Passing through Singapore: A Hub for Urbanist

When I moved to Singapore I had heard that it was a hub for many fields, a city where “East meets West” as the saying goes.  Even after hearing this and studying these trends I was still surprised by the influx of very interesting people passing through Singapore’s academic and professional urban planning circle last month.  Ranging from professors to practitioners, these individuals all have made significant contributions to how we think about solving problems in cities. Below are profiles of three of these visitors that I had to the opportunity to talk with. Some I had met before, while others presented new ideas, but all three provide great incites into the issues facing cities, particularly Singapore.

Peter Newman – Professor of Sustainability from  Curtin University Sustainability Policy Institute. An author of many books, Newman is most well known for popularizing the term “automobile dependency”  in his 1999 book Sustainability and Cities: Overcoming Automobile Dependence, (by Newman P and Kenworthy J). His more recent book Resilient Cities, written with Timothy Beatley and Heather Boyer, challenges policy makers to think beyond just sustaining a city’s current economic, environmental, or social situation. Instead it propels cities to consider how to overcome the very real threats of climate change as resilient cities. While in Singapore Newman was teaching a short course at NUS on sustainability.   Although based in Australia, he has had many opportunities to teach and research abroad. He even spent a semester at the University of Virginia’s School of Architecture while I was there.  Personally I really appreciated Newman’s views about researching cities in Asia. As an outsider he seemed very aware that no one could better understand Asian cities than Asian universities.

Tim Beatley – Professor of Urban Planning at the University of Virginia.  Beatley, besides co-authoring a few books with Peter Newman, was also one of my undergraduate urban planning professors.  While in Singapore he co-taught a course with Newman. He also conducted a lecture based on his new book: Biophlic Cities. In this book, like many of the lectures I heard from him at UVA, he challenged the audience on their knowledge of the environment around them while also sharing many studies that support his passion for bringing nature into the lives of city dweller.  For instance because of his lectures at UVA I will always remember what a sliver spotter skipper looks like and that children in day-lit schools grow taller than other children.  His courses at UVA also challenged us to actually explore our city and its local environment.  Because of his course I attempted to map all of the edible trees on UVA’s Lawn and even made a short film on urban foraging.  Now as I sit on my porch in tropical Singapore, listening to an the sounds of insects, I know that much of my curiosity about the flora and fauna in my new city stemmed from the lessons in his courses.

Herbert Dreiseitl - Partner of Atelier Dreiseitl, a design firm that places a strong emphasis on rainwater runoff. There are many notable Atelier Dreiseitl projects through out the world, however my favorite is the Bishan Park project they are just about to complete in Singapore.  This park is focused around the revitalization of a portion of the Kallang River.  Previously this park sat next to a cement lined canal that contained the water from the formally free flowing river. After a few decades of water flowing through it, the cement of this canal needed to be replaced. Instead of simply upgrading the current design Atelier Dreiseitl proposed that they renaturalize this portion of the river and then construct the park around this new body of water. This project however was never intended to be just one portion of the river, but instead is part of the larger Singapore ABC (Active, Clean, Beautiful) Water scheme.  In presenting his work on Bishan, Dreiseitl was very careful to emphasis that this is not a complete project within itself, but instead the entire drainage system of Singapore needs to be considered to slow the pace of water, to provide more flexible storage spaces for water, and to eventually  contribute to reduce incidents of flooding. Singapore still has many cement lined canals and open drains to consider before it can truly have a system that sustainably handles water, but in the mean time the Bishan Park Project provides an excellent example of how Singapore could redesign its storm water management system to be a series of beautiful rivers and streams.

- Melissa

Photo Credits: Book – Better World Books, Beatley – by the author, Bishan – Atelier Dreiseitl via The New Paper

Reimagining the Mother City: ‘Counter Currents’ in Cape Town

Edgar Pieterse, director of the African Center for Cities and editor of Counter Currents presents in this recent volume on Cape Town, South Africa “a radical project of optimism, bringing into collision the work of architects, planners, scholars, poets and sculptors to explore new possibilities for the city’s self-image.”

In Miranda Iossifidis’ insightful review of the book on Global Urbanist, she discusses Pieterse’s hopes that this volume can provide an opportunity for Capetonians to reflect on and experiment with solutions to some of the city’s serious challenges, ranging from memory and social justice to changing cultural values and the ever changing, often disturbing, realities of the Mother City in the years during and since apartheid. However, Pieterse asserts that Cape Town “can save itself” through “shifting public ideas and discourses about the kind of Cape Town we should be imagining and nurturing.”

Iossifidis concludes that the book manages to portray a rich, dynamic and hopeful picture of Cape Town as it is and its way forward into the 21st Century:

“This city–the ‘Cape of Storms and the Cape of Good Hope at the same time’–is a uniquely complex case study from the perspective of local thinkers and practitioners presented in a well-designed and richly illustrated manner. Perpetually probing for glimpses of possible alternatives, the book avoids stagnation through an innovative multidisciplinary approach, combining poetry, photo-essays, and policy analysis alongside practical and theoretical essays, creating a rhythm of careful optimism.”

I look forward to reading it myself soon!

- Ariana K. MacPherson

City Beautiful: Bikes Continued

Inspired by Amy’s post, I decided to seek out a project I heard about a while back from various different sources. Bicycle Portraits is an effort to photograph “everyday South Africans and their bicycles.”

As someone who has traveled to and around South Africa a total of four times since 2005, I can say that biking has definitely become more popular in the past six years. On my first visit to Cape Town it would never have occurred to me to bike between the picturesque and disheveled neighborhoods that characterize that city full of paradoxes. But this time around (I just returned from two weeks there last month) I was close to astonished by how many people I saw biking around not just for pleasure but as what seemed like a growing form of transportation.

