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The Condition of Asian Megalopolises and their Paradigms
PROLOGUE in these metropolises can be packed with as much as 100,000 people/sq. km. Here, many do not have access to running water or toilet facilities.
Asia must cope on a daily basis with rifts between social and economic systems that precipitate conflicts over land use. Several binaries dominate the narrative: urban vs. rural, rich vs. poor, private vs. public, formal vs. informal. Unresolved and festering, these binaries induce destabilising tension amongst parts within a whole, triggering systemic fragmentation.
The conflict is visible as an outright struggle in which one group or species thrives at the expense of others, and appears in turbulent boundaries, or edge conditions, where skirmishes flare up. In some places, neighbourhoods become enclaves with hardened edges where space becomes exclusive to certain groups. In most cities, this is accompanied by a loss of ecosystem serviceswhere natural systems such as rivers are degraded to the point that they are unable to support life.
In Bandung, Indonesia, urban and suburban precincts within the Upper Citarum Basin, where the city is located, tripled in size between 1983 and 2002. Industrial areas surged almost one hundred fold. This period of change also saw forest cover halved from 85,138 to 39,150 ha.22
Of the 2,500 factories in the basin, most discharge untreated waste water directly into the river and its tributaries.23 A recent study found faecal coliform levels in the River Citarum up to 5,000 times the mandatory limit.24 Pesticides have contaminated nearby groundwater that serves farming communities, posing a public health hazard.25
The population of the Mumbai Metropolitan
Region (MMR) is less than 2% of India’s total and yet it accounts for 5% of the country’s national gross domestic product and 33% of its income tax.26 Following the liberalisation of the Indian economy in the early nineteen nineties, Mumbai witnessed an influx of migrant labour. Population
in the metropolitan region increased almost 60% in just two decades, from 14.8 million in 1991 to 23.5 million in 2011.27 Growth has not been equitable. In 2001, Greater Mumbai had 6.25 million people living in slums, approximately 54% of the total population; by 2017, this figure was nine million or 62%.28 As the city grew, 36% of its forests and green cover were lost, water bodies shrank by 12%, wetlands by 31% and open spaces and croplands by 40%.29 The degradation of ecosystems came sharply into focus in 2005, when a devastating flood paralysed the city and caused the death of over 1,000 people.30
These cities illustrate how the production of financial capital is often at the expense of natural capital, and how this, in turn, affects social capital. Eventually, the two loop back to undercut financial capital. The Mumbai flood, for instance, damaged 200,000 homes, 40,000 commercial buildings and 30,000 vehicles. Capitals are inextricably linked; focus on one is at the expense of others. How can designers address this level of complexity?
The first challenge facing the design community is cognitive dissonance. We are desensitised to contradictions around us; consequently, we continue as we have always done, with impunity. Let’s consider Mumbai again again: despite its problems, it’s been called the greenest city in India because it has the largest number of green buildings, many of which were built at a time when the city’s systems were being degraded.31 The term green here refers to compliance with a checklist that stipulates what a development should do within site-and-shell. The resulting dichotomy of scales, architectural vs. urban, allows us to celebrate the success of one and ignore the failure of the other. This tendency to compartmentalise can be traced back to our framing of the problem. Author Jane Jacobs, in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), famously asked ‘(what) kind of problem the city is’.32
In science, there are several problem types that apply to the built environment; each must be tackled with the appropriate ‘methods of analysis and discovery (and)
strategies for thinking.’ 33 Otherwise,
solutions may be meaningless and could even exacerbate the situation.
