Prof. Albert Speer
AS&P - Albert Speer & Partner GmbH, Frankfurt, Germany

Sustainable development means to be one of the most fashionable terms in political statements in Africa, Europe and China.

To a huge extend, the above-mentioned principles decisive for what we use to call `sustainable urban development'. Sustainable urban development is understood as a process of balancing constantly changing determining factors of city development, with the aim to provide to the citizens:

 

We would like to underline the importance of such kind of development by pointing out that given the still accelerating process of urbanization in China, India and large parts of Africa like Nigeria, Egypt and South Africa. The large cities or Megacities in fact provide the battle grounds whether appropriate living conditions for the generations to come can be provided or not! The facts, which lead to this statement, couldn't be clearer:

·      Urban Population will double from 2000 to 2025 from 2.4 billion
    to 5 billion.

·      By 2050, approximately 75-80% of the earth's population will live in cities (today: 47%)

·      By 2015 approximately 360 ‘million cities’ will have developed, from which 153 will be in Asia. There will be 27 ‘Mega Cities’ with more than 10 million inhabitants, 18 of these in Asia.

·      European population shrinks in number and ages, while other regions of the world grow rapidly: population development from today until 2050:

·         Resources of farmland will shrink due to desertification and urbanization and at the same time land coverage of urban agglomeration areas will increase.

·         Today, approximately 18% of the world population doesn't have access to pure drinking water, mostly in developing countries. More than 50% of the purified water is lost between water plants and consumers because of insufficient facilities or vandalism. More than 70% of the water used in agriculture is lost through inefficient irrigation systems or inappropriate methods.

·         In 2025, approximately 66% of the world population will live in regions with medium or severe pure drinking water shortages.

... All living systems worldwide are in decline. At the same time, the world's largest cities face exceptional challenges with respect to health, welfare, education, poverty, crime and pollution."... "lt is demographically spectacular to see birth rates plummet when people move from the countryside to the city. At some point in the middle of the century, the population will peak and begin to draw down. At about that time, 75-80% of the population will be living in cities. lt is an aging population for at least 100 years."

Another Global Mega Trend is literally boosting the above mentioned effects of urbanization-globalization, understood as increasing interaction and interdependence between ‘global player regions’ of which larger or Megacities normally are a core part - producing a new division of urban labor, of production and services capacities, at the same time increasing competition between these regions to attract the most capable global economic players and groups of inhabitants - mobility of the ‘brains’, ‘knowledge nomads’.

 

lt is no exaggeration to draw from the above mentioned first - that there is hardly any alternative to sustainable city development and second - that time has already started to run out!

 

lt is obvious that this understanding of city planning requires an adequate response from architects, urban designers, administrative municipal bodies, investors and political decision makers.

 

This response is all the more difficult because processes in urban development planning normally progress quit slowly, at least when it comes to durable built up structures. Their implementation normally requires a considerable effort in planning, organization and management, recourses' input as well as investment - and it normally affects the lives of numerous citizens. In contrast, the time-pressure imposed by dynamic changes like migration, technical Innovation, auto mobilization, social and economic progress is already high and even accelerating. lt is not easy to keep pace with, these changes.

This is why we believe that a strong strategic planning force at a regional planning level is necessary to support the efforts of local planning bodies in their efforts, or put into other words: set up and alter that control and reinforce guidelines for the ‚self organizing individual entities’ of a city.

 

To summarize the key statements:

 

·         Cities can be regarded as `living organisms'

·         They tend to diversify and partly self organize in a network of self  contained entities

·         Central planning authorities on a regional, strategic level should set up and control development guidelines.

Although the cities' framework conditions in Africa, Asia and Europe are completely different - and reach from population-shrinkage with over-aging problems to dynamic or even hyper-growth with over- proportion of under aged population combined with insufficient infrastructure - there are some principles that seem to be almost `universally' applicable. They are summarized in the following and represent the experiences of our work during the last 30 years of environmental and sustainable planning in many countries.

 

 

The planning principle suggested to allow for a proper development control in metropolitan areas has been called `de-centralized concentration', which means a densely interlinked network of sub centers or `satellites' with particular vital functions within the concentrated urban fabric of a Megacity.

 

lt has proved in many fields that the attempt to centrally plan, organize and implement the development of highly complex systems has significant disadvantages, increasingly so with growing size and increasing interdependence between its elements.

 

We have learned that this applies to Megacities or metropolitan regions as well; in fact it is by our opinion the most suitable way to keep pace with the demands of fast - or even hyper fast - city growth. Within this context, efficient use of land-resources, as part of environmental protection, constitutes the basis for sustainable urban development. To achieve these goals it is most important to steer the organization of settlement patterns within an area.

 

Given the dimension of Megacities, this has to be done on the level of regional planning. lt is most important to strengthen and improve regional planning capacity, at the same time intensifying cooperation between planners and local authorities.

 

Concentration will create compact settlement entities based on limited consumption of land and effective infrastructure networks, while a decentralized planning approach will lead to self-contained urban entities providing efficient and durable technical and social structures.

 

The strategic development concepts for the City of Shanghai reflect this idea, by implementing sub-centers around the core city, for example Anting.

Preference of Public Transportation

 

The organization of passenger and freight generated mobility is a key issue in Megacities both with regard to ecological and economic reasons. Above and beyond construction of a given transportation infrastructure, its operation is also crucial. What is necessary is a networked, integrated traffic management system encompassing multiple modes of transport.