With that in mind, this project will (hopefully) grow in popularity with bicycles themselves!

- Ariana

NYC as World’s Green Capital

A group called Earth Energy Economy LLC or E3 plans to organize “the world’s largest urban cleantech event” in 2014. The event would be focused along the East River in 5 key concentrated activity zones in each borough. The zones will feature green transit hubs that would offer a combination of bike-share, electric car-share, electric shuttles and water taxis. The greatest purpose of the event is to accelerate the development of a cleantech industry cluster to be known as the “East River Clean Technology Corridor”. Demonstration projects will begin in 2011 with Dekalb Station serving as the first beta site.

E3NYC Annouces 6-Month Cleantech Expo for 2014

Additionally, E3 is co-sponsoring ONE PRIZE: an Annual Design and Science Award to Promote Green Design in Cities. This year the design competition is soliciting ideas of ways to envision New York’s waterways as the “Sixth Borough of New York City.” The competition is a response to the city’s waterfront vision plan, and the jury will be chaired by Amanda Burden, New York City Planning Commissioner Chair.

Sam

Report: Green > Brown

As the U.S. Congress continues its attempt to slash-and-burn nearly anything environmental, a new report out by the  United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) tells us that – surprise – investments good for people and the environment won’t kill our economy.  In fact, the  “green economy” they describe propels countries forward to a sustainable future and poverty reduction, while staying “brown” actually holds them back.

For cities, check out the section starting on page 20. The report here essentially confirms much of what we know: density increases energy efficiency (saves money) and job productivity (makes money). With more people moving to cities, that means big opportunities for buildings, transport, and waste management systems to have a positive feedback for  the environment and economy.  TheCityFix also has a great summary of major messages for transportation.

Amy

Attention urbanites: your carbon footprint just went up a size

TheCityFix reported on a new study today that dissects the relationship between cities and greenhouse gas emissions – and the results are a bit humbling for global city-dwellers. Or at least the more affluent, sprawly ones.

Cities and Greenhouse Gas Emissions, researched by World Bank staff and Canadian academics, went beyond just per capita emissions and looked at total emissions. That, combined with also considering emissions from the production of what city residents consume, results in about 80% of the world’s share (though a little over half of the global population is actually urban). Like any alarming new climate stats, once you pick apart a number generalized to the whole world the picture is more nuanced and less surprising. Affluent urbanites produce a larger share of emissions, denser neighborhoods are more efficient than less dense ones. The chart below is an example – unsurprisingly the U.S. is the biggest, fattest emissions blob:

CO2 emissions per capita, 1967-2005, from Cities and Greenhouse Gas Emissions, p. 16

But that’s exactly the point the report is trying to make – rather than take it at face value that cities by nature are more efficient, policymakers and planners need to look at the nuanced context of where they’re operating when doing emissions inventories and designing climate strategies. In other words, disaggregate, disaggregate, disaggregate.

The irony is that obviously with climate change comes greater vulnerability to  coastal cities,  but according to forthcoming work by the Asian Development Bank the impacts of how climate change will force migration to urban areas that are safer is sorely neglected and likely to accelerate.  So by that logic cities create most of the world’s carbon emissions, the effects of which will cause more people to move to cities, resulting in greater urban emissions…and so on.

Maybe that’s a bit fatalistic, but on a more hopeful note with greater density and better transit options cities do end up having lower per capita emissions.  Cities are also at the forefront for taking action on climate change, perhaps because residents and businesses benefit directly from energy efficiency and better transportation. Cities form for reasons of efficiency – good planning and policies to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions will also have a proportionately large impact to cool down our hot, crowded cities.

Amy

e2 Feature on Bogotá

PBS hosts a great series about the economics of being environmentally conscious called e2. Their second season focused on design and it is narrated by Brad Pitt. One of the episodes focused on Bogotá as an example of a sustainable city. It features former Mayor Enrique Peñalosa who speaks about his efforts to reconnect his city through bike paths and the bus rapid transit system called Transmilenio.

Additionally, this episode and all of the second season is available on Hulu.

http://www.hulu.com/embed/0MkXr3gGiliDbSWmPEPtxA

Unsustainable Housing in India

After 70 residents were crushed to death in New Delhi when a building collapsed on November 15, a few interesting stories have emerged about the growth of India’s cities.   The building that collapsed housed more than 400 people in a crowded structure that suffered from flooding in the basement and illegal floors built by the owner on top of the structure.  According to the New York Times short film India’s Poor Struggle for Shelter Delhi is filled with four to five story structures such as this, even through the legal maximum height throughout most of the city is three stories.

Unfortunately these illegal and unsafe structures are often the only places were urban poor families can afford to rent within mega-cities. In a related article India’s Cities Fail to Keep Up With New Arrivals a recent report by McKinsey Global Institute cited unprecedented growth in Indian cities.  The report estimates that about 590 million Indians will live in cities by 2030, and:

To provide enough housing and commercial space, it said, India must build the equivalent of the city of Chicago every year.

I was recently asked how I would propose to development more sustainable Asian cities and I after stumbling through an answer I realized that the most important aspect of sustainability to me, and often the most over looked, is equity. I guess Bill McDonough’s idea of sustainability as Equity, Economy, and Ecology all being equal parts, has stuck with me since I read Cradle to Cradle.  Although the environment tends to be the most popularly associated term with sustainability, without examining equity issues within cities informal housing will still exist and will be a detriment to the environment due to crowding and poor sanitation.

As we work in the future to build, redesign and adapt cities in be more sustainable, we as planners should not ignore the question of equity as we develop more environmentally sustainable practices.  This incident in Delhi has highlighed that without providing more financially diverse housing options illegal housing units will continue to be built and leased to the urban poor, even as more environmentally sustainable practices happen elsewhere in the same city.

Melissa