170511 sponge cities absorb past

Sponge Cities Absorb The Past

11/05/2017

barrysays

Sponge City development concepts are all the rage, especially as being the solution to China’s continuing urban planning disasters. The alarm bells have been ringing for years, based on past experience through history, but nobody wanted to listen. Finally, old knowledge has been given a new lease of life through a modern pitch.

News: China to Boost "Sponge City" Program

WHERE DID IT ALL GO WRONG?

New York Central Park. Olmsted's Sponge of Manhattan (image: airport2park.org)

Flooded streets are becoming an all too familiar way of life for many of Asia’s urban population, where more than half of such residents live in flood plains and low-lying coastal zones, including in major cities such as Guangzhou, Ho Chi Minh, Bangkok, Manila, Jakarta, Dhaka and Kolkata. Recent years have witnessed increasingly severe and frequent flooding which is only going to intensify with ongoing climate change. Rapid urbanisation is massively exacerbating the climate problem however. By 2050 Asia’s urban population will have risen to about 64% and in China alone, there are at least 100 cities of more than 1 million residents. In India, 55% of the population is expected to be urban by 2050. Flooding is no longer just a problem for farmers living on flood-prone plains; water has become the nemesis of China’s 680 million urbanites, where rapidly created new city development has spread uncontrollably at the expense of agriculture, woodlands, streams and ponds. Development located without respect to land management, traditional knowledge or sufficient concern for the natural forces of nature.

Wuhan overwhelmed by flood, July, 2016 (image: Reuters)

Last year, the huge city of Wuhan on the Yangtse river floodplain and one of the most populous of Chinas cities, experienced turmoil from a super storm that resulted in multiple fatalities and the relocation of 80,000 residents.[1] Recently rated close to the foot of the Sustainability Index of 100 World Cities[2] but traditionally known as “the city of a hundred lakes” the chaos was just a small part of the week long flooding which killed more than 180 people nationally, affecting 32 million people across 26 provinces and led to losses of 50 billion yuan (about $7 billion) [3]. Such situations are now to be expected as commonplace. How did things get to this situation?

Traditionally, and for thousands of years, populations have located next to rivers. They are the lifeblood, facilitating trade, enabling agriculture and providing resources. However, past generations have always been smart enough to know not to build directly on the flood plain, generally selecting higher ground for development and retaining agriculture on vulnerable land.

Oklahoma City, a typical example of impermeable urban realms (image: pottstowntrees.org)

Modern cities, concrete caked and bitumen baked, have fallen foul of both the arrogance and ignorance of a society that has been led to believe that natural environmental balance is unimportant and can be overcome with new technology and engineered systems built to manage storm water, including underground drainage pipes, storage tanks and deep tunnel systems. Such systems are useful; however, they are expensive, inflexible and limited. They cannot replace the efficiency and balance of natural systems.

In the rush to develop more roads, homes, factories and shops, to feed the urbanisation frenzy, governments have turned a blind eye to that most basic concept of “developing in the right place,” and grabbed at the cheap, flat, agricultural flood land previously and deliberately left clear from development. It has been replaced with engineered, high-value, high-risk urban development. Not only is such development irresponsible, it has taken away the very land best suited to feeding the burgeoning urban population.

WISE OLD MEN

The Emerald Necklace Park System Boston (image: mauricio.carvalho)

Frederick Law Olmsted (image: olmsted.org)

Rewind to the last great period of urbanisation in the second half of the 19th Century. The new technologies of that time led to a massive leap in industrialisation, requiring a huge number of workers to come to the cities where relentless shifts required them to live close to the factories. In the United States, the population in cities such as Philadelphia, Boston and New York exploded and congestion, pollution, crime, and disease were prevalent problems. Theorists at this time began developing planning models to mitigate the problems caused by rapid urban growth and government grew quickly to understand the need and benefits of providing healthy environments for the working populations within the cities, to balance poor urban conditions. Central Park in Manhattan, Prospect Park in Brooklyn and the Emerald Necklace of parks in Boston, were at the centre of engineering solutions to control water and demonstrated Frederick Law Olmsted’s brilliant work as a “Landscape Architect” in integrating engineered green space at the heart of cities as a means to manage crippling drainage issues.

Back Bay Fens development area (image: Boston Public Library)

1882 Muddy River dredging. (image: muddyrivermoc.org)

In the 1870’s the Back Bay Fens in Boston was a tidal salt marsh that had become foul smelling and prone to flooding as the city developed around it. The challenge Olmsted faced was one of sanitary engineering: to provide a storage basin for storm water and to divert the sewage flowing into the Fens so the marsh could be restored to ecological health. Olmsted reshaped the area to form a meandering stream bordered by wide reaches of low-lying marsh, creating a new landscape carefully designed to look natural[4]. He linked the Fens with the rest of an integrated park network along the Muddy River known as “The Emerald Necklace” which was envisioned as a common ground to which all people could come for healthful relief from the noise, pollution, and overcrowding of urban life. He designed paths and parkways to link the parks into the surrounding burgeoning neighbourhoods.

