Posts

Wooden skyscrapers could be the future of cities around the world

The development of engineered timber could herald a new era of eco-friendly ‘plyscrapers’. Christchurch welcomed its first multistorey timber structure this year, there are plans for Vancouver, and the talk is China could follow.

When American engineer William Le Baron Jenney designed the world’s first skyscraper in Chicago in 1884, no one believed in his unconventional technologies. His lightweight steel frame relieved a structure of its heavy masonry shackles, enabling it to soar to new heights. Perplexed by this trade-in of solid brick for a spindly steel skeleton, Chicago inspectors paused the construction of the Home Insurance Building until they were certain it was structurally sound.

Of course, Jenney’s revolutionary edifice provided a blueprint for city skylines across the world. By 2011, China was reckoned to be topping off a new skyscraper (500ft or taller) every five days, reaching a total of 800 by 2016. Toronto, now North America’s fourth largest city, currently has 130 high-rise construction projects under way.

Chicago's Home Insurance Building, widely considered to be the world's first modern skyscraper.

Chicago’s Home Insurance Building, widely considered to be the world’s first modern skyscraper. Photograph: Chicago History Museum/Getty Images

As a result, buildings are slowly choking the atmosphere. In Britain, where the construction industry accounts for almost7% of the economy (including 10% of total employment),47% of greenhouse gas emissions are generated from buildings, while 10% of CO2 emissions come from construction materials. Furthermore, 20% of the materials used on the average building site end up in a skip.

So just as Jenney’s steel-frame solved the issue of the dense, stunted buildings in the 19th century, architects and engineers are now seeking new ways of building taller and faster without having such a drastic impact on the environment. And that has seen them revisit the most basic building material of them all: wood.

Although wood in its raw form could not compete with Jenney’s steel-frame wonder, a type of super-plywood has been developed to step up to the challenge. By gluing layers of low-grade softwood together to create timber panels, today’s “engineered timber” is more akin to Ikea flat-packed furniture than traditional sawn lumber, and offers the prospect of a new era of eco-friendly “plyscrapers”.

For Vancouver-based architect Michael Green, the sky is the limit for wooden buildings. While nearing completion of the University of Northern British Columbia’s Wood Innovation and Design Centre in Prince George, Green’s practice, MGA, has also drawn up plans for a 30-storey, sun-grown tower for downtown Vancouver.

If built, Green’s vision would be easily the world’s tallest wooden building, soaring past the current contenders – London’s Stadthaus at nine storeys, and the 10-storey Forte Building in Melbourne. But that’s not the main motivation, according to MGA associate Carla Smith. “To be honest, it’s not like we really care about being the tallest,” she says. “We really do see a wooden future for cities, and our aim is to get others to jump on board too.”

Arts & Media Building in Christchurch, New Zealand.

The Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology arts and media building under construction in Nelson, New Zealand

Green is giving away his hefty, 200-page instruction manual, The Case for Tall Wood Buildings, free of charge. He hopes it will inspire architects and engineers to branch out beyond their concrete and steel confinements, and embrace a material that sequesters carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, holding it captive during its growth and lifetime in a structure – one tonne of CO2 per cubic metre of wood. To put that in context, while a 20-storey wooden building sequesters about 3,100 tonnes of carbon, the equivalent-sized concrete building pumps out 1,200 tonnes. That net difference of 4,300 tonnes is the equivalent of removing 900 cars from the city for a year.

But while timber advocates such as Green hope to to sow the seeds of change in the minds of policymakers worldwide, building regulations still put a low-rise lid on the height of timber buildings. This is based on wood’s historic reputation as kindling for a great city fire: in London, Chicago and San Francisco (to name just a few), roaring fires have ravaged city streets, wiping out great swathes of grand architecture and razing urban history to the ground. But while the classic timber-framed city of 1870s Chicago was gone in an instant, today’s engineered timber develops a protective charring layer that maintains structural integrity and burns very predictably – unlike steel, which warps under the intense heat.

