Architecture and Design

EcoBlocks in China

(Photo via Green Dragon Media Project)

My recent interview with Caroline Campbell from the Green Dragon Media Project (podcast pending, I promise!) inspired me to learn more about green buildings in China. (Browse an image gallery from the Green Dragon Media Project’s recent tour of China here.)

Conventional city planning in China usually involves “the SuperBlock, a model that relies on a centralized infrastructure of power plants and electric power lines, sewage treatment plants and sewers, and a sanitary water supply provided by the city or provincial utilities,” as recently reported by GreenBiz.com.

But scientists and designers are engineering new ways to create resource-efficient “EcoBlocks.” And China–where the rate of environmental degradation is at an all-time high–serves as a global test site for sustainable living.

GreenBiz.com examines one particular program, originating out of U.C. Berkeley’s Urban Sustainability Initiative (USI), to help make the ecologically utopian ideal of large-scale green architecture a reality.

• Eco-Cities Take Root
  Source: Lara Abrams Melman
  GreenBiz.com

A hugely collaborative effort, involving an interdisciplinary team put together by the College of Environmental Design at Berkeley, the Tianjin Urban Planning and Design Institute and the Gordon Moore Foundation, the team has been working to integrate the best of clean technologies into the decision-making processes of urban areas throughout the developing world. In 2006, U.C. representatives met with officials from central and local governments in China to identify a site suitable for development of an EcoBlock prototype and settled on Qingdao, a 600-unit building that will be replicated eight and a half times across a 23 hectare (56 acre) plot of land.

The potential for environmental, social and health savings that the EcoBlock can deliver is just huge: if 18,333 600-unit EcoBlocks were built, it would keep 34 landfills, 42 power plants, 54 water treatment plants, and 51 wastewater treatment plants from being built, at a total cost savings of $38,737,185,000. In a pre-feasibility report on the EcoBlock conducted by ARUP in conjuction with the University of California at Berkeley and Huahui Designs, the company estimates that the Chinese government alone would save 1.3 percent of its GDP from not having to build additional infrastructure to meet demands for energy, clean water, sanitation and waste disposal - and that’s not counting the savings from costs currently associated with treating environmental pollution associated health problems, which currently claims about 10 percent of the country’s GDP.

(Photo via GreenBiz.com)

But eco-city development is not necessarily a cure-all for pollution ills, in China or elsewhere. According to the dean of Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design, Harrison Fraker:

[S]uch eco-city developments will require a completely different way of doing business — at least in the U.S. — because the way the system is set up currently, he says, is slanted heavily in favor of developing fast and getting out, with minimal responsibility for environmental impact over the long term. In other words, the developer relies on a centralized power supply and they just plug into it, develop, and hand the keys to the home owner, who ends up being the one who pays the bill(s) going forward, while the developer just sells and gets out. Eco-city developments, Fraker believes, will require some sort of property management with self-interest in operating and maintaining these different, distributed small scale systems.

There are some other challenges to eco-development:

1. “Clean” technology can be expensive.
2. It can be difficult for foreign firms and local firms to collaborate, which is necessary in order to reinforce responsible business practices.
3. The idea of gated eco-communities do not always appeal to local cultural attitudes and norms.
4. The incentives to build “green” are not always evident at the outset.

Despite facing some of these potential obstacles, China holds incredible potential to launch a worldwide movement towards revolutionary sustainable design.

See some of the links below for more information on interesting eco-projects in China:

• The Water Cube
  National Aquatics Center, Beijing
  By ARUP

• Dongtan Eco-City
  by ARUP

• Integrated mass transit
  Chengdu
  by the Urban Sustainability Initiative (USI)

[tags]China, eco-design, ecoblock, superblock, sustainable architecture, Arup, Urban Sustainability Initiative[/tags]

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