Harnessing technology and engineering: creating the world's first sustainable city

By the end of 2007 mankind will become a primarily urban species with more than half of the world’s 6.6 billion population living in urban areas. This trend for urban living has gripped China, and it is estimated that 600 million people in China will have moved from rural areas to the cities by 2050.

The relentless march of urbanisation goes hand in hand with a vast increase in energy consumption and pollution. In fact, China recently became the world’s second largest consumer of energy, after the United States.This trend is widely recognised as being unsustainable and consequently a new approach is required to find a sustainable lifestyle for the cities of tomorrow.

One possible answer is Dongtan, Arup’s masterplan for the world’s first eco-city.The project aims to use existing technology and engineering to demonstrate that environmentally friendly and sustainable urban growth are not mutually exclusive.

Arup’s approach for Dongtan and other sustainable cities is to form a global team of experts from within the firm who together take an holistic approach to city making. Alongside urban design, civil engineering, the team considers the social, cultural and economic requirements of integrated urban developments.

With our client, the Shanghai Industrial Investment Corporation (SIIC), we are setting ambitious targets for Dongtan.We intend to create a city that has an ecological footprint close to 2.2 hectares per person, meaning that it would take 2.2 hectares of land and sea to supply the resources each person in Dongtan would need to live each year. To put this into context, Beijing is currently 4 hectares per person, London 6.6, while the average for US cities is 18 hectares per person.

The key to making the city sustainable lies in understanding how planning for transport, housing, energy and all other factors fit together and influence each other. Each individual aspect of the Dongtan masterplan is quantitatively modelled to understand resource implications and optimise the design. It is this holistic, sustainable method of planning that will not only be the key to the project’s success, but is likely to be one of its lasting legacies.

Dongtan will emerge as a city where energy consumption in buildings and transport is fully powered by renewables. It will embrace closed-loop recycling,where all waste is reused or recycled within the system. It will maximise production and use of local organic fresh food and it will be self sufficient in water supplies.

All the technology to make this possible is available now: the great innovation in Dongtan lies in bringing it all together and designing the city with sustainability as an all-encompassing integrating and guiding principle.

Planning an eco-city is an unknown, and undoubtedly the process that Arup has started with Dongtan will be improved on in future. One city on its own cannot solve China’s, or indeed the world’s,environmental problems.However,China is an incubator that might just determine for the entire human race whether sustainability is more than just a word.

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