Back Bay Fens under construction (image: Synthetic.landscapes)

Back Bay Fens 20 years later (image: Synthetic.landscapes)

It was around this time that the various planning professions were originated and that of Landscape Architecture arose through the advocacy of its pioneering father Frederick Law Olmsted. It continues to involve the systematic investigation and understanding of existing social and environmental systems in order to guide and adapt to future change. The scope of the profession involves site and development planning; stormwater management; environmental restoration; park and recreation planning; visual resource management and green infrastructure planning, all at varying scales of design, planning and management. It certainly is not garden design. The decision-making approaches to development that have guided landscape architecture for 150 years have always had “sustainability” at the core. It was always just considered as ‘standard thinking’. As the world leaps towards environmental crisis once again ‘sustainability’ is now however a marketable commodity.

Let’s skip to the world of post war Europe, rapidly rebuilding with housing programs and new towns. Our new visionary is the Scottish Landscape Architect and City Planner Ian McHarg. who during the 1950’s and 60’s, from his position at the University of Pennsylvania and as a national celebrity with his own TV talk show The House we Live In, pioneered the concept of ‘ecological planning’. His 1969 book Design with Nature continues to be one of the most widely celebrated books on landscape architecture and land-use planning.

Ian McHarg (image: AZ Quotes)

McHarg advocated an ecological sensibility that accepted the interconnected worlds of the human and the natural.

He advocated an ecological sensibility that accepted the interconnected worlds of the human and the natural, and sought to more fully and intelligently design human environments in concert with the conditions of setting, climate and environment; the true work of the Landscape Architect and in line with the rationale of Olmsted, who believed the goal wasn’t to make viewers see his work but to make them unaware of it. McHarg served on several important panels and commissions including the influential 1966 White House Commission on Conservation and Natural Beauty, in doing so befriending Ladybird Johnson and Laurence Rockefeller amongst other influential decision makers. He set his thinking in radical opposition to what he argued was the arrogant and destructive heritage of urban-industrial modernity, a style he described as "Dominate and Destroy."

SEOUL UNDERSTANDING

Changes in Seoul's urban environment Image: Seoul Solution

In learning from the past, what better reference could China take as example in terms of the impacts of rapid urbanisation as that which happened in the adjacent Republic of Korea during its economic development plan initiated in the late 1960s, following the Korean War.

Changes in Seoul's city areas and farmland areas (image: Seoul Solution)

The population of cities, and Seoul in particular, increased massively through industrialisation and unsurprisingly created many infrastructure, pollution and environmental problems affecting the everyday lives of the citizens. In the 1970s and ‘80s, developers moved from the built-up areas into the undeveloped low-lying areas for site and land development (Banpo, Jamsil, Cheonho, Amsa, Siheung, Gimpo, Seongsan, Shillim, Janghanpyeong, Guro, Mokdong, etc.). Not only was this a high-risk policy, the new areas were also developed without adequate consideration for storm water facilities, resulting in repeated flooding.

Basin and backwater flooding in Seoul (image: Seoul Solution)

Changes in Seoul's permeability (image: Seoul Solution)

The loss of natural grounds, green belt and farmland, in the city reduced the permeable green zones under which water could be recharged. The impervious surface expanded from 7.8% of a city of 2.5 million in 1962, to that of 47.7% of a city of 10 million by 2010. Surface water runoff from heavy rain ended up in the low-lying areas (11% (1962) → 52% (2010) [5]. There are 40,000 basement housing units located in the flood-prone low-lying areas of Seoul. As well as the problem of surface runoff from the massive volume of storm water flowing into these basements, the sewer pipes for basement housing are installed lower than the public sewage system. They back up and regurgitate horribly when it rains.

Economic loss brought by flood damage in Seoul (image: Seoul Solution)

After major flooding in 2010 and 2011, plans had to be established to invest heavily to change the city’s flood control measures, which previously had been focused on engineering facilities to control floods, to that of accepting the natural environmental situations and adjusting back to those, whilst being more prepared and responsive by involving the population working at the micro scale to minimize damage.