 

This requires not only investment in high-tech solutions - detection, satellite navigation, centralized administration, etc- but also a newly integrated manner of thinking on the part of individual operators and organizations. To this end, solutions will be developed, in part with assistance from AS&P, in Europe, Africa and Asia.

 

A well functioning public transportation system is the only chance to guarantee mobility in 21th century. Consequent means towards this goal will have a positive impact on the urban structural fabric as a whole. Above all, public transport, in contrast to individual traffic, will drastically reduce air pollution as well as energy consumption. Organizing a regional planning with regard to reduction of mobility is the key to overall sustainable development and reduction of energy consumption. Not only this, efficient transportation helps to save a tremendous amount of time which is now speilt in endless traffic jams and represents a gigantic waste of human-resources!

The future will show whether the transportation network presently under construction or in the process of planning in Shanghai can catch up with the city’s development. In any case should the entity of urban quarters be kept free of through traffic and only be accessed by public transport, bike and pedestrian routes.

 

One side-remark should be made in this context - it might be difficult to prevent people from buying a car, as long as it a status symbol and represents the economical and social achievement of its owner. The crucial question is how to prevent people from driving it. In many European cities, a variety of different measures have been set up to limit individual traffic, mostly by making it unattractive or more expensive. These measures however have always to be accompanied by an attractive and appropriately expensive offer of public transportation means to be effective.

 

 

Today's rapid growing Megacities do significantly lack down town open space and regional green belts in a dimension to be called `landscape'. This cannot be balanced by artificial water ways, parks and street related green belts only. Megacities demand a profound ecological inner-city-landscape planning. The function of inner-city - is manifold, to name the most important:

 

4.      Networks of Infrastructure Systems are a Prerequisite for Sustainable Urban Development

 

Organic growth and constant rejuvenation have become one of the major objectives in strategic Megacity development planning, in particular applied to infrastructural systems, leaving more space to the self-organization of the `city organism'.

 

"We think of city infrastructure as static in the centre, growing at the edges. But the entire infrastructure of European cities completely turns over in 50 years.... What we design today must stretch for the new arrivals - the 2.5 billion people who move to the cities over the 40 years leading to 2050.... By 2050 city systems overall will have become inadequate and will be serving an aging population as well". (Hawken, 2005).

 

Only the introduction of an intelligent network of infrastructure systems within the Megacities will preserve resources and reduce emissions drastically. To develop and optimize infrastructure systems an interdisciplinary planning approach is necessary, which finally leads to a sustainable solution. Urban planning and planning of urban technical facilities has to be conducted simultaneously. The various fields of infrastructure water supply, sewage, waste treatment as well as heating and air-conditioning - may no longer be optimized separately and sequently, but rather jointly and parallel, they have to be considered as one system, to be integrated in one urban technical network.

 

Technical infrastructure systems should apply the following principles:

 

·         An integrated concept for potable water supply and wastewater recycling to be offered in separated networks, including the use of rainwater. Able to achieve high potable water quality and reduced consumption

·         The additional input in planning efforts and higher investment in key technologies will be compensated by intelligent combined systems and considerable savings in operational costs.

·         Applying the principles of a sustainable-infrastructure-Systems-network anticipated environmental benefits are as follows:

 

The process of urban development calls for optimizing the organizational struc­tures. The organization and management of a Private Public Partnership pro­vides for a proper use of financial resources and lasting economic success. The following key issues have to be taken into account:

 

·         Organization of process oriented approaches to identify a variety of concepts

 

Any chain is only as strong as its weakest link. The efficient use of recourses and energy in particular has to be followed from the production through the transport and distribution to the end-users. With regard to urban planning and building construction this means that only parallel and joint efforts on all levels and in all scales of planning will provide for an optimum of efficiency in use of resources and environmental preservation. The general planning approach to­wards sustainability thus has to encompass the level of regional planning and urban design as well the architectural design for single buildings.

 

When it comes to the concrete urban und architectural design, we have found a way to deal with these tasks in a comprehensive way, which might be considered suitable in other fields of activity as well.

 

We call our approach `sequential, cooperative, transparent planning process'. The emphasis is put on the process, which means the `planning of the planning'. The overall aim is to establish an understanding of sustainability and efficiency among the involved participants by giving them precise knowledge about the purpose of organization procedures, the envisaged coordination of talks and the other players involved. This is still not very common in China! lt is based on working cooperatively as a team and a relatively free flow of information in the process, which means making the process transparent to the participants. As the participants are more or less equally integrated in the process, compromises between their particular interests can more easily be found and later are supported more effectively. This becomes an important aspect in a large-scale and long-term planning like for example a Masterplan for a World EXPO - which results in kind of a `New Town' as well - encompassing a whole variety of single tasks and a large number of participants to be involved in different stages of the process. The necessary preconditions are:

 

·         Set up of a properly organized project schedule that provides regular occasions for information exchange; in other words, a sequence of precisely prepared meetings, with strictly mandatory attendance of all relevant participants and a well-organized information management and coordination

 

·         All participants must agree on and support the procedures! The procedures must be comprehensively developed and fixed in formal agreements, which the participants accept as binding

·         The project aims must be defined clearly and communicated to the participants

·         The structure and the procedures must provide for enough flexibility in order to be adapted to changing conditions in the course of the project

·         High ranking people must be in charge of setting up and supervising the process, adapting the given structure and schedule to the changing requirements of the process and checking that the agreements are abided to.

 

Examples of different projects in Europe, Africa and Asia from AS&P will be shown in a power point presentation in Shanghai.