as the world’s first zero-carbon city, it may in fact remain just that – a concept. Its GHG-free status has also been abandoned, with the design manager Chris Wan arguing, “We are not going to try to shoehorn renewable energy into the city just to justify a definition created within a boundary. As of today, it’s not a net-zero future[,] it’s about 50 per cent.”39
Currently, the world’s only sustainable ghost town, Masdar houses only students studying sustainability at the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, and it is another example of a well-intentioned but overly ambitious project that did not account for the overlap between technology and the political and economic climate that surrounds that innovation.
Neom, Saudi Arabia
Neom is a planned, cross-border, smart city in the Tabuk province of northwestern Saudi Arabia. What can Neom learn from Dongtan and Masdar that can save it from partial construction and untimely abandonment by its government? How can it become a fully functioning smart city and a working model for a sustainable city?
First of all, it actually has to get people to live there. We saw with Dongtan how the individual citizen was not included in the city planning, and Masdar houses only the students at its university. Neom, on the other hand, plans not only to be a smart city but also to function as a desirable tourist location, a positive investment in regards to the city’s future population and economic growth. These smart eco-cities cannot just rely on a novelty factor of being “the first” or “the only” sustainable city in the world. People are what make a city – without them it is just an ambitious project. People will make the difference between success and failure for Neom.
These eco-city experiments show us the need to intertwine the people and the political landscape in the project. We have seen examples of new housing being built for inhabitants of favelas in Rio and townships in South Africa only to discover that they did not want to move. It is dangerous to predict how people want to live their lives. Perhaps investment in new improved services in the existing setup would be more acceptable or provision of transport infrastructure, like the cable car in Medellin, to allow those communities to access the job market. This gives them choice.
Peter Hall40 looks at the inconclusive story of London’s strategy to find a new airport, which after 40 years is no nearer resolution. This is a lesson in adopting big ideas, and one that Jane Jacobs warned those who attempted drastic surgery on the city. Small, she believed, was the future. Cities should be nurtured not traumatized.
Christchurch, New Zealand
In 2011, a violent earthquake killed 181 people in New Zealand’s second largest city – Christchurch. On top of that, thousands were made homeless, and an area that was four times bigger than London’s Hyde Park was deemed unhabitable.41 Christchurch is still recovering and rebuilding from this natural disaster and is aesthetically and spiritually a completely different city to what it once was. With new constructions, gravel quadrants replacing multistorey buildings, and others that are still even boarded up, many of the city’s inhabitants can no longer remember what it once looked like. A new Christchurch has been born.
In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, the central government triaged the most important parts of a functioning city – roads and bridges had been destroyed, silt clogged up the sewage system, and powerlines were down. The government’s main response was to establish a single body, the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA), which was to be solely responsible for managing the rebuild.42 This single-purpose organization was tasked with the demolition of buildings and residential homes, with almost 8,000 of the area’s homes “red zoned”, meaning the land was so badly damaged it was unlikely it could ever be built on again.43 Within the space of a year, the population of the greater Christchurch area declined by 9,200, 2% of its total population, due to home loss.44 The city’s mayor, Lianne Dalziel, ushered in a new era of governance that focused on empowering community organizations to do things for themselves in a sort of grassroots-based resilience project.
Thus began the construction of a new Christchurch. CERA came up with the city’s first urban blueprint plan by taking more than 100,000 ideas from the local community, and a team of local and international architects and designers spearheaded a super-project which involves 70 projects being constructed over the next 20 years or so.45 The project imagines a central business district of low-rise buildings, a green frame and corridor of parkland, environmentally sensitive transport including a light rail network, pedestrian broad walks, and cycle lanes. The local government also saw the opportunity to improve Christchurch’s economic infrastructure, with pre-earthquake data telling them that the city’s retail areas were not competing well against the rise of shopping malls.
Christchurch is an example of efficient and vision-led local government action. We hear all too often of the failure of local and national governments to deal effectively with these disasters, with many agencies not funded adequately and consequently destroying all hope of a quick response.
When the loss of life is apparent and a new path must be forged, local governments are very effective at embracing the community and moving forward.
Conclusion
The purpose of this chapter is to show there is a precedence for everything we need to achieve in solving the climate crisis. We have overcome catastrophic disasters throughout history, and we have emerged and rebuilt better each time.
The lessons from Uruk, Mesopotamia, Memphis (Ancient Egypt), Rome, Venice, 1665 London, Jerusalem, modern-day London, the eco-cities, and Christchurch are lessons learned at the time and carried forward into the new cities formed around them. The modern city is a product of all these lessons, but with pressures of unprecedented urbanization and the need for transformation to address the climate crisis they once again have to rebuild to a new and higher standard.
While the housing problem of 1784 Florence shows us that the problems of today have not changed, it is clear that the scale of the problems has, and, therefore, so too have the consequences. This is our challenge.
Notes
1 1 La Citta di Firenze, Archivio Storico. https://cultura.comune.fi.it.
2 2 Hall, Sir P., 1998. Cities in Civilization. Pantheon, New York.
3 3 Jacobs, J., 1969. The Economy of Cities. Random House, New York.
4 4 https://www.ancient.eu/gilgamesh.
5 5 https://www.ancient.eu/uruk.
6 6 Ibid.
7 7 https://staff.cdms.westernsydney.edu.au/~anton/Research/Uruk_Project/history.htm.
8 8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesopotamia.
9 9 Ibid.
10 10 https://www.laits.utexas.edu/cairo/history/ancient/ancient.html.
11 11 https://www.history.co.uk/shows/ancient-top-10/articles/10-things-the-ancient-egyptians-gave-us.