The city, Jacobs reckoned, is a problem in complexity, for which there are two subtypes. Disorganised complexity seems random by virtue of the vast number of interacting variables.A metropolis comprises thousands of buildings, hundreds of thousands of air conditioners and lights, and millions of inhabitants. The energy behaviour of the city as a whole cannot be predicted from the efficiency of its parts – there are just too many interactions, each contingent on several others. The whole, however, can be estimated with tools of statistical analysis that map the relationship of one system to another. A problem of organised complexity (e.g., a neighbourhood) operates with fewer variables and yet, paradoxically, is harder to generalise. The number of variables is notsubstantial enough to be probed statistically; the interactions, too many to model independently. Confounding the situation is human behaviour that can cause the whole to act in unpredictable, non-linear ways. The working definition of green today does not contemplate complexity. Instead, a green building is presented as a sum of simple and complicated problems, governed by laws of physical science and open to cause-effect analyses. Each element – say, envelopes, cooling systems, lights – is evaluated, quantified and optimised. The performance of the whole is the sum of its parts; one plus one equals two, always. When simple and complicated problem-solving techniques are applied to complex problems, the outcomes can be, at best, ineffective. Donella Meadows, pioneering American environmental scientist, posited that the way to tackle real-world complexity is to frame it as multiple interacting systems. 34 A system is an agglomeration of elements and connectors within a boundary condition, and whose collective behaviour cannot be deduced from that of its subsystems.
‘Systems can change, adapt, respond to events, seek goals, mend injuries, and attend to their own survival in lifelike ways, although they may contain or consist of non-living things. Systems can be self-organizing, and often are self-repairing over at least some range of disruptions. They are resilient, and many of them are evolutionary.
Out of one system other completely new, neverbefore imagined systems could arise.’
Donella Meadows 35
A network of spatial connectors – say, sidewalks – is a system with characteristics that set it apart from others with the same elements and interconnections, i.e., every sidewalk is different, depending on its combination of residents and visitors. They have an organic and spontaneous order, wherein ‘the parts generate the whole . . . while the whole organises the parts’.36 There are several takeaways from this part-whole hypothesis. Firstly, the parts must be contextualised against a whole and vice versa. A system cannot exist in isolation. This is, in effect, a position on scale, for instance how a building is embedded within a neighbourhood or a neighbourhood within a city. Here, design moves from arranging objects to crafting relationships, focusing on edge conditions and connectors that regulate flows and exchanges. Secondly, systems adapt and change in unpredictable ways. It is impossible to conceptualise the end state of a city, thirty to forty years from now, therefore the goal must be to formulate a framework for change: mechanisms for growth, feedback loops and cycles. Thirdly, the proposition allows us to conceptualise the links between human-made and natural. Cities operate within ecosystems and since both tap into similar resource flows, designers can target pathways and seek out partnerships. Systems are inherently difficult to visualise. To operationalise the thinking for the drawing board, architect and design-theorist Christopher Alexander postulated that systems have forms that give rise to patterns.
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PROLOGUE
A pattern is both spatial and behavioural, emerging from interactions between people and their environment. An act of design, therefore, is contingent on finding good forms and patterns in the real world, and adapting them to a new context.
French urbanist Serge Salat referenced the writings of Alexander on urban form, for a study of Paris.38 The Haussmann plan, implemented in the nineteenth century, was compared with Le Corbusier’s 1922 proposal, which was never executed.39 The latter was described as tree-like, hierarchical and with more categories of large-to-small roads. The former, leaf-like, had fewer categories and showed a polycentric arrangement of connectors. Salat discovered an explicit correlation between form and performance. Buildings in the Haussmann model had lower energy demand and more daylight access. Neighbourhoods did better on three counts: access and connectivity, as seen from a pedestrian viewpoint; adaptability, which is the ease of replacing a part without disrupting the whole; and social and commercial exchange, a reference to street life. Salat went on to summarise the morphological assets of eco-urbanism. To a list that began with density, functional and social mix, he added the metrics of complexity – node connections, frontage, courtyards – and the presence of nature, i.e., water and greenery. What is significant about his findings is that the leaf-like configuration does better than the tree-like on all counts: environmental, social and experiential. He did not, however, make a case for nature, nor did he challenge the anthropocentric priorities at the heart of both models.
