Sustainability Conference 07

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• Presentation Material A (PDF)
• Presentation Material B (PDF)
• Neil Kirkpatrick
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Dongtan Eco City and Eco Cities -
Tools and Lessons

Neil Kirkpatrick’s presentation begins by detailing Arup’s work on Dongtan Eco City a project to manage an 86km2 area of Eastern Chongming Island. Developed by the Shanghai Chogming Investment Development Group, the city aims to provide exemplary sustainability standards, with ecology being a prime driver for the design.

With a blank canvas, Arup is looking at how to make the city the most sustainable in the world, providing more green space than cities such as L.A. and London, and an emphasis on low rise buildings.

Among the key issues Neil focuses on is that of accessibility in terms of to where people travel, leading to a focus on communities rather than buildings. Water also becomes a key issue – both in terms of leisure and consumption. Other considerations are such elements as protection as, due to the wildlife currently existing on the site, wind turbines cannot be used. Indeed, in deciding which technologies to use and what infrastructure to employ, the design becomes about the relative impact compared to other cities, so the design will still have an impact, but it will be minimised.

Throughout the presentation, it becomes apparent that crucial to the project is driving down the demand for fuel and energy consumption. Part of that approach is to incorporate a greater number of jobs in proportion to the number of residents in the city to reduce the number of people commuting out. By creating buildings that recover heat and use natural cooling, the designers can reduce the demand for energy and by recycling resources they can avoid the use of virgin materials/

Further challenges are presented by food as a resource, hence the increased efficiency of the used of land and what Mr Kirkpatrick describes as ‘glorified greenhouses’ to provide food in the most sustainable way.

Mr Kirkpatrick draws attention to the fact that to maintain our current lifestyles we would need the space and resources of three planets. The design for Dongtang will not make it a ‘One Planet’ city, in part because of the holiday travel lifestyles of the affluent people expected to live there. However, it will be one of the most sustainable cities in the world, with a 63% reduction in ecological footprint.

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