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China Planning For Sustainable Cities
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun Jul 17, 2005 07:24 PM
from the sounds-like-a-plan dept.
from the sounds-like-a-plan dept.
TapeCutter writes "In a BBC article William McDonough says, 'The Stone Age did not end because humans ran out of stones. It ended because it was time for a re-think about how we live.' The Chineese appear to agree with him and have commissioned McDonough's company to create an environmentally sustainable village as a pilot project for the more ambitious idea of sustainable cities. McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart have also written a book on the subject, Cradle to Cradle, previously reviewed here on Slashdot."
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Easy for China To Do (Score:5, Insightful)
In a free country that lived by the rule of law, the people have a right to object and challenge such reshaping of the land. Not in China, sadly.
Re:Easy for China To Do (Score:3, Insightful)
If we are all going to live on this planet I don't think we can all do what we like or the planet is going to run out of resources. Sometimes we need to be told/made to do things that we dont want to (Like polution and population control) and china have acted quickly and sensibly on both these iss
Re:Easy for China To Do (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh, China might have an advantage in population control now though they were way late in starting, but its my understanding China is a disaster on pollution control. Thanks to central planning and the desire to industrialize fast, they've massively overbuilt coal fired power plants and coal fired steel mills and put them next to pretty much every city. As they abandon sensible bicycles for cars in an effort to catch up to American's in wasting energy and pollution, I think some cities have air so bad its not just a long term health risk, it is an immediate health risk.
One reason they have so many mining disasters is they mine so much coal. They along with the U.S. are probably the two leaders at fueling CO2 buildup and global warming.
Problem with central planning is if the central planners make bad choices they can do a lot of damage fast. For example they have almost always opted for economic growth over environmental protection. Thanks to central planning they can grow their economy really fast and destory their environment really fast too. They can also insure no tree huggers get in their way, in contrast to the U.S. The fact enivornmentalist have clout in the U.S., though less then they did thanks to Republicans being in power, is one reason U.S. economic competitiveness is falling while our environment is improving some. Though environmental protection is just one of many, others being out of control health care costs, uncompetitively high wage rates, bad education, and workers lacking motivation.
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This is All Wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
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IP Laws will keep the idea from gaining traction (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:IP Laws will keep the idea from gaining tractio (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:IP Laws will keep the idea from gaining tractio (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:IP Laws will keep the idea from gaining tractio (Score:4, Insightful)
In the case of sustainibility, survival drives innovation, not profit. Or, in the immortal words of Plato, "Necessity, who is the mother of invention."
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Re:IP Laws will keep the idea from gaining tractio (Score:3, Insightful)
People are too apathetic and see our extinction as too far off to warrant changing their lives.
Re:IP Laws will keep the idea from gaining tractio (Score:4, Insightful)
I suspect that the average Chinese villager is a bit closer to survival mode than you.
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They'll need them (Score:5, Insightful)
Sustainable cities? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sustainable cities? (Score:5, Interesting)
The Greeks are a bad choice of example. Here's what Plato had to say about a once fertile region, destroyed by the kind of irrigation now being heavily practiced in California, among other places:
What now remains compared with what then existed is like the skeleton of a sick man, all the fat and soft earth having wasted away.... Mountains which now have nothing but food for bees ... had trees not very long ago. [The land] was enriched by the yearly rains, which were not lost to it, as now, by flowing from the bare land into the sea; but the soil was deep, and therein received the water, and kept it in the loamy earth ... feeding springs and streams running everywhere. Now only abandoned shrines remain to show where the springs once flowed.
(Quoted in A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright. Go read it. A complete English translation of Critas is here [mit.edu].)
Has it never seemed strange to you that the area called the "Fertile Crescent", mostly Iraq and Israel, is now anything but fertile? It's that way because of too little long-term vision in farming practices. We have been stressing our environment for a long time.
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Re:Sustainable cities? (Score:4, Interesting)
The solution is to come up with something that does for goats what myxomatosis did for rabbits.
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Re:Sustainable cities? (Score:5, Informative)
Disagree all you like, but it is indeed historical fact that the Fertile Crescent was covered in huge temperate forests, and that deforestation caused by humans dramatically reduced the rainfall the region received. Here are a few excerpts on the topic for ya:
"Along with its other distinctive qualities, the Epic of Gilgamesh is the earliest recorded story of desertification caused by the extensive destruction of forestlands. Lebanon went from more than 90 percent forest (the famous Cedars of Lebanon) to less than 7 percent over a 1,500-year period. Trees and their roots are an important part of the water cycle, so rainfall downwind of deforested areas decreased by 80 percent. Over time, millions of acres of land in the Fertile Crescent area turned to desert or scrubland, and remain relatively barren to this day...
