“High-Tech” Sustainable City?
My Signal for the week is a recent development for a “High-Tech Sustainable City” designed by the technophilic, machine-age architect commonly known to us common luddites as Sir Norman Foster.
This idea, coming from a long heritage of British High-Tech is nothing new, but what is new is its contextual deployment. Unlike Archigram’s context-less freely floating moving cities, this one happens to be rooted in a tropical, developing nation — raising all kinds of questions about technology, cities and their role in the developing world.
The questions this news article posits is “So what if you could start from scratch and try to create utopia? And what if one of the world’s leading architects designed the center?” — And I’d like to take a stab at answering this question.
First off, if the rendering above is anything to go by, this city looks uncannily similar to Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse (notice the central town planning with large highways and modernist single-use-per space connotations). This is not just not new anymore, but it’s also fundamentally flawed an idea, ridding any urban complexity from the built environment, creating stale, scale-less cities.
But going beyond the urban critique (which is relatively obvious at this point), I’d like to talk about some issues of sustainability here. This city is meant to be created from scratch ostensibly near a river, with “Large, shaded walkways to encourage people to walk through the city, lots of green spaces, widespread use of solar energy and a transportation strategy that includes electric vehicles, water taxis, and dedicated cycle routes characterize the plans, which are set to be realized within 25 years”. Note the use of buzz-words in this quote connotating a high standard for sustainability. But is it really more sustainable to create a new city from scratch as compared to retrofitting and improving already existing cities? Is it more sustainable to use electric vehicles in a country that gets a vast majority from its electricity from coal (which is worse than gas for Co2 emissions), not to even mention the already scarce availability of electricity in the country?
I’m not sure what Sir Foster is exactly thinking here, but this project contains neither the visionary radical-ness found in the early work of his pre-decessors (if anything it is but a mere shadow), and neither does it foster (pun intended here) Corb’s utopic visions for a machine age era, if anything, I was hoping we were past that already.
