Whether you love them or hate them, cities are here to stay, and they are getting much bigger. Back in the sixties and seventies when people talked about sustainable living they were usually referring to the rural idyll. The back-to-the-land movement saw migration from cities as our salvation. By living in harmony with nature, we would solve the social and environmental problems we had caused through urbanisation.

Today that narrative is reversed. Now experts talk of how innovative designs, technology, and planning are about to shape our cities so they provide the model of sustainability. By living close together we will be able to use energy efficiently, recycle, share resources, live smartly, cut travel, and ultimately reduce our environmental impact on an already over-stretched planet.

There is no single template as to how we might achieve the sustainable city. Someone living in Dhaka in Bangladesh will have different priorities and challenges from someone living in London or Zurich. But wherever they are on the globe, our major cities have one thing in common: they are growing, and the way they are growing is no longer sustainable.

Alex Steffen is an environmental journalist who has been writing and speaking about planetary challenges for many years. He believes that the bucolic dream of the sixties and seventies failed because it was premised on a simple deceit. Rather than moving to the countryside, as the back-to-the-land movement envisaged, to practice ecological farming, sustainable forestry and lifestyles lived in harmony with nature, most people simply chose to export urban living to the countryside.

“People moving to the country and living ex-urban lifestyle is the least sustainable way to live,” explains Steffen, who is the author of ‘Carbon Zero: Imagining Cities That Can Save the Planet’ and ‘World Changing: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century’. “If you are going to live two hours away from a major city and just happen to live on a large plot that you garden or landscape, and yet you drive everywhere and still live like you did in the suburbs, there is no ecological benefit at all. In fact, it is worse.”

Millions are migrating into cities

Our future lies in the city for pragmatic reasons, explains Steffen. He describes himself as a planetary futurist – someone who works on planetary issues, especially urbanisation and sustainability. According to the World Health Organization, 54 per cent of the world’s population live in urban areas, up from 34 per cent in 1960. This figure is set to grow by 1.8 per cent each year. “We are a rapidly urbanising species, so by the middle of the century, we are going to be three-quarters urban and 95 per cent of humanity will live within a two-hour distance of a major city. We are going to be overwhelmingly connected to our cities,” says Steffen.

Economics is one of the main drivers for this growth. Cities are where our economies are based, where opportunities are at their richest, and where trade flows. They are fertile ground for new ideas and they are where culture, art, and innovation thrive. Which is why, across the globe, migration is from the rural to the urban.

For urban planners, the immediate challenge will be how to accommodate these new populations more sustainably. According to Steffen, this will mean building up. The high-rise will increasingly become a feature of our lives. “There is no way to build those cities in a sustainable manner unless we concentrate that growth,” says Steffen. “If you were to spread China’s urbanisation across the landscape at a density compared to, say, Houston in the US, it would spread thousands of miles. We cannot urbanise at the scale of billions more people, and grow outwards to do it.” While population density will be even greater in the future, Steffen believes with it will come the chance to live more sustainably.
 
“City density allows us to build services and infrastructure that low density does not. There is a direct benefit to having a certain number of people in an area,” says Steffen. The most immediate advantages are around economies of scale. It is easier to provide sustainable energy supplies and waste management to a concentration of people than it is to a population spread through a suburban sprawl. By living nearer to where we work, sustainable transport networks become more achievable. By planning efficiently, we will be able to walk or cycle where we need to go. The buildings we live and work in will require so much less energy to sustain them. Technological innovations and processing speed will evolve to create an interconnected world that will allow us to use our material and social resources much more efficiently.

Steffen points to car ownership as an example of how current thinking is outdated when it comes to using our resources. “There is a huge array of ways to use the immense surplus capacity that exists in any given vehicle. It is usually stationary for 23 hours a day, but we can crank up that surplus capacity to service as many trips as possible,” Steffen explains. “You can have a self-driving car travelling almost 24 hours a day, delivering many more trips than the best Uber driver. It can do so at a much lower cost, and you would never have to park the car unless it’s electric and you have to charge it.”

He adds that in some high-density places, the cost of owning and parking a car already far outstrips the cost of using taxis. “Add to this the other big changes, like our ability to use consumer data, and systems to predict with increasing accuracy what is happening in the near term, then we have the potential ability to get cars to people before they actually know they want them.” Of course, the use of information technology is not just limited to better transport options. It can be used in every aspect of our lives, as long as we are living close enough to each other to be able to share those resources. “We are talking about a more cooperative way of living,” explains Steffen. “We are seeing a different system replacing the formal system we have in place, and we are seeing that potential across the board. Every major part of the economy that I have been able to look at has a comparable kind of effect happening.”

Smart cities are on the rise

Songdo International Business District lies 65 kilometres southwest of Seoul in South Korea, and it offers us a glimpse of the sort of future that Steffen envisages. Dubbed the ‘world’s smartest city’, Songdo has been built from scratch on land reclaimed from the Yellow Sea. It is 60 per cent complete and is home to around 70,000 people so far. Its population is anticipated to be three times that number when it is completed in 2018.

