Smart Cities in Japan; Fujisawa Sustainable Smart Town
This past summer I spent a month in Japan at the Rikkyo University Economics Research Institute studying the emergence of smart cities there. I was fortunate enough to be next to one of Japan’s foremost [English and Japanese-speaking] academics on the topic, Dr. Andrew DeWit. If you read Dr. DeWit, you’ll catch a glimpse of what the smart city could be. And I must say, the smart city vision is awesome. It not only solves economic development problems in a country still fighting deflation and thoroughly dependent on exports, but it also helps cities and communities across the aging country to adapt to climate change and potentially achieve zero-carbon status.
But, of course, the actual smart city developments on the ground are often imperfect iterations of this smart city vision. Thus far in this blog on City Smarts I’ve begun chipping away at what that overarching vision is; but I think now is a good time to look at some actual developments. Just like any other theory or idea in the white towers of academia, we must guard against debating the smart city concept in some intellectual stratasphere. If we want to affect its actual and concrete development, we must be sure to bring our analysis down to the ground, where construction has already begun and where people are already living in these supposed “smart cities” and “smart towns.”
I follow a lot of headlines about smart cities, and scan several sources almost everyday. I’m part of several smart city groups in various social networks, and I have been analyzing my Google Alerts every day for almost 5 months. The majority of smart city headlines focus on India, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi has announced an ambitious plan to build 100 smart cities. I also occasionally come across articles that focus on, first, Europe and, second, the United States. After these areas, one might be lucky to find some news on China’s “eco-city” development near Tianjin. South Korea’s Songdo is kinda old news, and Abu Dhabi’s Masdar City cannot overcome certain ironies and scalability problems (t0 be discussed later). But Japan? Mostly the chirping of crickets here, which I find to be problematic considering how many pilot projects already exist in Japan, with one estimate putting the number at 200 pilot projects (Clarisse Pham).
So today, I hope to do my part in fixing this egregious blind spot by briefly introducing you to a small “smart town” project near Tokyo, Panasonic’s Fujisawa Sustainable Smart Town (FSST).
Fujisawa Sustainable Smart Town
You’ve probably heard of the Congress for New Urbanism, right? One of the more successful urban philosophies and practices of the past two decades, New Urbanism holds that the key focus of any planned development should be place-making through design. And, in America, the quintessential place translates into street-oriented homes with porches, green lawns and public sidewalks for playing and strolling, community centers that gather residents together and promote cultural sharing and creation, and efficient, more dense development to not only conserve space, but also subtly encourage people to leave their [supposed] smaller homes and gather in those public spaces. In short, New Urbanism finds a silver bullet in DESIGN — design towns a certain way, and you’ll address the triage of community problems, economic problems, and sustainability problems.
Panasonic’s Fujisawa Sustainable Smart Town is New Urbanism on steroids. Like New Urbanism, the Sustainable Smart Town emphasized street-oriented residential development, which produces a welcoming feel when one walks through the town. Also, the center of the town has a shared community space, with a park and a meeting facilities. Multiple pedestrian paths circled the development between the houses. Residents proudly took care of their flowers, vegetables, and plants. Unlike most American style New Urban developments, green energy and energy efficiency were visible hallmarks of the development. Also, the size of the homes were much more efficient and economical than a typical suburban home in the United States, with the typical home being 1,100 to 1,300 sq. ft., and the lot being no larger than 1,600 sq. ft. Furthermore, these homes are easily accessible through multi-modal transit — many people used bicycles to run errands or reach the bus and train stations, which were nearby. But, most families did seem to also own personal automobiles. Thus, family life, in this town about 60 km southwest from downtown Tokyo, seemed pleasant, comfortable, beautiful, convenient, and more resilient, efficient, and sustainable than typical suburban developments we see elsewhere in the world, especially the United States.
Officially opening in November of 2014 and to be completed by 2018, FSST will have a total of 600 smart houses and 400 smart apartments (Clarisse Pham). Unlike most headline-grabbing smart city developments, Panasonic’s FSST is a brownfield development, as it sits atop the site of a decommissioned Panasonic television factory. Given Panasonic’s corporate interests, the development, of course, revolves around the residence and their [sustainable] consumption. Panasonic claims that this residential development will be able to reduce CO2 emissions by 70% when compared to 1990 levels and attain 30% of its energy needs from renewable sources. It also intends to reduce residential water usage by 30% (compared to 2006 averages) and provide 3 days of energy in the case of an emergency (an increasingly popular resilience strategy post-Fukushima, when Japan faced rolling blackouts). These features warrant its landing on the “smart” list. It is a developmental movement towards energy efficiency, resilience, and (partially) zero-carbon living. In addition to “passive design,” by which the individual homes have been optimally designed and placed to capture wind and solar energy for low-cost cooling and heating, each home also has an advanced Home Energy Management System (HEMS), something I covered in more detail in my post about the Smart Grid. The HEMS not only efficiently and effectively manages energy production and consumption (e.g., storing unused solar energy in household batteries, or imperceptibly raising the Air Conditioner temperature to lower peak demand), but it also visualizes the flows of energy. I find this visualization to be revolutionary, in that it makes visible what we often ignore in our day-to-day lives.
I would not, however, call Panasonic’s FSST radical and indicative of the future. A right step? Yes. But if we are serious about radically re-conceiving human society in a way that is resilient, economically productive, sustainable, and efficient, we must ask, “Is typical suburban, middle-class development, albeit with a few bells and whistles, the way we want to go?” As we will see in my next blog post about Kashiwa-no-ha, a smart city could potentially be a high-rise, dense city. Furthermore, a smart city could potentially be an affordable city. Or rather, it should be an affordable city. Single family, detached smart homes in the FSST cost between 52 and 62 million Yen, or roughly $435K and $520K. How smart is your development if it is only accessible by a small portion of your society?
Please stay tuned, as in the coming weeks I will detail another smart city development near Tokyo called Kashiwa-no-ha.
