Greening Los Angeles and Shanghai: How and Would it Matter? | Nov 7th at 3:37pm
LA’s own distinguished Tridib Banerjee (I forget where he works) is speaking in the afternoon “Regional Urban Design” break out group about alternative futures for his city. Starting with a early 20th century plan by FL Olmsted, which was park-heavy and livability-friendly but never implemented, he’s going through other scenarios. For example, what if each city had to provide for its own “fair share” of the region’s growth and, critically, the new development was limited to only 2% of its land? That is the premise of the region’s metropolitan planning organization’s (SCAG) current “2%” plan. One version of a solution to this puzzle is much higher densities along the major transportation corridors. Is this post-oil? He’s not sure; but maybe.
On to India and Tata motors. India is motorizing rapidly, if not at Chinese rates, still at a pace that is crowding roads and parking spaces. Tata expects to sell 250k Nanos annually in India. Opposition to this trend is reminiscent of objections to working class families suburbanizing in the US in the post-WWII period. Another tradeoff that seems easy on an abstract level, less so at a human scale.
Another speaker is Lin Wang, a Harvard Loeb fellow this year but normally the head of Urban Design and Historic Preservation in Shanghai (a quite challenging job I’m sure, as they are bulldozing seemingly with abandon). She starts with a great photo of the Shanghai skyline revealing maybe a couple of hundred skyscrapers in a few square miles, with the smaller ones probably hidden. She is emphasizing how populations and densities have risen. 8,000 skyscrapers currently. A shift from a 40% urbanization rate to 90% now. Roughly 20 million population now. Photos of Pudong in 1996, 2003, 2005 and now, all quite different. (The highest building, “the bottle opener,” is just completed.) No photo from 20 years ago because there was nothing much there. What, she asks, when they all have cars? Can you imagine? Then, she says, to some groans from the audience, it’s not realistic to think we can stop it, so what to do?
Ms. Wang presents the “urban strategy,” starting with the 1966 urban plan. Which I though meant in the year 1966 but it turns out “1” refers to the central city, “9” to the 9 new cities, or subcenters—such as Pudong—where the district administration centers are (some of these new cities have a population of 1 million), “60” to new towns, and “6” to the number of central villages (population around 2 thousand, organized around farming villages in the county), an effort to modernize rural villages.
The strategy is thus a hierarchy of places, and then roadways. 15 minutes to the expressway system, 30 minutes from new towns to the expressways, and so on. The subway system is being rapidly expanded from 19 lines of 1000 kilometers to 32 and 1500 by 2010, with 120 stations under construction.
Finally, 2318 buildings are considered historic, in 41 historic districts of 44 square kilometers. Roads will not be widened in these areas, and parking will not be added. Additional landscaping is also in store for some areas of the Bund, now under construction.
The discussant is William Rees, a population ecologist—perhaps best known for his promotion of the ecological footprint framework—from U.British Columbia. He says he’s scared of what’s happening in Shanghai, etc. In comparing these places, he focuses on two numerical indicators: material/resource flows, and relative rates of consumption.
Rees rejects Banerjee’s distinction between LA as a single big city or a network of cities, as being immaterial to the broader ecological impact issue. His presentation is “getting serious about urban sustainability.” The framing premise if that cities face any number of grim threats, quoting Martin Oppenheimer “Today’s city is the most vulnerable social structure ever conceived by man.” Second, “the anomalous, unsustainable oil-based expansion of the human enterprise.” Text of next slide: “Result: A World of Overshoot”. Followed by, “As presently conceived and designed, cities are not complete (human) ecosystems” with subtitle “Enclosed in a bell-jar, any city would simultaneously starve and suffocate.” His point, cities should be defined to include the necessary ecosystem. Next slide, “In biophysical terms, cities are parasitic ...” The next slides clarify that what he means is that cities acquire resources, then dissipate them. So the big problem is waste management. Thankfully, his first concrete examples are not US cities.
His answer: We must give up on material wealth. Question: Can we do this? Second question, if not, what does that mean? Here’s the US example—US cities must reduce their ecological footprint by 80%. But note: this is not anti-city, only a critique of “how we do them.” Such as think of them as bio-productive regions. A number of more political recommendations follow. More independent and self-contained, in a manner that makes them more accountable for the consequences of their resource use.
My quick take: There is a muddled mix here of positive and normative; of the facts and what to do with them. The factual part is the strongest by a long shot. These are, in many respects, straightforward accounting models of resource, energy and waste flows (admittedly, with lots of uncertainty as we project into the future). The normative is the weaker, without a doubt, which is almost always the case—but worth hearing through to be sure. Still, might be clearer if we labeled assertions about facts differently than assertions about right and wrong.
Randy Crane (PhD, MIT) is professor and vice-chair of urban planning in the UCLA School of Public Affairs, an associate editor of the Journal of the American Planning Association, and coeditor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Urban Planning.
