In 2008, the world quietly underwent a major shift in balance. According to UN estimates, 2008 was the first year in history when more than half of the world’s population lived in cities. Essentially, these cities are unsustainable, but provide challenges and opportunities for environmentally conscious developers. In order to make them more sustainable, building design and practice, as well as perception and lifestyle must adopt sustainability thinking.
There are around 3.4 billion people stuffed into every available corner of urban space, and these numbers are set to increase. Over the next 30 years, the populations in cities of Asia and Africa are expected to double, meaning that we need to find room for another 1.7 billion people. Cities all over the world in their current infrastructure are expected to become even more unsustainable.
The pressure cities are putting on the planet’s resources is huge. At a time when humanity has woken up to its responsibility to the environment, the continuing urban swell presents an immense challenge. In response, cities all over the world are setting high targets to reduce carbon emissions and to produce clean energy. For example, London has planned a 60% reduction in CO2 emission by 2025. Unfortunately, projections show that over the same timescale, London will emit around 51 million tonnes of CO2, which is a 15% increase of the 2006 figures.
Carbon emissions are not the only sustainability problem cities face. Besides many other pollutants, cities are entirely dependent on other areas for consumable resources such as food and clean water. As populations continue to soar, these severity of these issues will increase. Many governments are attempting retrofit existing cities with new technologies or to reduce emissions to improve their sustainability. Abu Dhabi, the richest United Arab Emirates States, is currently constructing the world's first eco-city - a city intended to be entirely self-sustaining.
Study Purpose
The purpose of this study is to explore the feasibility of an eco-city, that is, a city that is entirely self-sustaining with minimal need for resources from other localities. The concept of an eco-city, that is, a city with zero carbon emissions and uber-efficient structures for sustainable living is now becoming a reality. The first eco-city is Masdar and is currently under construction in the United Arab Emirates, is expected to be completed in 2015.
Questions the study will address
- How will Masdar be able to utilise existing technologies more efficiently than modern cities to achieve sustainability?
- How does Masdar plan to provide enough power, water and food to its 50,000 intended inhabitants? Is vertical farming the answer to food issues?
- How will the land area (6.5 square kilometres) be developed to provide the basic needs of modern cities?
- How will the design of the city including transportation and building design and distribution help achieve sustainability?
Very good problem articulation. It seems inevitable as human populations continue to expand (especially with developing countries such as india) that further pressures are going to be put on existing cities and that we are going to have to manage resources more efficiently to support a larger population. Im not sure what it means for Masdar to be "entirely self-sustaining", does this mean they will grow their own food as well?
ReplyDeleteIt is rather hard to provide reference modes for a study situation of something that does not yet exist. It seems what you are proposing is a simulation study to see if this proposed ecosystem is feasible. For Masdar to be a true ecocity then all of the variables related to the city should be endogenous and result in a balancing feedback dominant system. Variables that are exogenous to the system will be natural variables such as sunlight (for solar panels) that will drive the system in a renewable manner.
There are a myriad of questions to be adressed in this study (probably hundreds!). I think some of the important ones are related to practicality ie. can this model be feasibly and economically applied to every city if it succeeds? Or are costs too high to make this practical on a global scale?
I think that the problem articulations sums up a lot of background and has a good list of policies that current cities are trying to address. The graph explicitly shows the problem well. I was thinking about why do people move to the cities though? It could possibly be to be more "eco" and drive less because all the necessities are closer to them included jobs.
ReplyDeleteYour questions are great though to address this problem. In LA they tried to implement an urban farm which eventually collapsed and was sold to the silly government who decided they wanted to build a waste-to-energy incinerator....anyway kind of off topic but close to a solution for not sourcing produce from one specific location...to bad it failed. If you want to read more about it just google "South Central Farm" there was even a movie about it called The Garden.