Building self-sufficient "superblocks" may be the most sustainable solution to China's urban congestion and pollution problems, say the brains behind a development in the port city of Qingdao.
The "EcoBlock" concept, created by University of California, Berkeley, architecture students, is an off-the-grid enclave designed for roughly 10,000 units. Buildings ranging from five to 20 stories would cluster around central parks and retail hubs; the structures would get all of their energy from wind, waste and sunshine.
The goal is to break ground on the EcoBlock in Qingdao early next year and replicate the urban utopia throughout China, project officials said.
|
| Artist rendering of the EcoBlock project. Image courtesy of ARUP. |
"Chinese are flocking to the cities," explained Jean Rogers, a principal in the San Francisco office of Arup, which is engineering the project. "The idea behind this is to create a more sustainable way of living."
About 300 million Chinese are projected to urbanize during the next 25 years in search of opportunity and money, straining this fast-developing nation's infrastructure. China is already building about 12 million housing units annually -- more than 10 superblocks a day, noted Harrison Fraker, dean of UC Berkeley's College of Environmental Design.
The half-kilometer-by-1-kilometer EcoBlock would cost roughly 10 percent more to build than a traditional "superblock" development of the same size, Fraker said.
The EcoBlock's developer could recover the capital premium in as few as seven years by building energy-efficient structures that utilize passive heating and cooling, he explained. Rooftop wind turbines and solar panels would provide the bulk of the buildings' energy, with the rest provided by anaerobic digesters that munch on sewage sludge and yard waste.
All of the site's household wastewater and rain runoff would be treated and reused, so the block would need to get just 10-15 percent of its water from the city, Fraker said.
Every housing unit would be within a five-minute walk of a city bus stop, encouraging residents to leave their cars at the curb, he hopes.
"This is a smart neighborhood grid," Fraker quipped.
To be sure, EcoBlock-style projects with a "whole systems" approach to design are rare in China.
Peggy Liu, founder of the nonprofit Joint U.S.-China Cooperation on Clean Energy (JUCCCE), said replicating the EcoBlock is essential to creating a sustainable supply chain of green-building materials in China.
"This is using current technologies, so it's a little bit more open-sourced and more affordable to build," Liu said. "China is developing a block at a time, not a building at a time, so when you think about green buildings you should really be thinking about green blocks."
But other development experts underscore that minds must change before building patterns will, amid such a rapidly changing landscape of central plans and market reforms.
"China's urbanizing, and its population has more purchasing power," said Connie Ozawa, an urban planning professor at Portland State University and consultant with the China-U.S. Center for Sustainable Development. "The demand for Western-style development is there.
"At the same time, China is trying to mold that vision with something that's uniquely Chinese and one that's aware of energy and land-use costs," Ozawa said.
John Spears, who runs the Maryland-based International Center for Sustainable Development, which has worked as a consultant to the Chinese government, considers the growing pains conceptual: Tomorrow's planners must view cities and the enclaves within as self-sufficient systems that recycle and reuse their water and waste.
China did it for centuries before Communism, he said.
"Before the Cultural Revolution, China was self-sufficient," explained Spears, who helped Sichuan Province officials design a model "sustainable" village with methane cook stoves, composting toilets, straw-based walls and rainwater collectors. "Everything changed under Mao [Zedong], and these new generations have forgotten this."
Forty years after the revolution, the concept of a self-sufficient community within a larger city is still "anarchy" for some urban planners, Arup's Rogers offered. Building massive power and water projects to meet the needs of cities and their Soviet-style superblocks has been the path to promotion for local Communist Party officials.
But as China's megacities grow, central government officials say they are making conservation a priority through tougher building codes and energy laws (see main story). Indeed, cities will likely experience China's biggest growing pains in coming decades, Ministry of Environmental Protection officials said in an e-mail response to Greenwire's questions.
"China is in the middle of industrialization and urbanization, as well as in a period of intense problems between economic growth and environmental protection," the officials wrote. "The situation of environmental protection is still challenging."
