Several stars stood out. Anumita Roychowdhury, from New Delhi, one of the authors of Slow Murder: The deadly story of vehicular pollution in India , showed pictures of the blackened lungs of citizens in Indian megalopolises and announced that bad air now kills as many Asians, especially children, as foul water. Nicholas You, an urbane Chinese architect working with UN-Habitat on strategic planning, warned that sprawl is the greatest threat to the world’s cities, as it produces ‘irreversible changes in consumption of land and water’. Both counselled the creation of urban villages within big cities, in which convenient services and work would make walking a preferred option to gridlocked commuting.
As Roychowdhury told us: ‘In the next three decades the population of Asia will increase by one billion, half of whom will live in cities, where automobile dependence is very destructive. For example, in New Delhi, one person dies every hour from pollution. There are 14 million people but only 4 million vehicles, not all of them cars, yet 80 per cent of the city budget is dedicated to road infrastructure.’ Cars are idle for 22 hours a day, yet the land a car occupies is larger than the average home in New Delhi. People are relocated from the cities because there is no space for them, but there is space for cars.
Given the price of land in the USA and Australia, it is staggering to find that some of our major cities sacrifice 40 per cent of their surface to cars or their requirements. The roads, driveways and freeways; the garages, parking lots and tall concrete monstrosities where they lurk during the day; the showrooms and car marts that line metropolitan streets; the repair yards and dumping sites where dead vehicles stack up. What a colossal waste! Imagine how much could be done with only half of that real estate!
New Scientist featured one way it could be tackled in a cover story in June 2006 titled ‘Ecopolis: Last hope for the natural world’. We are reminded that 100 years ago London (where I also grew up) was the worlds biggest city, with a population of 6.5 million. In 2006 London isn’t even in the Top 20. Tokyo is up there with 34 million inhabitants-nearly twice the population of Australia. Tokyo is famous (infamous) for four-hour commutes, tiny homes with minuscule rooms, and capsule hotels where you crawl into a coffin-sized modular sleeping unit. ‘Last hope’, indeed.
China, with even greater population difficulties and horrendous pollution, is now beginning to use its new wealth to experiment with model eco-cities. One is to be a satellite of Shanghai, built on Chongming, an alluvial island in the delta of the Yangtze River. That’s where, as New Scientist’s Fred Pearce observes, low-rise development will begin on the reclaimed mud-a model for the rest of China, with state-of-the-art green technologies, and maybe a model for others as well.
As the Chinese expect no fewer than 400 million people to move to cities in the next 30 years, they will need all the inventiveness they can muster. I heard China ’s Environment Minister warn ten years ago: ‘We may enjoy our economic miracle, with 12 per cent growth, but we must remember the cost of environmental damage removes 8 per cent from that figure.’ The town of Dongtan, now under construction on Chongming, could be the answer.
Australia ’s challenges are different. Some of us debate urban consolidation versus suburban renewal. In the west Peter Newman and his colleagues have taken a different tack and, in doing so, have led to Perth ’s stunning revival. Their approach is based on two vital secret ingredients: ask the people what they really want and make sure all sections of government are in the loop. One example is fast transport. Give commuters trains that are faster than their cars and require no expensive parking costs, and they will use them. Perth now offers some free trains and buses that come so often you don’t need a timetable. There has been a spectacular move, as I’ve mentioned, towards railway convenience in Perth at a time when Sydney ’s services explore new depths of antediluvian frustration and 74 per cent insist on commuting by car. Newman’s 1999 book about the future of cities (Sustainability and Cities, written with Jeff Kenworthy) was launched in the White House by then Vice President Al Gore. His enlightened ideas may seem too much for Australians to contemplate right now but, as with recycled water in Toowoomba, harsh realities will soon force us to take on the previously unthinkable.
Yes, we shall get help from new technologies: intelligent materials regulating pollutants and temperature; fibres carrying daylight as if it were water into every room; waste treatment systems such as Biolytix, recycling 80 per cent of household water by means of living humus full of good bacteria; photovoltaic cells giving home owners near independence from the power grid; computerised vehicles cutting fuel costs in half; and city farms on rooftops growing our daily greens and salads-but, as in Vienna, there will be old-fashioned remedies too. Faced with an urgent need to travel two or three kilometres, I often use a traditional device invented in Africa and refined in Europe -legs. As a boy, I walked to school from the Danube to central Vienna, in snow or sunshine. It was always a delightful trip, fuelled by not much more than a slice of toast. If we design our cities with enough thought, imagination and consultation we could achieve a sublime future: a combination of the best of old and new.
Several years ago I wrote a novel, 2007: A true story waiting to happen. Many of its scenarios have come true, including John Howard’s endurance in the Lodge in Canberra. Now that we have reached my year of reckoning, I am in the position George Orwell, sadly, did not live long enough to enjoy when he wrote 1984- getting ready for my comeuppance. The year 1984, as it approached, held forbidding associations. Nowadays I don’t believe anyone gives it a second thought.
In my novel, 2007 was the year when animals, large and small, decided that the crunch had come. The environment was in a tailspin and climate change had gone berserk. The animals sensed it, freaked and took over civilisation. Roads were blocked (shitting cows), airports closed (3000 pelicans), whaling ships were sunk (by 40 angry whales) and communication lines severed (by rodents chewing optic cables). Soon the normal business of government and commerce proved impossible. The people got very cross and planned to zap the animals.
This was, I thought, a reasonable extrapolation from conditions in 2000. Having now got rid of half of the natural world, we might well decide to cut our losses and eliminate the rest. It will soon go anyway. And the benefits seem compelling. Nearly all our plagues come from contact with domesticated animals. Bird flu is the present preoccupation. Other pandemics will emerge as we squeeze nature into corners. Thus AIDS arose from crowding monkeys or apes, and Ebola fever from hemming in the remains of jungle in Africa. Clear it all away and our worries would cease.
Would we miss animals-pets, birdsong, snuffling dog muzzles, cows in pastures? The Chinese seem to have coped. As for those creatures in the wilderness-the tigers, gorillas and frogs-they are not long for our planet. Some have turned up their paws already. Let’s get real!
Getting real in 2007 meant first committing universal faunicide, then shutting all the farms (most are failing anyway) and facing the turbulent realities of climate change. What would we eat? Easy! Attach food factories to bigger supermarkets and there manufacture mounds and sheets of protein that can be moulded and flavoured to resemble chicken or beef or prawns. Carbohydrates could come from plant-like GM crops developed by NASA for use on other planets. Both kinds of food are not much of a problem for genetic engineers, who even now have bacteria standing by that are capable of fermenting a fairly decent two-hat meal.