The rigidity of mass timber panels has tended to restrict architects to a “house of cards” design, whereby panels are slotted together and stacked on top of one another in repetitive patterns. But new innovations are coming thick and fast: theUSDA recently announced a $2m investment for wood innovation, and in the previously scorched city of Chicago, mega-firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrillpublished a study that re-imagines the 42-storey Dewitt Chestnut apartment block as a timber tower. In Europe, a 14-storey wooden building is currently under construction in Bergen, Norway, with another eight-storey structure on its way up in Dornbirn, Austria – the prototype for a 20-storey plyscraper designed by the global engineering firm Arup.

 

Arts & Media building in Christchurch, New Zealand

The finished NMIT arts and media building

One other important breakthrough came in British Columbia, a Canadian province half-covered in forest. Since 1996, more than 16m hectares have been destroyed by North America’s native mountain pine beetle, which releases a blue-staining fungus into the wood, halting the flow of nutrients and water and the killing the tree.

The province faced the prospect of billions of these dead lodgepole pinestriggering a huge release of carbon dioxide – until a means of using this undesirable blue-stained lumber for building was realised. British Columbia promotes its use through the Wood First Act, passed in 2009, which requires all new, publicly financed construction projects to first consider wood as the primary building material.

The most prominent example is Vancouver’s 2010 Winter Olympic ice rink, the Richmond Oval, which features massive glued-laminated timber arches of beetle-ravaged wood. Building regulations are now loosening up in Canada, reflecting the recent successes of the country’s wood use. Last month, Ontario raised the cap on timber structures from four storeys to six, just as British Columbia did in 2009.

But perhaps the most promising realisation of wood’s worth is in New Zealand, where the violent earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 left almost one third of the Christchurch’s buildings – including 220 heritage sites – up for demolition. Almost four years on, the city’s grand rebuild has begun, and wood has taken a step into the spotlight due to its durability in high-seismic activity zones. The “new” Christchurch, as outlined in the Central Recovery Plan, is proposed to be a low-rise, “greener, more attractive” city costing around NZ$40bn (£19bn), almost 20% of the country’s annual GDP.

 

Detail of the Merritt building in Christchurch, New Zealand.

A detail of the Merritt building in Christchurch’s central business district Photograph: PR

 

Andrew Buchanan, professor of timber design at the University of Canterbury, sees a growing interest in the use of wood in Christchurch’s rebuild. “When it first happened, people were scared of concrete and masonry buildings,” he says. “Wood was seen as a very desirable and very safe alternative.”

Earlier this year, Christchurch welcomed its first post-earthquake, multistorey timber structure – the Merritt building in the city’s central business district. The structure uses a “post-tension” technology – the brainchild of Buchanan and his colleagues – where timber is lashed together with steel tendons that act like rubber bands, allowing the building to snap back into place following any seismic movement. And recently, the Southern Hemisphere’s first engineered timber factory opened up in Nelson, producing timber panels for flat-pack cities across the globe.

In China, Arup is currently working to educate engineers on the use of wood. With even a superfirm like SOM – the architects behind One World Trade Centerand the Burj Khalifa – considering using of wood for high-rise construction, the industry finally appears ready to grasp its full potential.

Several of SOM’s buildings are in Chinese cities (the 71-storey Pearl River Building in Guangzhou, and the 88-storey Jin Mao in Shanghai, for example), so perhaps their Timber Tower could take root there too? “Judging from the speed that the Chinese usually adopt new technologies,” says Arup director Tristram Carfrae, “this really won’t take very long!”

This article was amended on Monday 6 October 2014. The NMIT arts and media building is in Nelson, not Christchurch

,

Can China’s 13th Five-Year Plan deliver more sustainable cities?

Article by He Quandong

China’s next five-year plan must turn the country’s urbanization ambitions into concrete, implementable measures, says the Energy Foundation’s He Dongquan

article image

Better public transport is likely to be a priority in China’s 13th Five-Year Plan (Image by Yuxuan Wang shows Beijing’s central business district)

As China’s policymakers mull the contents of the country’s next Five-Year Plan, chinadialogue asks a range of contributors what they would like to see in the development blueprint.

In March China published a new urbanisation plan for 2014 to 2020. How this vision is implemented through the 13th Five-Year Plan will determine what China’s cities look like in the years ahead.

There are a number of points in the plan worth noting.

The overall approach to sustainable cities is excellent. It calls for urban space to be optimised through public transport, high-capacity infrastructure and mixed-use development. These ideas are closely linked to China’s energy-saving and emissions-reduction needs.