High-rise residential buildings mean that 40 per cent of the city is set aside for outdoor spaces such as parkland or a golf course. The plan is for every service or device to be linked through an information network so as to create a coordinated, synchronised city. Home devices will be controlled by mobile phone, while waste will be sucked into underground pipes where it will be automatically sorted, recycled or burned for fuel. Bikes are everywhere, parked at night in neat ranks outside apartments. Pedestrian thoroughfares link city dwellers to shops and restaurants with outdoor seating. Everyone is connected through video to minimise the need for meetings, while sensors control electrical amenities, such as escalators that are turned on as you approach them.

Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, is another city of the future. Scheduled for completion by 2025, Masdar is being built in the unforgiving heat of the Arabian Desert. It will be powered by solar buildings designed to match energy needs with the energy created. There are no light switches or taps, just sensors. ‘Passive house’ building techniques are being used to minimise the energy needed for cooling as planners draw on traditional Arab designs to create narrow, well-shaded streets. The city is being designed to maximise shade while a wind tunnel funnels cool air through the streets. In the Middle East, 60 per cent of a building’s energy is used for cooling. Masdar has managed to cut this figure in half.

You won’t find heat-creating fossil fuels in Masdar either. Cars are parked on the outskirts due to the city being built on top of an electric driverless vehicle network powered by renewable energy. This new city is a crucible for sustainable learning. At its heart is the Masdar Research Institute where students from around the world come to learn about cutting-edge developments. The Institute provides the research and the theory, pilot sites test the theory and optimise the engineering, and the results are then applied and commercialised within the city.

Most cities grow with the times

Unlike Songdo and Masdar, both engineered cities, most other cities evolve over time. The story usually begins with a natural seaport, a crossing point for trade routes, a bridge or fertile land. Singapore is the perfect example. In 1819 the British statesman Sir Stamford Raffles arrived to find nothing but tropical jungle. Perfectly situated for trade between India and China, the 700-square-kilometre island now has a population approaching 5.5 million. It boasts the second busiest port in the world and, according to certain criteria, is the tenth most sustainable city in the world.

Professor Peter Edwards is head of the Future Cities Laboratory based at the Singapore-ETH Centre for Global Environmental Sustainability. The Laboratory is an interdisciplinary research programme that aims to produce the ideas and knowledge needed to make cities and urban life sustainable. By partnering up different academic disciplines, the Laboratory prides itself in providing creative solutions to the challenges of urban living. “You can have a great scientific understanding of a problem and you can have a great technological understanding, but if the design is not right and you have not created a comfortable living environment, then no one is going to want it,” explains Edwards. “You need this design component. The involvement of architects in developing a vision of what the future can look like, using more sustainable technology, is very important.”

Professor Edwards started his career as a botanist, which explains why he sees the story of Raffles providing insight into the direction the sustainable city will ultimately take us. “When Raffles arrived, the tropical rainforest had been there for 80 million years,” says Edwards. “Rainforests are highly decentralised. Their production systems – the leaves – are decentralised, their waste processing systems are decentralised, and they possess all sorts of homeostatic mechanisms. In contrast, modern industrial cities are highly centralised – for example, in their systems of energy production and waste disposal, and balancing mechanisms present in rainforests are mainly absent. This centralisation has been driven mainly by the goal of greater economic efficiency, but the result has been increasing imbalance with the environment, so that cities have become less sustainable and less resilient.” He believes the rainforest has something to teach us about the future of the sustainable city.

Buildings will need to be autonomous, like trees, by collecting water and perhaps supplying water to a larger supply. They will need to be energy-neutral, collecting energy through photovoltaic technology. They will have to exist in balance in terms of nutrients. “We are soon going to reach a limit with what you can do with highly centralised cities, and we will simply have to move towards cities that more closely resemble natural ecosystems,” Edwards explains.

Rainforests are the benchmark for cities

The work of the Future Cities Laboratory is taking us a step closer to that vision. One example is a project that his team is currently working on to cut the energy needed for cooling buildings by up to 40 per cent. This could provide massive energy saving for Singapore where 70 per cent of a building’s energy goes into cooling. What is exciting about this technology is that it is designed for commercial buildings, and as a result, will reduce the current requirement for ducting used for cooling. The project is called ‘3for2’ because by reducing the bulky ducts, you can build three floors where there are currently two.