"The result of this local climatic change more than 5000 years ago was widespread famine. The collapse of the last Mesopotamian empire happened around 4,000 years ago, and the records they left behind show that only at the very end of their empire did they realize how they had destroyed their precious source of food and fuel by razing their forests and despoiling the rest of their environment." This is actually just a summary of what you can find in any ecological textbook for undergrads, but is reprinted in "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight" by Thom Hartmann, copyright (c) 1998, 1999, 2004 by Mythical Research, Inc. Used by permission of Harmony Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
Another:
". .
Jared is referring to the fact that the societies in the Fertile Crescent cut down their forests for agricultural use and wood burning, which ultimately altered the climate and destroyed the land they were cultivating.
Another:
"A cautionary tale comes from the arc of land through parts of Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran -- the cradle of civilization known as the Fertile Crescent. In ancient times much of this land was forest. The area became a leader in food production as trees were cleared for agriculture, and cut for timber, firewood, and manufacturing plaster. Now the expression "Fertile Crescent" is absurd, because the land is largely desert, semi-desert, steppe-eroded and salinized terrain, unsuitable for agriculture." A summarization of another textbook article by Ann Hancock, who simplified it for a magazine article.
I can go on here. Any undergrad in ecological science will be able to confirm what I've said. It isn't an area of dispute where scientists are concerned.
I can't argue you this point, because it's simply not correct.
You can't argue with it because you've apparently never bothered to do a whit of research on the topic. But I suppose you're more learned than Jared Diamond, or just about any other ecological scientist on the planet?
Max
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Peak Oil (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Peak Oil (Score:3, Funny)
We'll get to it. Right after we're done converting to metric.
Re:Peak Oil (Score:4, Insightful)
The question each of us must ask is:
What will you do when gas reaches $5 per gallon?
Move to Alberta and get rich?
As of now Japan, China, and the EU are dumping tons of resources into this, but I've yet to hear anything about the US government acting on it.
There's one big problem: There is no viable alternative to oil, even at current prices. But if the price keeps going up, there will be. Gas will never hit $10 per gallon, because even without subsidies biofuels cost less than that to produce. We don't need to dump tons of resources into it, because the situation will correct itself automatically. From the perspective of biofuel producers, Peak Oil is just a business opportunity.
When we run out of oil, it doesn't mean we run out of fuel, it means we run out of cheap fuel. We use oil because it's cheap. When it's cheaper to use alcohol produced from corn, we'll use that instead.
This will slow economic growth, of course, but there's not going to be any economic collapse outside of Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. In the big picture, oil doesn't really matter that much.
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Re:Peak Oil (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Peak Oil (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, if you don't consider the 400-plus billion we spend annually on "defense." It's a collossal subsidy.
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Re:Peak Oil (Score:4, Informative)
In 1981 the cost of a gallon of gas was $3 in 2005 dollars. See "The Oil Uproar that Isn't." [nytimes.com]
So we pretty much know that the threshold for economic shit hitting the fan is between $2 and $3 per gallon in 2005 dollars, eh?
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You insensitive clod... (Score:3)
Re:Ramp-up time is key for energy infrastructure (Score:4, Informative)
Ethanol has been a sham from the get-go.
Max
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Boil water first... (Score:5, Informative)
If I needed more water for such activities all I had to do was call the front desk and they provide it free of charge.
Re:Boil water first... (Score:5, Interesting)
that advice is usually given to all foreigners going anywhere but the most developped countries. the fact is, the water is not cleaned (if it is) the same way as what your system is used to.
locals can drink and abuse it without getting sick because they're used to it. your system, weakened by years of overtreated water, simply can't cope with it.
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Re:Boil water first... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Boil water first... (Score:3, Informative)
If I needed more water for such activities all I had to do was call the front desk and they provide it free of charge.
I also recently came back from a visit to china. The only reason you do this is to prevent travellers diahria. Even brushing your teeth introduces foreign b
Separation? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Separation? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not about what citizens want, it's about what they need. A city can sustain itself with or without access to neat gadgets from Japan. A city cannot sustain itself without water and food.
It seems to me that this concept just isn't practical, mainly because of the level of interdependence and globalization we've developed in the more modern nations.
Practical compared to what? Compared to the status quo, where there is plenty of fossil fuel to go around? Probably not. Compared to starving to death because you didn't plan ahead for clearly forseeable problems? Very practical.
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Just checking (Score:3, Interesting)
Just curious...
Re:Just checking (Score:3, Interesting)
Just curious...
Hmm.... China is bad for such things. But generally you have as much a chance of being beaten by the police in the US [wikipedia.org] as in china. In china, if you follow the rules generally nothign happens to you. Very much the same for the states, except for the crime is worse.
