Half of humanity today live in cities and within two decades, United Nations figures estimate that nearly 60 per cent of the world’s population will be urban dwellers. While cities grow and expand, however, so do their footprint and impact on the world’s resources. Faced with the twin dilemmas of increased demand for resources and the dwindling supply of it, the world has responded with a solution – eco-cities.
Nowhere is this growth of eco-cities more apparent than in Asia, home to many developing countries including economic giants India and China. By 2030, one billion people out of an estimated population of 1.4 billion in China will live in its cities. Of these, 221 cities are projected to be home to over one million people.
In comparison, the whole of Europe has only 35 cities that house a population more than a million.
In response to the numerous problems arising from that urban growth – such as increased pollution and traffic congestion, depleted natural resources and fragmented communities – governments and developers in China have started about 40 officially recognised eco-city projects.
Eco-cities, also known as sustainable cities, are designed with environmental considerations at their core. Such cities seek to reduce as much as possible their environmental impact and minimize the use of energy, food and waste.
The concept has gained popular recognition ever since the term was first coined by California-based planner Richard Register some 35 years ago, who defined it has a holistic approach where government, industry, people’s needs and aspirations, nature, agriculture and the physical environment are “functionally integrated”.
With increased global awareness of worsening climate change and environmental issues, the imperative for sustainable development is clear – but how do planners execute the different models on a drawing board into a successful living and breathing city?
The eco-city model: Practical, replicable, scaleable
This was one of the questions posed by Ho Tong Yen, chief executive of the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City (SSTEC), master developer of China’s high-profile Tianjin eco-city, at the recent Asia Pacific Sustainability Leadership Forum held in Singapore.
He noted that the current discussion of eco-city concepts at the intergovernmental and policy level was about how to provide a practical, viable model for sustainable urbanization not just in China, but also in other parts of the world.
The Tianjin eco-city – located in the northeastern part of China south of Beijing – is a bilateral project between the Singapore and Chinese governments, jointly developed by Singapore-listed Keppel Group and a Chinese consortium led by state-owned Tianjin TEDA.
Its project managers had settled on three basic requirements for the city – namely, it must be practical, replicable, and scaleable.
The SSTEC has put a plethora of clean technology features into the city’s 30 kilometre square area. These include district heating and cooling, state-of-the-art public transportation and lighting systems to maximize energy efficiency, automated energy management for buildings, a pneumatic waste collection system, solar installations and the latest methods in rainwater harvesting.
Part of the city’s business model is attracting the clean technology, or cleantech, companies that provide these technologies to Tianjin, said Mr Ho, adding that many of the world’s top companies such as Siemens, Hitachi, Philips and General Motors have invested in the eco-city to test-bed their products and take advantage of the concentrated market for green products and services.
But the SSTEC checklist for success, a list of 26 key performance indicators, involves more than just the deployment of cleantech. It covers ecological aspects such as biodiversity, clean air and water, and also social factors such as public housing and community facilities for residents.
“We are trying to create a high quality living environment with commercial, industrial, education and other facilities where residents can live, work and play in a green environment,” said Mr Ho.
Developers designed the eco-city’s neighbourhoods based on comfortable walking distances to amenities and included a green corridor that runs for 12 kilometres through the city for public use.
The 350,000 people expected to live there will find most of what they need in life within walking distance, he noted.
Another project that focuses on the liveability of cities is the Guangzhou Knowledge City (GKC), developed by Singbridge International, a unit of Singapore’s Temasek Holdings which develops eco-cities using the expertise of Singapore companies with a focus on China.
Singbridge chief executive Ko Kheng Hwa, who also spoke at the forum, noted that GKC’s success hinges on it being able to provide a high quality of life, which would in turn help transform the area’s labour-intensive manufacturing economy to one driven by high-tech firms with skilled staff from around the world.
“People move from countryside to cities in search of a better life, so these cities will have to focus on providing a better environment to work and to live,” he said.
The new 123 square kilometre development under construction in the heavily populated Guangzhou Province is designed to draw foreign and domestic companies from a range of knowledge-intensive industries such as information communication and technology (ICT), biotechnology and clean energy technology.
The emphasis on liveability in these Tianjin and Guangzhou cities is a far cry from the reality in most of China’s cities, however, say experts.