Changing Worldviews
Anthropocentricism places human beings at the centre of all decisions. We are set apart from nature; standing outside, looking in. Our approach to natural systems, if not exploitative, is custodial at best.
Experts argue that this humancentric position is an impediment to meeting the challenges of the twenty-first century. We must return to an earlier proposition, harmony between human beings and nature, which is more pressing today than ever before, as we face an existential threat of ecosystem collapse.
The narratives of politics, economy and society which once dominated the theory of urbanism must now be aligned with new ecological exigencies and timelines. To attempt to improve the city without explicitly addressing current crises is equivalent to rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic. In Asia, very few cities adopt a nature-centric approach to urbanism and planning. Singapore is a noteworthy example.
Singapore has done much to elevate the role of natural systems in planning. Green cover on the island has increased steadily over the last few decades, despite a parallel increase in population.
By 2018, it was equivalent to half of the surface area of its territory.40 The Garden Cityvision that had guided development for over four decades was reframed in 2012 as City in a Garden, a shift in policy aiming to enhance the coherence and accessibility of blue-green systems.
In 2015, the National Parks Board (NParks) unveiled the Nature Conservation Masterplan (NCMP), addressing the city’s natural assets for the first time.41 The NCMP maps out what is left and in need of protection, and seeks to integrate nature reserves with urban elements. The latter includes, for instance, a Park Connector Network (PCN) that links green patches with pedestrian and cycling tracks across the island, and doubles up as paths for the movement of species. Initiated in 1995, the PCN had a cumulative length of 330 km by 2017, and is expected to reach 700 km by 2030.42 Also part of the masterplan are nature ways: roads that, through selective planting, mimic the structure of a forest and bridge areas of high biodiversity. In 2018, these covered some 80 km, and by 2020 should extend to 260 km.43
At the building scale, the planning authorities in Singapore stipulate the use of the Green Plot
Ratio (GnPR), a metric with which designers can declare the quantum of vegetation in a project.
The GnPR is on the checklist of the Green Mark,
Singapore’s green building standard, which since 2008 is mandatory for all new constructions. In addition to this imperative, the Skyrise Greening
Incentive Scheme promotes green roofs and walls by offering subsidies and guidance to developers. The aim is to have 200 ha of vertical landscapes by 2030.44 In 2017, NParks attempted to steer the conversation towards ecology, issuing guidelines on how to attract biodiversity to roof gardens.45
Singapore applies systems thinking in planning by targeting multiple layers and scales at once. But what is the Singapore model pursuing, besides a better life for its citizens? Can an anthropocentric approach also benefit nature? Some would say no. In the ‘Ecomodernist Manifesto’ published in 2015, eighteen global experts argued that the urban and natural cannot be harmonised; if we are to survive, we must surrender the countryside to nature.46 Human beings may reside in cities, aided by technologies that produce and recycle what is required. Famed biologist Edward O. Wilson adopted a similar position in his book, Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life, in which he contends that half the planet ought to be set aside for biodiversity.47 Emerging technologies – biology, nanotechnology, robotics – will transform cities, making us smarter and more efficient. Both views are predicated on the goal of autarky: the metropolis producing what it needs, within its boundaries. As a species, it is unlikely that we will leave nature untouched; the tension between urban and rural will persist. The case for segregation will fail, just as coexistence, advocated since the late nineteenth century, failed.48 This is because neither addresses the underlying worldview, a cognitive framework that affects how we see the world collectively and act in consequence. The pervasive worldview is mechanistic, describing a macrocosm of independent elements with linear flows. Human beings, their buildings and settlements, are deemed separate from nature. The counterpoint to mechanistic is ecological: the world as a set of connected and interdependent systems, bound by circular flows and with the capacity to regenerate and self-organise. In the epilogue, the future city will be analysed through four prisms. The first, circularity, stipulates the need for looped resource flows as a way of accelerating production within metropolitan boundaries. The second, partnership with nature, requires that we protect existing ecosystems and construct hybrid ones in and around cities. The third, three-dimensional planning, is linked to the imperative of urbanisation: can the city grow vertically, thereby limiting horizontal expansion? And the fourth, regeneration, seeks a reversal of losses in systems that are degraded or fragmented so that the city, as it evolves, begins to self-heal, inside out.
