From Salt Water to Green Islands: A Dutch Vision
This excellent clip by Radio Netherlands Worldwide tells of Dutch consultancy and engineering firm, DHV, and their efforts in Tianjin on the “Delta Diamonds ocean city development project.” Naturally, it is labeled as an eco-city project–Green sells, so why not? The objective, in a nut shell, is to create a series of new islands through land reclamation and build a new community for 20,000 people. The site of these Delta Diamonds, as they are called, so happens to be right next to the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-City, which we have blogged about previously here, here and here.
A more detailed description of the plan, particularly the land reclamation phase, is available here. This Tianjin project is just one part of a portfolio of infrastructure projects of DHV in China.
In the video clip, Neville Mars, a Dutch Beijing-based architect skeptically points out:
First of all, they are talking about a new city built from the ground up. I think that’s already a bad start. True sustainability is the expansion of existing cities so you keep cities compact and city networks efficient. Even worse, these projects use land created artificially in the sea. You can’t get much less sustainable than that. It costs an unbelievable amount of energy to do.
Reasonably put. But with an additional 350 million Chinese migrating from rural areas to cities by 2025, it is worth questioning even Mr. Mars’ premise that cities, and all the concrete, glass and steel that they imply, can ever attain “true sustainability.”
As I watch this video, I am reminded of the 9 principles of eco-community design based heavily on the concept of “eco-infrastructure” that I penned earlier this year, and which I reproduce below (it is somewhat heady stuff, so I recommend going back to the original post “Eco-Infrastructure: Letting Nature Do the Work” for a refresher):
1. Design is based foremost on the centrality of the natural landscape and the environment’s natural endowment.
2. Eco-infrastructures are designed so that human infrastructure are mapped onto underlying eco-structures, eco-structures onto underlying human infrastructure, in a way that is complementary and mutually reinforcing.
3. Such eco-infrastructures are deployed with a unified system-of-systems approach.
4. Eco-infrastructure design is guided by the appreciation of stock-and-flow systems. Thus, it will embrace an energy system that focuses on harnessing the flow of solar flow, not the limited stock of fossil fuels. It will also recognize the need to address stock GHGs be sequestering carbon naturally through soils, in addition to reducing flows of additional GHGs by using renewable energy sources.
5. An eco-infrastructure strategy breaks down the dichotomy between rural and urban, and embraces an intermingling of the two.
6. Such ecostructures will be guided by the interactions of various closed-loop cycles (in water, food, energy, materials, nutrients, information and money).
7. Self-sufficiency and localization is emphasized not only because it strengthens security but also because is disentangles the community from the snares of global supply chains and keeps wealth within the community. Yet, such a community promotes free exchange of information.
8. The social aspects of community are fundamental, hence the focus on social metrics such as job and wealth creation and recreational facilities. Education and fostering eco-values in the residents are also key–regenerative living is a lifestyle (heartware), not just green power plants and gardens (hardware).
9. Resilience and security of the community relies on diversity in every respect–energy sources, biodiversity, food diversity, land use diversity, mixed-used housing, cultural and ethnic diversity. A corollary of diversity is localization, distribution and decentralization because these concepts require the recognition and embrace of diversity at the ground (grassroots/local) level. Hence, distributed energy resources and the use of local indigenous resources, among other things.
I welcome your thoughts on the Delta Diamonds project.
December 28th, 2009 at 9:58 am
Sobering Monday morning wake-up call? A “green” city developed by marketers; who would abandon the substance of the “green” to increase its economic value. Indeed, the notion of “green” divorced from its Siamese-twin “sustainability” is all image without substance. Regardless of the reality, this proposed city will materialize as a “green” attempt just as long as its profitability enriches its handlers.