New concepts include: transport-oriented development, mixed communities,urban growth boundaries and intensive urban development. These point towards fresh approaches to city building as planners seek to waste less on unnecessary infrastructure, shift patterns of behaviour, introduce systems to support public transport and change the emissions status-quo.

As well as greater use of low-carbon technology, new energy systems, smart cities and energy and emissions saving, the new plan calls for industrial land to be reallocated to encourage the circular economy. This recognises that, as China has urbanised, the efficiency of land-use has been low.

Also download our special journal: Reimagining China’s cities

Next we need to wait and see how the 13th Five-Year Plan turns these ambitions into concrete policies and implementable measures, and how it coordinates action across different government departments.

Another change is a new emphasis on the role of small cities. In the past, Chinese urbanisation policy looked to major hubs, but now the government recognises that a spread of smaller cities is needed to resolve economic and social issues. This will require changes in land ownership, government finance and taxation and the hukou system, in order to allow for a new phase of urbanisation, distinct from a past model dependent on GDP growth and government land sales.

The document also stresses that China’s urbanisation plans must be both feasible and properly enforced. Planning laws introduced in the past decade have supported the idea of “three plans in one”. This is the idea that content common to economic and social planning, urban planning and land-use planning should be carried out via a single process. The hope is that this will produce more scientific and feasible proposals which, crucially, are more likely to get implemented. In line with this approach, the regional plans proposed in this new document will include the housing authorities, the development and reform authorities and land authorities – going much further than the existing system run by the housing ministry.

I expect at the overall level the 13th Five-Year Plan will focus on solving issues faced by migrant workers, the hukou system, and coordination across different planning systems. Urban low-carbon development is likely to be covered at the level of specific plans, with the focus being coordination across different sectors.

The combined planning mentioned above is mainly happening at the local level: coordination mechanisms between the Ministry of Land, Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Housing are not yet in place. If we want better quality planning then the 13th Five-Year Plan needs to resolve this issue.

This article was originally published in China Dialogue

,

THE BUSINESS OF URBANIZATION IN CHINA

image

The government is preparing to throw billions into urbanization in China, but has it thought through the hardware challenges? Perhaps the most striking way to take in China’s startling urbanization is to sit in front of a computer and click through to Google’s Earth Engine. A search for Shanghai on the website brings up time-lapsed images of the city from orbit. In 1984, when the series began, Shanghai was a grey smudge in the middle of verdant countryside alongside a brown streak—the Yangtze River.

Press play and that smudge spreads like an ink stain, with downtown Shanghai becoming darker and the etched lines of Pudong International Airport easily visible. By 2012, the grey patchwork has sprawled out in every direction to leave just fragments of greenery. By 2015, Shanghai will reportedly host the second-tallest building in the world, with construction of the steel titan continuing at a feverish pace in the city’s financial district.

Shanghai’s mushrooming growth is part of the largest urbanization story in human history. The process is transforming China, and in some ways, has only just begun. By 2030, China’s cities will be home to roughly one billion people—three times the current population of the US.

When China began its reform and opening processes in the late 1970s, the country was an overwhelmingly rural one. Back then, with more than 80% living in the countryside, it was the backwaters that supplied most of China’s leaders, who sprung from peasant backgrounds. Since then China has been transformed. From the 1970s up until the end of 2011, when half of China’s population lived in cities, around 500 million people have added to China’s urban population in the last three years—and the process continues to happen at a terrific rate.

Beijing regards urbanization as the next step in sustaining China’s economic miracle. The push from farm to city will serve as the biggest lever for the country’s economic growth, helping to modernize and transform the country from an investment-driven economy to one that is consumer-driven, according to top government leaders and independent economists.

China’s urbanization drive to date has wrought severe social and environmental problems though, and a new approach is needed. Industries that are key to the process, such as construction, have thus far tooled themselves to deliver quantity over quality, raising the question: Can China actually build the ‘new China’?

THE MASTER PLAN

Answering this fundamental question in the affirmative, Beijing mapped out the next phase of that shift from countryside to city in March of this year. China’s long-awaited urbanization plan running from this year through to 2020 is not lacking in ambition or superlatives. The eye-catching headline is that the government aims to raise the rate of urbanization in the world’s most populated country by roughly a percentage point every year, from 52.5% at present to approximately 60% inside seven years.

