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: Read the full story
Happy Second Birthday!
Today marks the second anniversary of The Green Leap Forward.
Its been a real honor to bring news and analysis on China’s energy and environmental situation to the English-speaking world. GLF’s second year saw 65 new posts, roughly the same as the first (62) despite two major geographical relocations (Beijing -> Singapore -> Washington, D.C.) on my part, coupled with starting a new full-time job that really ate into my blogging time.
Of course I’ve doubled up on some of my work-products for blog posts, so in a sense, I’ve “cheated” some. An increase in posts by guest bloggers also helped fill the gap. GLF also benefited this past year from technology, with a new revamped RSS feed, twitter account (@greenleapfwd), Facebook fan page, and Linkedin group page. The latter half of the second year also saw a noticeable shift to US-China dynamics in clean energy and climate change, reflecting the nature of my day job, but also a fundamental shift in US-China relations, with clean energy and climate change featuring prominently in that metamorphosis.
What’s ahead for GLF? I’m going to try to start ramping up the frequency of my posts, but am hesitant to promise anything, especially with that thing called Copenhagen to start in less than a week! While GLF will continue to cover developments in Chinese energy policy and commerce, I hope to write more posts on water and the water-energy nexus as well. I will also experiment more with shorter punchier posts (although its often hard for me to refrain from in-depth 3,000 word exposes) and to revive the popular Green Hops news compilations.
I will take this opportunity to thank everyone who has made this possible, including my news sources, contacts on the ground in China who continue to feed me with insight, guest bloggers for adding to the diversity of perspectives, and most of all, my (growing!) family, who has tolerated geographical dislocations and my late nights on the lap top, and to whom I dedicate the next year of posts to.
Finally, I leave readers, as a “door gift”, with an this wild-looking Read the full story
Eco-Infrastructure: Letting Nature Do the Work
There are perhaps 40 different eco-city projects across China at the moment. If you had to design your own city, what would its infrastructure look like? Are cities, per se, even the right form of settlement for eco-planners to design? Here, The Green Leap Forward takes a look at several ideas in eco-community design, inspired by visits to several proposed eco-city sites in China last year, several presentations at a recent conference at the National University of Singapore, and the writings of Brian Milani.
Unified Infrastructure: Using Systems Thinking to Build Communities
If we think about the essential functions of a city, we would probably come up with a list including housing, food, clean water and air, electricity, mobility and access, education, jobs, recreation, and perhaps a few others. The problem is that these seemingly disparate Read the full story
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