It's a beginning... (Score:3, Informative)
Good reading: http://www.ishmael.com/Education/Writings/The_New
And some great books: http://www.newtribalventures.com/ntv/market/categ
Ages (Score:5, Funny)
No, but the Age of Democracy might.
Re:Living (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Inevitable (Score:3, Interesting)
That could be easiler utilized by small farms...
Sustainable cities have been dreams since the 60s. Even a half-assed one, but well done in existence, especially since it hasn't received much funding.
http://www.arcosanti.org/ [arcosanti.org]
Re:Inevitable (Score:4, Interesting)
No.
No no no no no no no no no.
This is a really, really, really stupid idea.
Small farms suck. We had small farms for about 8000 years, and they sucked. 90% of the population was trapped in back-breaking labour and poverty.
Now we have big farms. Big farms allow us to use big machinery, which makes farming roughly one hundred times more efficient. The result of that is that I can get paid (by comparison) a small fortune to sit at a desk and fiddle with databases, and never have to look at the rear end of an ox. Food is good, cheap and plentiful because we don't have small farms.
The reason people throughout the third world are heading to the city (even if they end up in shanty towns) is that small farms suck. Living in a slum on the outskirts of Bombay or Mexico City may suck, but living on a small farm is even worse.
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Re:What if sustainability isn't efficient? (Score:5, Interesting)
For the biodegradable stuff, fine. Dump it and let it rot. Or burn it as fuel. Whatever. But a lot of stuff isn't biodegradable -- plastics and glass for example.
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Re:What if sustainability isn't efficient? (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, I really wish Penn and Teller would do an episode of Bullshit about themselves. Seriously doubt it, though. One common characteristic I see in self proclaimed skeptics is that they rarely apply their craft to themselves.
Sometimes I think they just have run out of ideas and just need to make filler shows. In the case of that particular episode, they were attacking a strawman the entire time. A ten year old could refute their argument. They constantly harped on the "recycling takes more energy" argument, while completely ignoring that lower energy usage is not the point of recycling. Not to mention that it's painfully obvious that, if you put effort into reusing a nonrenewable resource, you will expend energy in that effort. Duh.
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Re:What if sustainability isn't efficient? (Score:3, Insightful)
What would be probably most efficient, under those circumstances, would be to work on policy to limit the use of unsus
Re:What if sustainability isn't efficient? (Score:3, Insightful)
Nope, wrong.
We make plastic from oil because that's the cheapest way to do it. We can make it from coal instead (which we have in sufficient quantity to last hundreds of years) or from plants. It will just cost more.
Peanuts, soybeans, corn aren't renewable? (Score:5, Informative)
Plastic can be made from lots of different oils, not just petroleum. George Washington Carver [about.com] managed to convert peanut oil to plastic.
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Re:What if sustainability isn't efficient? (Score:3, Interesting)
And one nice thing about upcycling (McDonough & Braungart strongly object to current recycling models) plastic is that it frees companies from the variability of the oil market. Having a ready supply of pure and perpetually reusable plastics will help keep product costs down -- the grandparent can't possibly be suggesting that pumping from deep oceans or making bacteria produce plastic will be more efficient than melting and remolding pure, ready to use existing plastics. The key is just ceasing to ch
Re:What if sustainability isn't efficient? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wasn't it you that said something in a grandparent post like: "People with no imagination see any change to the status quo as the end of the world. Thank god there's people who see change as an opportunity and a challenge." ?
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Re:Sustainable City After Nuclear War? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The most important step: (Score:3, Interesting)
That's because God posts anonymously.
Re:The most important step: (Score:4, Funny)
Damnit...
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Re:The most important step: (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't write off the Chinese so easily - they somehow put a stop to the explosive population growth, in a culture that values huge families. As far as sustainability goes, they hold the record - they have maintained a continuous existence for almost longer than any other culture - though heavily violent at first, the philosophies of Confucius and Lao Tzu from millenia ago, that still dominate today, sound very nonviolent and sustainable, even if not perfect - e.g. father as an absolute "tyrant." The Chinese were also not perfect in the sense that they too had an emperor until very recently, corruption, etc., but still, it's worth paying attention to what they are saying. They are not convinced the Taiwanese system that we pump so full of cash and resources to showcase it to them as bait, will lead to good. After all, they know what kind of opium-plague the free market can lead to, that scar in their memory is still very recent. When I see internet censoring stories about them, I'm not fully convinced that it's done simply out of a need to maintain corrupt power, or to keep China from succumbing to the inflow of miseducation and sex-opium-n-rocknroll that you get from the liberated, freemarket, human-rights promoting Clearchannel-RIAA western media.