The bolder portion of the plan will confer former rural residents who are currently living in cities the same benefits and rights that urban dwellers enjoy. By granting urban residency permits, which are China’s internal passports and better known as hukou. This move could transform the lives of up to 160 million migrants, as it will enable them to access basic services and social welfare. In doing so, authorities anticipate the hukou urbanization rate will surge from just over 35% in 2012 to 45% in 2020—a faster increase than the previous decade. To cater to this huge influx of up to 260 million people, planning officials have envisaged 21 mega regions nationwide to harbor the urban population.

The previous phases of the urban operating model had emphasized the ‘hardware’ of city building—roads, railways, airports, and so on. This approach led local officials to fixate on the size of the city—as this sets the boundaries on urban versus rural population— without thoughtful consideration and planning to ensure effective land usage. Senior officials discussing urbanization in the past typically took it as carte blanche for “another round of infrastructure spending, more steel, more cement, more building, more money, and more investment”, says Qinwei Wang, Chief China Economist for Capital Economics in London.

That fixation came at the expense of ‘soft’ infrastructure—services to assist the urbanizing population, such as schools and hospitals. That is set to change under the plan. Planning authorities this time have vowed to focus on the people populating those urban areas for the next phase, otherwise known as ‘a new type of urbanization’. “What is new urbanization? How does it differ to China’s last periods of urbanization where they brought 500 million citizens from countryside to cities? I think that had been an era of focus on hardware— transport infrastructure, getting roads, buildings, bridges, and so on—correctly invested into, and now it shifts toward… how to put more livability around China’s urbanization,” says David Frey, Partner at KPMG’s Global China Practice and country head of the consultancy’s Cities Global Center of Excellence.

“China would fail in its urbanization if it simply displaced people from rural to urban,” says Frey. Recognizing such, Beijing intends to build more extensive urban public transport systems—especially in large cities—and a national rail and road network to connect smaller cities and townships. It also aims to increase water and waste treatment ratios—particularly outside of large cities—while expanding broadband internet coverage, increasing the use of cleaner-burning natural gas in place of dirty coal in cities, and more district heating in the north to replace household coal-fired boilers. A ‘people-centric’ urbanization in China also means theoretically greater spending on social welfare, hopefully to boost consumption of services.

image

BOTTOM-UP+TOP-DOWN

The plan sticks with China’s model of top-down oversight that encouraged bottom-up migration. Migrants moved of their own accord, seeking a better life in cities that were in desperate need of workers as they modernized, similar to how urbanization proceeded elsewhere. There had been a huge impediment to the flow of people from the countryside into cities due to the restrictive hukou system, and until Deng Xiaoping came onto the scene, there were tight restrictions on labor mobility.

At the same time, the role of the state runs deep in urbanization, in contrast with how the process has been largely organic elsewhere. The country’s rapid phase of urbanization, especially in the last 20 years, has been driven by strong government initiative at the central and local levels. “In other places, urbanization just happens,” says Frey. “It’s an economic phenomenon that is a result, not a plan.” City governments welcomed the influx of workers, as they had decided the maintenance of economic growth in their administrations hinged on rapid urbanization—in other words, a building binge on infrastructure.

China’s command over the urbanization process stands in stark comparison with the efforts of the world’s second-largest emerging economy. As recently as 1987, India was more urban than China—as a quarter of the population lived in cities, compared with China’s 24% according to data from the World Bank. But China’s pace of urbanization overtook India’s toward the end of the 1990s and raced ahead. More than half of Chinese citizens were urbanized in 2012, compared with less than a third in India. Experts with McKinsey have attributed the overtaking to Beijing’s carefully shaped approach to urban transformation, while New Delhi has been less hands-on.

“If you were to check with urban planners in any economy today, they would tell you that, in fact, the best urbanization—the most optimized urbanization—actually does occur with more planning,” says Frey. Planning that involves much weighing of what to mimic and what not to mimic in other nations’ urbanization models. “In China, when it’s foreign expertise they need the most, they’re not afraid to rush up and get in,” says Kent Zaitlik, Business Development Director of sustainable sourcing and solutions company BEE in Shanghai. “That’s at the helm of what makes China so great, that they’re able to incorporate various learnings from around the world, and then incorporate those insights and techniques into whatever strategy they want to achieve.”

