THE ZERO-CARBON CITY OF THE FUTURE

ROBERT BUTLER | GOING GREEN | October 21st 2008

It turns out the future isn't "Blade Runner", writes Robert Butler in his green column for Intelligent Life magazine, but bicycles, recycling and "smart responsive simplicity". It's not as bad as it sounds ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, Autumn 2008

I thought I had seen the future. I even had it on DVD. Neon signs flickered, spotlights circled and airborne police cars hurtled between skyscrapers. We were going to be eating noodles in the rain and keeping an eye out for androids from an off-world colony.

But it's not going to be like that. The news filtered through to me during the eighth hour of a one-day conference in London. A white-haired man in a cream linen suit took to the stage and told several hundred architects, engineers and technicians, "The future isn't 'Blade Runner'. We know that now."

The man was Peter Head, director of Arup, the engineering firm. He's building a city in China called Dongtan on the eastern-most strip of an island in the Yangzi Delta. Till recently, this wetland area has mainly been of interest to migrating birds stopping off on their 8,000-mile journey from Australia to Siberia. But now the world's city-planners are watching to see if this is the future. The brief for Dongtan is admirably tough: (a) accommodate half a million people, (b) leave no negative impact on the wetland. Put them together and you have a blueprint for a zero-carbon city.

In this future city, Harrison Ford would have to hurtle round the paths on his bicycle and munch organic vegetables at a street stall. As he lay awake at night, he could listen to the white storks and hooded cranes getting their breath back. With 90% of waste recycled, the only thing he could throw away with impunity would be his lines.

For those of us living in old cities that weren't dreamt up by Ridley Scott or Peter Head, cities that flourished on the idea that fossil fuels were cheap and limitless and that CO₂ didn't hang around like a duvet, the buzzwords over the next decade look like being "retrofit" and "very". Head told the audience: "We are going to have to retrofit the way we live in a very significant way in a very short period of time."

This doesn't mean anyone has to put on a hair shirt yet. Life could even improve. We will have to insulate, micro-generate and think a little harder about the way we use buildings. In Cambridge this summer I heard a young mathematician discuss a seemingly abstract field of research: how air moves through buildings. After a moment, I realised he was doing his PhD on air-conditioning. Get that bit right, and your energy bills tumble. Head describes this frame of mind as "smart responsive simplicity". It amounts, in its way, to a new aesthetic.

The idea of smart is changing. As the pressure grows on finite resources, tales of status-hungry Texans burning log fires in the summer and turning the air-con up high to draw out the heat, sound like plain bad manners. Waste isn't smart and neither are fossil fuels. And attitudes here are shifting fast. The Senate majority leader Harry Reid told Fox Business News, "Coal makes us sick, oil makes us sick..." The clip of him saying that made the number one spot on YouTube.

It's smart to use the things that are limitless and free: the sun, the wind and the tides. It's smart to think about where stuff comes from and ends up. It's even smarter to close the loop between the two. They call this industrial symbiosis: what is waste to one organisation is raw material to another. You can also store heat from day to night (in the ground, in a tank of water) and from summer to winter. The idea that your kitchen scraps can go into an anaerobic digester which produces methane that could be used to power your cooker has even reached "The Archers".

This joined-up thinking, nicely illustrated in the online video "The Story of Stuff", is matched by a new sense of interconnectedness. Time magazine says: "It remains impossible for most people to connect what comes out of our wall sockets to morality." But many are making these leaps. The Bishop of London opts not to fly for a year because of the impact aviation has on sea-levels in Bangladesh. Sure, the bishop's flights in themselves won't change a thing. But Voltaire made the bishop's point for him when he said, "No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible."

City life could even become more attractive. As Peter Head walked along the South Bank to give his talk, he saw the flat roofs and thought, "Great for growing vegetables." One day the carrot that Vladimir eats in a National Theatre revival of "Waiting for Godot" may be grown on the premises. The National is looking at putting grass on its roofs. Gardens and allotments soak up traffic noise, cool the building and stop rainwater running off into the sewers. They also encourage the return of rarer birds and butterflies. Roof allotments, growing vegetables as well as flowers, are popular in New York, urban farming is on the increase in London, and grazing sheep have returned to Brighton.

For Las Vegas, sited in an arid basin, it's going to be smart to ease up on the manicured lawns before water gets even scarcer, and cultivate an aesthetic around the plants that thrive on thirst: cactus, lavender, juniper and thyme. (It's called xeriscaping, from xeros, Greek for dry.) Some states have decided that the millions of acres of roadside lawn don't have to look like one long stretch of America's front porch, and that they can reflect their own diversity by allowing switchgrass or asters or Indiangrass to grow wild. Paris's reputation for style has only increased with the introduction of 10,000 bicycles which are all but free for the first 30 minutes. They improve the atmosphere and they're quick.

It's a cliché to call environmentalism a religion. Not least because environmentalists seem to be taking most note of scientists (not always religion's strong point). But critics point to environmentalism's misplaced emphasis on sin and guilt. If there is a religious impulse here, it may be the one about neighbourliness.

Picture credit: René Ehrhardt/flickr (top); photograph of Robert Butler by Sam Barker.

(Robert Butler is a former theatre critic. He now blogs on the arts and the environment at the ashden directory. His profile of Richard Long is also in the autumn issue of Intelligent Life magazine.)