Changes in Seoul's land use (image: Seoul Solution)

Seoul adopted a water circulation system to restore natural water circulation and increase the amount of rainwater absorbed into the ground. The city has removed highways and opened up underground rivers, such as Cheonggyecheon. It has installed facilities that store and utilise rainwater, improved the permeability of roads and pavements, and empowered citizens to make use of rainwater. This type of new rainwater management is critical as it eases the burden on the existing sewage system and rainwater pumping stations, and helps the city to be more prepared for urban flooding. Seoul has had to transform its flood control policy to go beyond simple prevention to that of embracing the environmental, urban planning and transportation aspects, realising that the main elements that affect flood damage are a combination of rainfall, geography, land use, and the sewage system.

Status of Seoul City's Flooding Damage (image: Seoul Solution)

With climate change, torrential downpours will continue to intensify and become more frequent worldwide. It is crucial that urban districts everywhere are structurally well-planned from the beginning, so as to ensure that surface water runoff can be slowed, stored and gradually released without causing flooding, just as Olmsted achieved in the 19th Century. How can such a basic and traditional understanding have been so totally ignored by governments, planners and engineers all the way into the 21st Century?

A NEW SPIN

Flood risk mapping for China (image: China Meteorological Administration)

In September 2015, the China government rubber-stamped the development of 16 model “sponge cities” an ecologically friendly alternative to the engineered urban solutions of modern China. These will require infrastructure retrofits of cites such as Xixian New Area in the north, with about 500,000 people, to Chongqing in the south, with a population of 10 million. Each city will receive 400 million RMB ($63 million) per year for three years to implement projects.

Traditionally, Chinese cities handled water well, in both their location and disposition, especially those developed in the Yangtse river flood plain. Land stewardship, developed over thousands of years and based on the learnings through trial and error, enabled people to locate in safe places, keeping soil from eroding and diverting water for irrigation. But in the economic land grab of the last 30 years such knowledge was jettisoned for powerful engineering in the form of dams, levees, gates and tunnels, resulting in massive flood problems. So has China finally woken up to the Seoul factor or is it already too late?

As Landscape Architects, we have not been silent in our worldwide condemnation of the ongoing development led approach, however as a small profession, lacking influence, we have typically been side-lined into cosmetic greening treatments under engineering and architectural dominance or “superficial embellishment” as the Landscape Architect Hideo Sasaki once warned. This has been particularly true in China where there is little formalised planning education and the profession remains unregulated and unaccredited.Yet it was only after the Chinese president Xi Jinping suggested cities “should be like sponges” that the term suddenly became trendy among Architects, Engineers, and Urban Planners.

Qunli Stormwater Wetland Park, Harbin by Kongjian Yu (image: Turenscape)

Kongjian Yu, the Dean of Peking University’s College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, and currently the pre-eminent figure in the landscape planning profession in China has been successful in showcasing the standard ‘sustainable’ approach of Landscape Architects. He has for some decades been a particularly conspicuous exponent of the socio-ecological planning approach of fellow Harvard Graduate School of Design old boy McHarg, which he outlined first in his thesis “Security Patterns in Landscape Planning: with a Case in South China" It may now be that his lobbying and the mantra of McHarg is finally paying off and that government, developers and planners in China are finally waking up to the massive urban problems generated through irrational and unbalanced development over the last two decades. For that Yu deserves a medal!

Qunli Stormwater Wetland Park, Harbin by Kongjian Yu (image: Asla.org)

Landscape Architects are uniquely skilled to plan and lead urbanisation efforts over the next critical decade of our world development. Our all-round understanding of the balance of social, environmental and economic processes means that we are needed at the roots of the decision-making tree and not as its blossom. It’s time for Landscape Architects to step out of their professional comfort zones and fully realise their societal value by working in other sectors; Leading in government, driving business, forming education and delivering healthcare. We need to see their knowledge incorporated in the boardrooms of multinational companies, integrated through upper government, leading as city mayors and disseminated to the masses through entertainment and media.

Olmsted Park Boston 2015, the hidden hand of man (image: Bikeable)

The profession originated and grew out of the need to solve urbanisation crises of the past; during western industrialisation and through post war urbanisation. The profession’s successful visionaries of those times were leaders and orators able to convince decision makers of the value their scientific and balanced approaches.
In this new age of crisis and change its no longer business as usual. It’s time to listen carefully once again to Landscape Architects.

Barry Wilson is a Landscape Architect, urbanist and university lecturer. His practice, Barry Wilson Project Initiatives, has been tackling urbanisation issues in Hong Kong and China for over 20 years. (www.initiatives.com.hk).

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Reference:
[1] http://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_1494657
[2]
2016 Arcadis Sustainable
Cities Index ranks 100 global
cities on three dimensions of
sustainability: people, planet and profit.
[3]   http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-36721514
[4]   http://www.muddyrivermmoc.org/restoring-olmsteds-vision/
[5]   https://seoulsolution.kr/en/content/seoul%E2%80%99s-flood-control-policy