Sustainable City Regions: Mega-Projects in Balance with the Earth’s Carrying Capacity

Abstract

Cities are humans’ greatest and most complex constructions. They have been the cradle of civilizations and the crucible of humankind’s development and progress. All other great constructions have been built in one way or another to serve the interests and the culture of cities. Cities as constructions and institutions have well served the interests of society, that is, until recently. The gathering multiple crises of unsustainability have cast doubt on the ability and appropriateness of traditional urban forms and processes to endure much further into the future. The capitalist- corporatist control system that dominates urban and global economies has relegated both environmental and societal issues to be externalities to the operation of the economy of the city-system. The growing wealth, development, population, and the rising of peoples’ expectations increasingly overwhelms the capacity of nature to provide the city’s services and to balance out its offences to the environment. Another operating system and another urban model are needed. The Center for Sustainable Cities for more than 25 years has been researching two aspects of the sustainable city. The first is a study of historic cities in many dif- ferent cultures that do things well and that have operated not far from sustainability, at least in their balance-seeking relationship with their surrounding and support- ing environment. Through these studies the Center has evolved a family of urban forms that do not so much solve the problems that have become endemic in the modern city, but rather because of their unique syntheses they create places where these problems do not appear in the first place. The second aspect developed by the Center is the modern theory of the sustainable city and the attendant methods and processes for its realization. In late 2006 the government of South Korea sponsored an international compe- tition to design a new city that would replace Seoul as the national administrative center of the country. It was actually a series of competitions, the first of which was for an overall master plan to develop a constellation of towns. This was followed by a competition for the design of a Public Administration Town with sustainability as a major theme. One of the challenges of this competition was that “sustainability” was nowhere defined within the competition brief. Because of this, competition entrants were free to interpret the meaning of this contested term and indeed sus- tainability appeared in almost all the entries but only on a token level. In contrast, the entry, as presented here, is a serious attempt to demonstrate what the sustain- able city of the 21st century will look like, the theory upon which it would be based and just how it will operate. Drawing upon the examples of cultural and envi- ronmental “proto-sustainability” found in historic and traditional settlements, the Center for Sustainable Cities’ competition entry offers a bold new vision for build- ing cities of the future based upon lessons from the past. The design is called the Sustainable Public Administration Town-as-a-Hill or S-PATH (Sustainable-PATH); it was submitted as an urban design embedded in a sustainability process (Fig. 60.1). This paper examines the key aspects of this competition proposal: the Sustainable Area Budget (SAB) method, a design-based alternative to sustainability indicator and ecological footprint approaches; the Sustainability Game, a multiple scenario- building planning process; the Sustainability EngineTM, an urban modeling software that provides sustainability feedback to architect and stakeholder-proposed scenar- ios; and the Town-as-a-Hill, a dense, pedestrian-oriented urban model that places large scale components of the modern city such as parking, infrastructure, manu- facturing facilities, and large scale commercial and convention spaces inside a built “hill” freeing the hill’s “surface” to be devoted to human-scaled, walkable urban fabric, services and public spaces.