Context and Pedagogy
Bangkok, Hong Kong and Shanghai are chosen as case studies to identify the context and the paradigms of Asian megalopolises and to propose synergies of actions for more sustainable and liveable urban developments. These three cities don’t sum up the complexity of all Asian megalopolises, but the challenges they represent are universal: surging populations coupled with social and environmental problems that compromise liveability and ecology.
Climate change vs. ecological and social resilience, the Bangkok case study
Asian cities are the most vulnerable to climate change. One third of the world’s natural disasters over the past three decades occurred in Asia, where densely populated and low-lying coastal plains are exposed to storm surges, coastal erosion, flooding and rising sea levels.49
Density vs. liveability, the Hong Kong case study
Asian cities have seen densities soar in recent decades, reaching peaks in excess of 100,000 people/ sq. km. Is this liveable? With increasing densities many city dwellers have less access to greenery, social space, air and light. Even cities that have moderate density struggle to manage quality of life for their populations.
Economic development vs. social and environmental conditions,
the Shanghai Baoshan case study
After two decades of fast economic growth, China has proved hugely successful in growing its economy and generating wealth for its citizens. This success, however, has come at an outsized cost and the resulting deterioration of natural and social environments are unprecedented.
The Pedagogical Context:
A Collaborative and Integrated Approach
For three years, the semester dedicated to urban design in the Master of Science in Integrated Sustainable Design (MSc ISD) degree at the National University of Singapore (NUS) was devoted to a specific city. The purpose of this academic module set out to merge the concerns of sustainability, often quantitative and scientific, with the method of urban design, more intuitive and qualitative. In a studio lasting ten weeks, students were asked to negotiate potential outcomes – energy and liveability, resilience and ecosystem services – each elaborated with a set of metrics. Students travelled to the city in question for a week to map five chosen sites (1×1 km). In the following weeks they redesigned each site bearing in mind a predicted density increase and quality improvement, striving to make the site net zero in terms of energy and water. Their designs had to deliver on multiple counts, to show how their urban projects could reduce energy use and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and simultaneously improve the quality of life of citizens. Financial support and academic collaboration with EDF have made possible the different trips in the three cities along with the integration of energy data and energy equation from the beginning of the urban design process. The 3D City Platform, the EDF tool for energy calibration, was introduced early on in the design process so that it could influence design strategies, as the project moved across scales. The collaboration between EDF and NUS / SDE in the MSc ISD urban design studio supported three important goals that were set up by the NUS professors.
Systems Thinking
Students were encouraged to deepen their understanding of the integrated design approach. This related in particular the extent to which energy, urban design, ecology and liveability are interdependent layers. The 3D City Platform shed light on some of these connections.
PROLOGUE Multidisciplinarity
The studio sought to foster a productive dialogue between architects, town planners, urban designers, experts in landscape and ecology, and mechanical and electrical engineers, a discussion that is essential for forging inclusivity and integrative system thinking. The EDF team played the role of industry energy experts.
Iterative Process: From Pedagogy, to Research to Practice
This multidisciplinary collaboration combines pedagogy, research and practice in a new and efficient way. The MSc ISD approach to urban design and the 3D City Platform were both enhanced through exchanges at multiple levels.
Furthermore, collaboration with local universities and experts in each city provided extensive knowledge of the context as well as a valuable data collection in the development of the analysis and urban design. In addition, a transversal study linked to the Master of Landscape Architecture degree and the contribution of an expert in ecology and biomimicry in the Shanghai case study allowed us to deepen our ecosystem approach applied to urban design.
