[Scpg] The rise of the eco-city

[John Calvert]

The rise of the eco-city
By Fiona Harvey
Published: October 14 2005 17:00 | Last updated: October 14 2005 17:00

In the midst of the Arizona desert in the US stands a half-built town  
that has attracted architects from around the world for the past 35  
years. Arcosanti is an experiment in ecological city design. There  
are no cars since the space is planned for pedestrians, and there are  
large, compact living structures built next to huge solar-heated  
greenhouses where the residents’ food is grown. Electricity comes  
from wind and solar plants, and the water from the nearby river is  
carefully husbanded. Only 60 to 100 people live there now, well below  
the 5,000 that Paolo Soleri, the architect who founded Arcosanti,  
envisions. But since the project launched in 1970, 6,000  
architectural students have come to help with the building and learn  
about its design, and the site attracts 50,000 visitors every year.

The aim of the town is to emphasise the benefits of city life and  
provide a contrast to endless sprawling suburbs built on the  
environmentally unfriendly model of “the American dream of single  
families with a car or two cars”, explains Mary Hoadley, Arcosanti’s  
site coordinator, who, with her husband and now her daughter, has  
lived there from the outset.

Gathering a greater density of people to live and work in one place  
not only benefits the environment, by requiring less expenditure of  
energy for things like heating and travel, but also allows people to  
feel part of a community. “The word civilisation comes from the same  
root as city,” Hoadley explains. And “living here is fantastic. We  
started with the energy of the 1960s but this is something that has  
stayed the course.”

Although the town is still less than half-built (“We thought we’d  
have built it in five years and then travel the world building more  
villages,” Hoadley explains, but capital proved hard to come by),  
Soleri’s ideas have been an inspiration to subsequent generations of  
architects. A retrospective of his work opened in Rome last month,  
and he will visit China shortly in order to explain his philosophy of  
“arcology” – a mixture of architecture and ecology – to government  
planners.

China may be the next centre for ecological city design since it  
needs to build the equivalent of several cities a year in the next  
decade to house its growing population while still protecting its  
natural resources from the effects of urbanisation and  
industrialisation. The government has realised that residents’ desire  
for a higher quality of life, with cars, washing machines and other  
modern conveniences must be balanced against the need to protect them  
from water shortages, smog and pollution and to prevent the  
desertification of former agricultural land.

In fact, the country is building the world’s first fully fledged eco- 
city in Dongtan, near Shanghai, on an island three quarters of the  
size of Manhattan that sits in the mouth of the Yangtse river,  
providing a home to thousands of rare birds, plants and other species  
in its wetlands. The contract for the planning of the city was  
awarded to Arup, the engineering consultancy, in August, and the  
company is tasked with making the city as close to carbon neutral as  
possible, replacing almost all of the environmental resources it  
uses. Renewable energy will be a key part of the plan, with energy  
coming from waste and combined heat and power plants. At present,  
most of the island is agricultural land.

By 2010, the first phase should be complete, and an exhibition will  
be held to showcase the development. Peter Head, a director of Arup  
involved in the project, thinks Dongtan sends a message that China’s  
government “is willing to find ways of overcoming the challenges of  
creating sustainable cities in the face of significant climate  
change, environmental pollution, water shortages and the need for the  
use of cleaner energy”.

Projects such as Dongtan aim to build on Arcosanti and show that  
whole cities can be environmentally benign, instead of dirty and  
damaging. But managing the lives of several million people in a way  
that respects the environment is a big leap from creating a small –  
unfinished – eco-community in the middle of the countryside or the  
desert. “When the economic reality sets in, and it looks as if these  
cities will cost more to build in the short term, short termism might  
take over and the environmental aspects will be forgotten,” warns  
Andy von Bradsky, director of PRP Architects.

Still, even if China doesn’t realise its vision of eco-metropolises,  
smaller towns and cities across the world are using Arcosanti as an  
example and taking steps to green themselves.

In the UK, Newcastle hopes to become “carbon neutral” by encouraging  
energy efficiency, generating electricity from renewable sources and  
planting trees. In the US, EcoCity Cleveland is helping its local  
government use eco-friendly principles. And in Germany, the eco- 
buildings of Freiburg in the Black Forest have made it a tourist  
attraction. “I don’t think you’d be able to sell a house in Freiburg  
if it wasn’t environmentally friendly,” says Bill Dunster, principal  
at Zedfactory, the UK architects.

Bo01 (pronounced Bo-Nol-Net), in Malmö, Sweden for example, is an eco- 
friendly district with schools, shops, restaurants, a park, a  
beachfront boardwalk and now more than 1,000 residents. Launched as a  
government project to revive the formerly industrial port along the  
Western Harbour it was named after 2001, the year it opened, and the  
Swedish word for dwell.

Housing ranges from single-family homes to a residential high-rise  
(architect Santiago Calatrava recently added a 54-storey tower called  
the Turning Torso) and all construction follows strict environmental  
guidelines. The energy comes from sun, wind and water, and residents’  
electricity use is restricted to about half of what’s usual in  
Sweden; a large part of the town’s heat is extracted from groundwater.

“The idea initially was to get to grips with this old industrial land  
on the fringe of the city,” says Trevor Graham, project manager at  
Malmö’s environment department. “The concept was to create the city  
of tomorrow – a sustainable city marrying together quality of life,  
good architecture, good urban planning and environmental issues.”

In all these cases, architects and planners are giving up on the idea  
of an entire utopian eco-city and instead taking over an existing  
street by street or building up one neighbourhood at a time.

Additional reporting by Dalia Fahmy

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