The technology originated in Zurich and was mainly used in Switzerland to keep warm not cool, however, by using the same principles and adding techniques, such as dehumidifying the air before cooling, the technology is being applied in the tropics, and the result could be dramatic. In addition, architects, designers, and engineers from the laboratory are coming together to provide a new lease of life for some of the old shopping quarters of Singapore, where shophouses are the predominant typology.
“There are still many traditional terraces of shops with service lanes at the back that are a bit like the London mews. But the hundreds of air conditioner condensers blasting out hot air make these back lanes a horrible environment, a sort of inner circle of hell,” says Edwards. “If we can apply our new cooling technologies to the back lanes, however, we might transform this circle of hell into a wonderful environment, a mews environment with bijou cafés, trees, and places to sit.”

Another project involving science and design in an existing city is taking place in the informal settlements of Jakarta. Cities in the developing world tend to grow in a chaotic fashion to accommodate new arrivals from the country. Greater Jakarta has grown from around 3 million in the 1970s to 30 million today. Loss of ground water has meant that low-lying areas, where these settlements are situated, have sunk and so have become vulnerable to flooding. But the rivers are still used to provide everything from sanitation to drinking water.

Rather than the draconian option of clearing people off the land and decanting them into high rises at the city edge, the Future Cities Laboratory has sent in a multi-disciplinary team to look at how these informal settlements can be made more sustainable. “Breaking up the community and livelihoods is arguably not a good thing, so we plan to use good planning and good technologies to help develop those communities and allow them to grow incrementally,” Edwards says. Hydrologists and landscape architects are exploring river rehabilitation that balances issues of flooding, water quality, culture, and ecology. They are now working with local authorities and urban planners to develop design concepts that improve the ecology of the Ciliwung River and mitigate the impact of flooding. “Then we started to develop a type of housing that could be extended incrementally. This would allow a growing family, for example, to expand its accommodation vertically by raising the house roof and building another floor,” Edwards explains. “Our design concept also includes decentralised systems of water collection, waste processing, and electricity generation, making these houses as autonomous as possible. This is important in areas where public service infrastructure is poorly developed. The whole emphasis is to use planning and intermediate technologies to enable these rather chaotically assembled urban areas to grow out of their problems and develop in a better way.”

Steffen has also been exploring the challenges faced by cities in developing nations. He believes that they may paradoxically have the edge on developed cities because they have not sunk investment into old infrastructures. “There are many cars in the developing world but per capita there are far fewer. People are far less connected to the idea of a car as something essential,” says Steffen. “As development continues, it is entirely possible that they could be the places where autonomous vehicles take off the fastest, because you are not competing to get rid of the private car, you are competing with other methods of transit.”

He points to China as an example of how this technological leapfrogging can take place. In Europe, for example, transport systems have evolved over hundreds of years to a point where Victorian and Edwardian engineering is trying to support the demands of 21st century London. “China has said: ‘Look, we are going to invent new ways to build, we are going to build on a massive scale. We need transit, so we are going to build an entire subway system in Shanghai in 20 years, we are going to build thousands of miles of national rail, and so on’. If you look at the speed at which a place like China has accelerated its investment and development and you compare it to England and the time it took England to industrialise, China is faster by a factor of 10,” Steffen explains. So where does that leave the world’s slowly evolving historical cities in the race to live sustainably? Professor Edwards explains that many of these cities were built before the invention of the motorcar, so they have at their heart a street layout and a density characteristic that provides a good template for sustainable living. “In that sense it is the big sprawl that came after vehicles that perhaps presents a more difficult problem,” Edwards says. While retrofitting houses built over a hundred years ago may work in the medium term, he believes they will eventually have to be replaced by something more efficient in the longer term.

Housing costs must shrink

For all of the world’s great cities there is one problem that will have to be addressed in the very short term: the cost of housing. Supply and demand is distorting housing markets to such a point that it is starting to skew economies and is particularly disadvantageous to younger generations.

“Of this I am relatively certain: we are entering a moment where the cost of inaction is escalating so rapidly that cities are going to have breakthrough moments, one after the other,” says Steffen. “They will realise that the cost of not building new infrastructure, of not pursuing new policies, of not planning better, far outweighs the benefits of keeping the status quo. The current system everywhere is fraying to the point of breakage. It is not just true of London: it is everywhere. If you look at housing costs, transport time, and the backlog of deferred infrastructure of almost every city in the world today, you are looking at the decline of government services. Some cities are doing better than others, but none is doing as well as citizens expect.”

Both Professor Edwards and Steffen share a common optimism for the future. They both cite Copenhagen as probably their favourite example of a sustainable city because of its bicycles, walkability, green initiatives, and polycentric design. But what about the future city 20, 50, and 100 years from now? In 20 years, the autonomous building will have arrived, city planners will have been forced to address their housing shortages, and technology markets will have matured, bringing us solutions such as automated transport. For Steffen, social and political pressure will prompt a snap forward towards sustainability as an increasing coalition of people questions the status quo and realises that incremental change is not enough.

In 50 years, the polycentric city will be the norm, as cybertechnology will have done away with the need to commute. But it will take 100 years, believes Professor Edwards, before his ultimate dream of a city which is in true ecological balance will be realised.

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