2019 Texans accept declared state of emergency and pledge to limit each family to only three 4WDs.
2020 Australian PM rides bike to work. Gets there twenty minutes early.
2024 Government finally removes tax concessions on 4WD purchases.
5. The Future of Cities – More than Half the World’s Population?
History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
– Abba Eban, Israeli statesmen,
Vienna is one of my favourite cities. I grew up there. It is small, elegant and, like the old Sydney suburb of Balmain, shows organic growth-old parts remain and flourish amid the new. Green vistas are fresh alongside the venerable buildings. Private mansions mix with terraces and office blocks; the history is visible, and you can see how the future will be able to mesh into the spaces available.
Harry Seidler used to make much of this. He would show pictures of the heart of Vienna, near the great St Stephen’s Cathedral, where ancient structures stand in harmonious juxtaposition with spanking fresh shining ones. The mix of old and new is possible, he insisted;
Future Perfect you don’t need to quarantine the historic. (Federation Square in Melbourne does this superbly.) Nor does modern housing require a scorched-earth policy, a start from ground zero.
How many times have you looked down from a plane and seen fresh clover-shaped scars where new roads outline the shapes of instant suburbs being prepared, as if homes are about to land intact from the sky, delivered by ET? Kit towns. When you walk through them after they are finished, they seem strangely dehumanised and lonely places.
The 1960s and ‘70s were notorious for this kind of development. It was as if any kind of housing would do-a legacy from the Second World War, when shelter at all costs was required. In the 21st century we face greater simultaneous challenges: vast populations, water shortages, killer pollution and climate change. This year, according to the United Nations, more people will live in cities than in countryside: three billion of us squashed into barely 2 per cent of the earth’s surface.
One of the paradoxes of this movement of the poor in search of food and work is that the conurbations have spread over the best agricultural land. Towns were established long ago next to fertile fields and good water; now concrete has covered them in the quest for lebensraum. Vast Dickensian shantytowns and slums ring the great cities of South America, Asia and Africa. What answers has science got to this historic challenge? Maybe Vienna has a few. That is where the UN Population Division has offices, on the city’s outskirts by a pine forest, housed in a modernised palace. That is where, in 1996, their head demographer assured me that the world population will grow by 33 per cent, to nine billion, but then plateau and stabilise by about 2060.
So, how to combine the old with the new, as symbolised by those rustic UN offices and by Vienna itself? New Scientist magazine summed up the answer this way in an editorial in June 2006: ‘Greens are prone to idealising the past. They instinctively look back to a pre-industrial pastoral idyll, or to the age of hunter-gatherers living in harmony with their environment. In this view, urbanisation and the rise of the mega-city are harbingers of doom. City dwellers, after all, make up only half of the world’s population but consume three quarters of the resources and generate three quarters of its pollution.’ The magazine notes all the urban experiments from China to Australia, and counsels: ‘This is the challenge environmentalists should embrace. The good news is that cities, far from being environmental basket cases, are uniquely well-equipped for the task.’
There are schemes to bring the country into town: urban forests, rooftop gardens which spread down the walls of tall buildings (incidentally cutting the heating and cooling bills by 20 per cent); rivers and streams flowing through channels in streets (as they do traditionally in Japanese villages); built-in self-sufficiency in water and power via tanks and solar collectors; the return of city allotments, like those where granddads once grew fresh veg; car-free zones, with electronic transport and space-age bikes.
Many of these additions have hidden costs. The roof gardens and forests will require more concrete and structural support, for example. But all this is a matter of finetuning, like many aspects of green engineering, from biofuels to hydrogen power. We need to find out the limits of what works and keep within them. But the potential is huge. The current waste is staggering. London is four times more profligate with power than it need be. Most of this energy is lost by the city’s buildings and could be fixed using existing technology. (Airconditioning, which may cost more in power than a city’s cars, can now be designed into a new building, and be essentially free). Add the energy cost of congestion, now successfully being tackled by Ken Livingstone’s congestion charge, and the figure would probably double: you could make London, and presumably most Australian cities, eight times more energy efficient today.
The ABC’s Sydney headquarters, where I work, is a choice example. The older part is now seventeen years old. The recently added tower is about four. Despite this newness, you see many flagrant signs of bodge as you walk around. After even moderate rain you will find from ten to fifteen buckets placed on the expanse of the third floor to catch torrents coming through the glass-and-steel roof. A little way along is the grand new library. Fifty-seven powerful lamps are cantilevered to shine their hot illumination through the glass ceiling skywards, as if trying to bleach the clouds. I asked the folk working there whether they were puzzled by this weird and wasteful engineering, but they said they hadn’t even noticed it.
As we wrestle with stories about the wide brown, increasingly desiccated land, I still note the incessant automatic flushing of the ABC men’s toilets (we must have 70 or 80) pouring drinking water into the pissoirs every five minutes morning, noon and night. It’s nuts. (Am I the only one, incidentally, to be gobsmacked by the public infatuation with bottled water? Not only would the plastic bottles America discards every hour reach ‘all the way to the moon’, but the money we’re prepared to squander on ‘spring’ water-which we can’t differentiate from the tap variety-beggars belief. In 2005, Sydneysiders were challenged to assess the cost of two displays of water set up in Martin Place: a full 18,000-L rain tank versus the equivalent in bottles. The tank water cost $21.60, the bottles $29,880!)
I was delighted to hear that one of the first actions of our new ABC CEO, Mark Scott, was to bring in energy consultant Gavin Gilchrist. First, he asked Mark whether he really needed 28 lights on in his office in the middle of a bright summer’s day; would he be inclined to do the same at home? Then Gavin revealed that most firms would save 30-40 per cent on their energy bills just by applying bog-ordinary commonsense measures. (Now the ABC has announced it will introduce water-free urinals, two-sided printing and power-saving adjustments to electronic equipment. We are under way, at last!)
All these ideas, and more, were showcased in Brisbane at the end of July 2006, when five Nobel laureates, including an exuberant Mikhail Gorbachev, and scores of experts on the urban challenge, attended the Earth Dialogues. Much discussion was idealistic and ranged from global concerns to parochial gripes about Queensland ’s dams and tunnels.