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Re:These kind of initiatives are pointless (Score:5, Insightful)
People make decisions based a lot on perceived value, as opposed to outright cost. Many Americans live in a city with mass transit available to carry them wherever they need or want to go, yet they'll still choose cars. The cost of monthly transit passes is significantly lower then the cost of purchasing a car, buying insurance for it, filling it with expensive fuel and having routine maintenance performed on it.
Despite being cheaper, the perception most Americans have is that mass transit is something beneath them (only poor people take the bus, right?). They see the automobile as a symbol of freedom and independence, and in their minds auto ownership has a much better value despite the higher costs of a car compared with utilizing transit systems.
It's because of this perception that American city expansion and development is done almost exclusively to accommodate the automobile, leaving alternative means of transport like walking (which is both cheaper and better for you then driving) forgotten or a cursory afterthought.
New housing developments are laid out in such a way that it becomes very easy to quickly and efficiently take your car to the market to pick up milk, but incredibly difficult to walk or bicycle to the very same store. Is it any wonder why Americans are so fat?
If we started building cities with pedestrians and mass transit in mind, ultimately the cost savings would be huge for the typical household. But it would fail unless work was done to modify the popular perception that traveling by a car is better then walking or taking the bus.
So when someone says "People will never switch to environmentally friendly hybrid cars because they're too expensive, so we're going to stick with the internal combustion engine for a long time", they would be better off saying "owning any automobile is too expensive. Let's start building our cities with non-car owners in mind".
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Re:These kind of initiatives are pointless (Score:4, Interesting)
The very reason it is faster for you is exactly that US city planners almost exclusively focus on making it convenient to get around by car vs. public transport.
Mass transit works well even in countries like Norway (average population density: 13 per square kilometer) - they just don't work everywhere. I don't think anybody suggests that someone living in a rural area should rely entirely on public transport. But vast areas of major population centres in the US consists of out of control sprawl because public transport hasn't been given priority.
The times I've visited the parts of Virginia near D.C. for instance, I've constantly been shocked at how hard it was to get around even by foot. I stayed in a hotel what should have been a 15 minute walk away from a restaurant, and we were faced with having to cross several 4-6 lane roads and several sections where there was no proper sidewalk.
This was an area with a population density far higher than anywhere in Norway (where I'm originally from), yet so pedestrian unfriendly and with such a useless public transport system that the typical 5000-10.000 inhabitant village in Norway would have more people using public transport on a daily basis.
I've never owned a car or gotten a drivers license, because I've never had a reason to. Perhaps I'll get one whenever I get kids, but for now public transport serves 95%+ of my transport needs, and the rest is solved with cabs, and I end up saving both time and money that way. However it always makes it interesting whenever I visit the US (going again this weekend, and will be staying in Palo Alto).
To be fair, some areas are quite good - the D.C metro was quite nice when I went there, and SF has a reasonable transport system, though it's still slow and inefficient if you want to go out to any of the smaller towns that don't have rail links.
But to claim that you need "very high population densities" for mass transit to work is bullshit, as anyone who has visited some of the European countries with lower population densities can tell you. Once density drops down you may need to have access to a car now and again, but there's a huge difference between having a transport system you can easily use for 80% of your journeys and not having one at all.
I also find it interesting that in Europe, most families will own a car, but will still take train/buses/undeground etc. into account when deciding how to get somewhere, while in large parts of the US (outside some of the major metro areas like NYC) it seems that the assumption is that if you have a car it will be your sole mode of transport apart from planes, regardless of whether a particular trip might be just as convenient or faster or cheaper with public transport.
That unwillingness in many areas to consider public transport unless you are forced to by not having a car fascinates me - it's very clear that there is a social status consideration in what mode of transport you consider in the US, which is much less pronounced in Europe, and that is more important than whether or not public transport is convenient, cheap or fast.
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Re:These kind of initiatives are pointless (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, yeah. When it comes to people who see the idea of any obligations to anything other than themselves as evil, I do consider myself better than them.
Most of those people seem to have trouble realizing that there is such a thing as cost aside from what they pull out of their wallet. And yet they continue to make their glorious, "free" decisions, despite happily fettering themselves in their own ignorance, something which seems to be the rage these days.
'Cause, see, thinking of anything other than yourself (like, for example, the neighbors, or your grandchildren's ability to hit middle age in their forties rather than their twenties) must be tyrannical communistic doom, false dichotomies also being the rage these days. If it involves any sense of non-personal responsibility, it's bad bad bad!
Do I have contempt for that attitude? Yes, I do. Am I better than people who trumpet it? Yes, I am.
-PS
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