Slicker cities
In a few decades, three-quarters of the world’s population will be living in cities. Ashok Bhalotra takes time off from planning towns in India and China to explain how we’ll live
WORDS JANE SZITA
PHOTOGRAPHY RENE VAN DER HULST/UNIT C.M.A.
"It’s a numbers problem," says Ashok Bhalotra, the Rotterdam-based director of Kuiper Compagnons, of the current wave of urbanisation that’s seeing him shape cities as far afield as China and his native India.
"In three or four decades, the world’s population will be nine billion, and 75% will live in cities. So we have to be creative, we have to be like poets."Bhalotra’s brand of creativity is evident in his pioneering City of the Sun in Heerhugowaard, The Netherlands, a mainly solar powered, 1,500-home community completed in 2009.
Now he’s poised to do the same thing on a much larger scale, with a new Indian city in Rajasthan that will one day become home to 1.5 million people, all of whom will rely on a predominantly solar power supply.
The same sustainable principles inform the three interconnected cities that he’s designing in Dalian, China, each one housing half a million inhabitants.
"People laughed at my idea for Heerhugowaard at first," he recalls. "That was back in 1992, and I remember the mayor asked if I had sunstroke after I’d made my presentation. In India too, I had to work hard to convince people about sustainable energy. How did I do it? Not by talking about climate change, nobody understands that. Instead, I reminded people of how as kids they started a fire using a magnifying glass — everyone’s done that, and it gets you thinking about the power of the sun and how it can be used to heat and cool a house. You have to appeal to people’s imagination."
Imagination is certainly needed to understand the rapid urbanisation of the human race. In 1800, only 2% of us lived in cities. Now, more than half of us do, and that percentage is rising steeply.
The World Bank estimates that almost 200,000 people move to the city every day. In developing countries, 60 million new urbanites arrive every year, and in the next decade, many African and Asian cities will double in size.
By 2015, there will be 23 cities on earth with more than 10 million people, and 19 will be in developing nations.
What all this might mean is the subject of a dramatic growth in urban studies and in projects ranging from the UN’s Habitat Programme to the LSE’s (London School of Economics) Urban Age think-tank.
But it hasn’t always been this way, says Bhalotra. "Urban planning has been historically isolated from the political, economic and social agenda," he says. "It needs to be connected, but there has been a strong anti-city sentiment, people were stuck in some kind of pastoral dream."
As Europe industrialised in the 18th century, the expanding city was seen as debased. The philosopher Rousseau summed it up when he gravely announced, "Cities are the abyss of the human species."
The industrialists who made their money from urban factories were quick to move out of town to country estates, while their workers were left to languish in inner-city slums. By the 20th century, planners were in a form of mass urban denial, building ‘garden cities’ and suburbs that tried to replicate some imagined village ideal, partly fuelled by the rapid rise of personal car ownership.
But harsh economic realities are ending the reign of suburbia, as Canadian urban planner Ken Greenberg confirms in his book, Walking Home: The Life and Lessons of a City Builder. "The inevitable rise of the oil price — 20% here in Canada last year — is a game changer," he says.
"There’s a huge realisation that we’ve massively underinvested in public transit, and cities everywhere are being equipped for bicycles." There’s a growing awareness that future city planning departments will no longer be able to afford to give the traffic engineer free rein.
"Public transport has to be there from the beginning," says Bhalotra, whose new Indian solar city is designed not around roads, but bus and train lines, bike paths and footpaths, which pass through "varied scenery, so travelling becomes a pleasure."
Existing cities, meanwhile, are increasingly being retooled into denser, less car-dependent places. "Currently, 50% of my work is transforming suburbs," explains Toronto-based Ken Greenberg. "They have seen a huge population change. In the 1970s, the poor lived in the inner city and the affl uent in the suburbs, but that has been reversed. The poor have been pushed out to the suburbs, where there are few transport options. So the task now is to retrofit the suburbs — make them denser, more mixed, with more facilities and more transport links. The suburbs are becoming urbanised."
History is full of lessons for urban planners. Fatehpur Sikri in India is one of the most colourful, a splendid Mughal city which the Emperor Akbar began to build in 1570 to honour the holy man who had predicted his son’s birth. It took 15 years to complete, only to be abandoned just 14 years later, because it lacked a sufficient water supply.
Ashok Bhalotra likes to tell this story to underline his point that the biggest challenge facing our growing cities is equal access to the necessities of life: water, energy and food. His Dutch City of the Sun has containers outside each house to collect rainwater, while his new urban projects in India and China integrate agriculture into the fabric of the city.
"Food production has to be urban," he says, "because 35% of food is currently wasted due to transport and storage methods."Instead of sweeping away the villages standing in their way, Bhalotra’s new urban developments will simply integrate them, and the farmers can stay.
"They will receive training to do high-tech agriculture in the city," he says. "More production on less land. The farmers will become shareholders in the urban economy."
Keeping farmers in the city adds to the diversity that Bhalotra believes is vital for cities to work.
"We have social housing next to exclusive villas. We have to plan for the slum dwellers too. The people who have nothing, they will also come to the city. They will need some small shelter too. In fact, the slums have a wonderful sense of community and joy — the soul of the city is the slum."
This celebration of diversity extends into the city fabric, where Bhalotra plans to use different themes and architectural styles to offer a changing experience, rather than the rubber-3stamped grid that featured in 20th-century cities. "The discovery of new things should always be possible," he says. "It’s important to embrace the sensuality of the city. It should respond not only to our needs, but our desires too. The city should have 1,000 identities."
