions of birds that congregate in the internationally recognised wetland sanctuary at the island's tip.
China is straining against its ecological limits, and Dongtan is an experiment that is trying to redress that. "We face the challenges of shortages of energy and damage to the environment," Ma says. "We need to reduce our ecological footprint. So Dongtan is very significant for Shanghai and for the nation."
The stakes are high. China is urbanising at record speed. It already has 90 cities with more than a million inhabitants, and expects 400 million people to move from the countryside to cities over the coming 30 years. The ecological implications of this urbanisation are immense. Shanghai's ecological footprint per head of population is already four times the Chinese average.
This is why Dongtan is such an important experiment. If it succeeds, it will demonstrate that even rich cities don't have to have a devastating impact on the environment. Right from the start, environmental scientists have been involved to advise on minimising its ecological footprint before a stone is laid. The plan is to keep Dongtan's footprint to 2.2 hectares per head, less than a third of a typical Shanghai resident's footprint. To achieve this, they are stipulating how to design transport, energy and waste-disposal systems, and how best to spread the population. "Nobody has done anything like it before," says Peter Hall of University College London, who is a planning adviser on the scheme. If Dongtan works, China could find itself with a template for green cities that could change the world.
The city's energy will come entirely from renewable sources. Supplementing the predictable wind farms and solar panels, a waste treatment plant on the fringe of the city will have anaerobic digesters to convert sewage and compost into biogas that will be used for cooking, heating and power generation.
The city's planned half a million inhabitants will live in three compact districts, separated by parks, farms, lakes, pagodas and leisure facilities designed to attract tourists. Unlike most of China's existing frenetic cities, it will be quiet, too. "That will probably be the first thing you'll notice," says Peter Head, head of the Dongtan project at Arup. Dongtan will be dense enough to be walkable, with shops, schools, jobs and services close to housing, but not so dense as to need high-rises or to generate a "heat island", in which the temperature of the whole city is raised.
Most people will live in apartment blocks six to eight storeys high, designed with natural ventilation to minimise the need for air conditioning. Uniquely, they will have two water-supply systems: one with drinking water and another providing "grey water", a mixture of river water from the island's existing canal grid and recycled drainage water, to supply toilets and garden irrigation. That should cut fresh water use by two-thirds.
Deterring the car is also vital, says Dong Shanfeng, the senior architect on the project. "Cars won't be banned, but driving will not be made easy." A single road will meander through the first phase of the city, with traffic lights that automatically switch to give priority to the planned hydrogen-fuelled buses. How successful the anti-car policy will be remains to be seen. Dongtan will be only a couple of kilometres from the end of the road bridge from Shanghai (see Map). The hope is that residents and visitors driving onto the island will park their cars and walk, cycle or use the buses. The streets are being laid out to favour public transport, bikes and pedestrians, and to make it difficult for cars.
The first section of Dongtan, with a population of 25,000, is scheduled to be completed by 2010, in time for the Shanghai International Expo. The first residents will staff hotels and exhibition halls on the mainland. Afterwards, Ma wants leisure industries to move in to attract tourists. The first foreign development deal, a ¬1.2 billion contract signed with Treasury Holdings of Dublin, Ireland, last year, will create a golf course and equestrian centre, and also a yacht marina on the site of what is now a small fishing port."


From issue 2556 of New Scientist magazine, 17 June 2006, page 43