The Protocol: The Sampling
In each city, five 1×1 km sites are chosen as samples that represent the variety of the city/territory. These parts of a system are either interrelated or independent. In both cases, the five sites analysed and developed into five master plans are placed in relation with larger scale infrastructure, grids and networks. A middle-sized neighbourhood measuring 1 sq. km. is a relevant scale to grasp the interactions and synergies and to develop globally positive solutions rather than solutions that might be positive on one level but negative as a general result. In this synergetic context, the five master plans of the five samples do not only demonstrate the performance of the proposal as the addition of isolated and specialised performances, but as a holistic and multi-scalar ecology bound by complex relations, negotiations and compensations between its different elements.
What is important isn’t so much the performance of each element by itself, as the globally virtuous system that they form together.
Strategies are developed to articulate and rearticulate the architectural, the urban and landscape in a vision that attaches as much importance to the detail and materiality of everyday situations as it does to strategic planning issues. Design integrates performance, density metrics and quality of life visioning. The master plan demonstrates how energy, water, density and liveability are negotiated in a mixed-use development. The urban projects take into account what exists on the site and its value to the future of the city. New developments are inserted that strive for densities that are no more than the average for that city, the five 1×1 km master plans are instruments for developing the interactivity between building typology and urban morphology, with specific impacts on energy, water systems, ecosystem services and social cohesion. The lessons learned from Bangkok, Hong Kong and Shanghai could be adapted to many other rapidly expanding Asian cities.
The Method: A Multidimensional Approach
Two major phases structure the integrated and sustainable urban design process. The first phase is that of understanding situations by accurately analysing the site and its territory, and the second phase is that of developing synergetic strategies and quantitatively assessing their impacts.
Understanding situations in order to take efficient action towards a sustainable and context-specific urban development.
In order to analyse and act on 1×1 km sites, a multidimensional approach is developed to articulate the city samples in their context as well as to qualify and quantify locally developed strategies that have a global impact. The multi-scalar ecology articulates four scales under respective conditions: Metropolitan Scale – the context –, City Scale – the organisation –, District Scale – the interactions –, and Block Scale – the mixing. Urban parameters are set to understand the site condition and to elaborate integrated strategies. Sustainability concerns the ecologic, the economic and the social, parameters that vary completely according to the geographic, climatic, economic and cultural conditions of each region or city. Urban layers are developed as tools for representing and understanding the analysis and the development of strategies. Urban design, beyond a formal exercise, becomes a complex process of progressive identification, decomposition and recomposition of layered information and strategies. System thinking is implemented for the development of synergetic strategies structuring an integrated and sustainable urban design process. Outcomes assess the quantitative approach of the design impact. Resilience, liveability, energy and ecosystem services are evaluated in each urban proposal.
Bangkok:
A parallel universe of formal and spontaneous networks
Bangkok combines two types of city characteristics. On the one hand, sectorisation, mega-blocks, high-rise buildings and mono-use developments on a monumental scale assert Bangkok’s identity as emblematic of globalisation. On the other hand, informal and adaptive dynamics provide responses to changing needs and temporary requirements at the scale of street blocks, through a complex layering of mixed-use and spatial interpenetrations. In this situation, the uniqueness of the place is a combination of both systems and develops an urban dynamics in which the city is shaped by commonalities and interdependencies through interesting forms of solidarities that produce an intense range of citizenoriented services. Bangkok provides a temporal dimension where the transition between formal and spontaneous uses activates the street throughout the day. The urban and social dimensions of Bangkok can be defined by its immediacy of reaction, as well as its rapid adaptation to physical urban transformations and to the severe effects of climate change. The mutation from an aquatic to a terrestrial city has produced an impact on the urban environment and its ability to mitigate extreme weather conditions, as well as on the lives of its citizens. New informalities and forms of resilience emerge in the transition from ‘living on water’ to ‘living under water’.
