China to pioneer ‘first sustainable city’

Chongming, an island at the mouth of the Yangtze river, has felt the impact of environmental degradation more than many places, as its population has doubled in 50 years and deforestation has silted up the river.

Now Chongming is to become a model for environmental good practice. The Shanghai government has just begun construction of an “eco-city” at a place called Dongtan, which is to be a showcase for sustainable urban life in a country where 20m people are moving to cities every year.

Arup, the engineering and design consultancy behind the masterplan, describes Dongtan as the “world’s first sustainable city”. “By integrating all these different technologies, we can create a new type of city living,” says Dong Shanfeng, who runs the project at Arup.

There is not much to see yet, but by the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai the developers hope 25,000 people will be living there, rising to 80,000 by 2020. Eventually the eco-city could have a population of 500,000.

Such bold initiatives are particularly important in China, which has 16 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world and is increasingly an exporter of environmental problems. This summer for instance, the government admitted that emissions of sulphur dioxide, which cause acid rain, had risen sharply over the last five years and that China was now the
biggest source of such pollution.

Mr Dong says the Dongtan buildings will use one-third of the energy consumed by typical houses and energy will be renewable – one of the mock-up drawings shows large windmills in the
distance.

Minimising the new city’s environmental impact is vital, he says, not least because it is next door to a reserve for migrating birds.

Kang Hongli of Shanghai Green Oasis, a non-governmental organisation that monitors the island’s bird population, says: “The precise impact is not clear, but such expansion is bound to put huge pressure on the environment.” While there is a plan to protect the wetlands near Dongtan, she says, wetlands on the north coast of the island are already suffering.

The developers plan to generate 50,000 jobs around Dongtan in tourism and research – they are looking at a number of “innovation-oriented industries”, says Mr Dong. Yet if there are not enough jobs for residents, the eco-city could generate long car commutes to other parts of the Shanghai region.

That would make it part of a bigger problem. Although Shanghai is building new underground lines, critics say the city has created too many distant suburbs poorly served by public transport, one cause of the explosion in car ownership.

The paradox is that “if there is not an economic base and sufficient mass transit, Dongtan risks becoming a new-age Potemkin village”, says Christopher Choa, an architect at the Shanghai office of EDAW, an architecture and environmental consulting firm. “The real danger is that it becomes a whitewash for other activities that are not sustainable.”