The top-down approach has arguably been vindicated in the relative absence of illegal slums and informal settlements in urban China, unlike other countries that have recently undergone some form of urbanization, such as India, Brazil and Mexico.

“China does not want the type of urbanization like in Latin America, where people moved to urban areas with no jobs and became unemployed and a burden to society,” says Wang from Capital Economics.

Although China’s urbanization has been impressive, it has impressed because of the unprecedented geographical scale on which it is occurring. Not everything has gone according to plan and evidence of China’s unbalanced urbanization has manifested in other ways. “The flaws in the previous model, in which urban construction mostly relied on land sales and fiscal revenue, have emerged in recent years, and the model is unsustainable,” warned Finance Vice Minister Wang Bao’an on the unveiling of the new plan in mid-March.

Spatial urbanization has happened at a much faster pace than the rate of urban population growth—which since the late 1970s has been slower than other countries—encouraged by local governments that seized rural land and sold it to developers to build residential properties, office buildings and industrial parks. Consequently increase in urban land under construction expanded quicker than urban growth, at around 90% versus 52% from 1990-2000, and 83% over 45% in the next decade, according to data from the Ministry of Housing and Rural Development (MOHURD). Between 2000 and 2010, the ratio of urbanization of land to urbanization of population was 1.85, far above the international standard of 1.12 and leading to urban sprawl and the phenomenon of ghost towns.

image

BUILDING A NEW CHINA

China’s new style of urbanization envisages half of the new buildings put up by the year 2020 to be ‘green’, compared with just 2% in 2012. It also takes aim at the hot-button issue of chronic smog hanging over Chinese cities, calling for more than 60% of cities to have air quality that meets national standards (particulate matter 2.5 rating between 35 and 75 depending on the location) by 2020, whereas environmental official announced in March that only three of 74 surveyed cities that met with national standards.

The sweeping scale of that mandate evokes skepticism regarding China’s technical capacity to actually carry it out.

My main concern is with their engineering capacity, with being able to implement some of the things they want to implement,” says Zaitlik from BEE. “I don’t think they really have a firm grasp of some of the engineering feats that need to be taken into account to incorporate some of the green technologies they want to use.”

For instance, Zaitlik pointed to heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) design as a particular challenge. “Design of a HVAC system is what’s most important” to green building development, says Zaitlik, as it determines energy efficiency, indoor air quality and comfort. The multinational firms that BEE works with typically have the skill set to design sophisticated HVAC systems, but for Chinese firms, “it’s a different story because their engineering team probably does not have the capability to incorporate some of those technologies from abroad,” he says. “That is a different kind of thinking that China will almost need a crash course in. That’s what’s difficult.”

Frey from KPMG concurs. “That’s not something you just flip a switch on,” he says. What Frey expects to happen is progressive and talented individuals seizing the initiative in certain cities, with their efforts eventually gaining traction and then replicated across the country over time.

He also points out that developed economies, in their own transformational programs, have also struggled with fostering green development. “No country, no area, no region really has a lock on what that path is, [but] what China has shown is that when it sets its mind to something, it’s pretty good at figuring out how to execute.”

But the industry is plagued with short-termism and is beholden to maximizing profits and lowering building costs—with little consideration for the building’s lifecycle, the environment or the health of the occupants. “They’ve been building like this for years and it’s all about having results, about who brings up the building [the quickest] wins,” says Zaitlik.

He adds that one of the key reasons why the entire lifecycle of a building is not given proper attention in China is because developers run the show. “Developers don’t really care about the whole life of the building. They just want to get in and get out, as soon as possible. There’re no rules or regulations, or incentives for them really to actually try to go forth and make sure that this building is energy efficient.”

Part of the solution may lie in China’s green building certification, the Green Building Design Label, also known as Three Star. Pushed out by the Ministry of Construction in 2006, it is similar but newer than its Western counterpart Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) and consists of a set of evaluation standards for rating green building sustainability. MOHURD doles out financial subsidies under the scheme on a-per square meter basis, with up to RMB 250 available. Zaitlik says that if adhered to it could grow green constructions quickly, but clearly defining green is crucial.

If they don’t really… solidify what the meaning of green is, and also have a rigorous process in place to actually show the efficacy of what they’re developing, then it will be a lot of lost money and not much to gain further down the road.” Frey argues that developers will ultimately have to act out of sheer necessity, noting some developers are already awarded projects based on their ability to differentiate with a set of eco-standards.

Some of China’s largest developers are already well down this path, snapping up eco-conscious expertise and knowhow as they look toward the future, according to Frey. Smaller developers are also getting involved by tapping consultancies and institutions like the China Greentech Initiative—a collaboration of greentech firms, government agencies and non-profit organizations that promote greentech solutions.

THE ENVIRONMENTAL BRINKS

In addition to the negative environmental impact of urbanization, social problems in addition are nothing to sneer at. The majority of urban population additions have contributed little to increased spending and consumption growth. Migrants will typically save their money to compensate for the lack of access to social benefits, rendering them not much better off than when living in the countryside in some cases.

From these complications arise vexing questions: is urbanization really the answer or are there alternative options for elevating the quality of life for rural populations? Views are split.

Most certainly,” says Rena Singer from the Seattle-based Landesa Rural Development Institute, when asked if an economy can be considered ‘developed’and ‘rural’. “Developed refers to standard of living, not place of living,” she says.

Conversely, Frey says a high rural population would indicate underlying problems with agricultural development. Wang concurs, surmising that if the countryside is working as it should, that will simply free people up to move to cities. “[China’s] productivity is relatively low when you consider many people are still in rural areas,” says Wang from Capital Economics. “There’s still a lot of room for China to improve in the agriculture sector, which means China does not need so many people to stay in rural zones to work in the agriculture industry.”

The new plan looks to address agricultural productivity through a number of measures, such as mechanization and the transfer of land user rights from small farmers to specialized farms, rural cooperatives, and agricultural firms—leading to larger farm plots that are more efficient.

Wang says a common scenario in the future might be one farmer on a combined larger plot of farmland making a better living and employing workers—versus 10 farmers each farming less than half an acre of land and living in poverty—with the other nine farmers ‘sufficiently’ compensated.

Intensive farming has already taken shape in pig farming. The Jiahua Pig Breeding Farm in Zhejiang province can produce 100,000 animals every year. “In the future, there will be more of these kinds of big farms. It will be more modern and better managed,” says Wang. Whether ‘rural’ can be equated with developed or not, China’s government is decidedly uninterested in the question. For China, it’s cities all that way, but as Frey notes: “that can only happen if agriculture productivity is rising.”

NOT ONE DROP…

China is already a water-stressed nation, a problem that expanding urbanization will presumably exacerbate. A study by China’s Ministry of Water Resources found that approximately 55% of China’s 50,000 rivers that existed in the 1990s have disappeared.

Furthermore, the State Forestry Administration released figures this year indicating that China had lost 340,000 square kilometers of wetlands, that’s roughly the size of the Netherlands.

Unfortunately China has only just started to address its water problems, implementing progressive pricing on water in larger cities, which won’t derail massive water shortages by a long shot. The key to avoiding that, Wang says, will be smoothing out the migratory patterns. Urbanization has typically favored the wealthier provinces on the eastern seaboard and southern coast, which has in turn increased resource pressures in those parts. “In the plan, it looks like the government has realized this problem and they want to develop the smaller second- or third-tier cities in broader areas, not only in the coastal areas but in central or west of China, so that will ease tension a little bit.”

In a break with the past, the future pattern of urbanization will likely be slow and measured. “I think China will make a lot of mistakes [but] I also think it will also get a lot of things right,” says Frey.

From a more grassroots perspective, there is a raft of exciting new ‘smart city’ technologies—the Internet of Things, smart grids and meters, and even driverless cars—that are coming to bear, lending a technological element that has largely been absent from China’s urbanization story. Shanghai’s iconic Bund skyline was deemed a space-age pipe dream when it was first conceived, and is now arguably the symbol of New China. So while many aspects of the new urbanization plan seem overly lofty, China may prove again that it does what it sets out to do, by any means necessary

This article was originally published in CKGSB and written by Colin Shek.