Peter Head
John Elkington interviews Peter Head of Arup on how he is involved in shaping a better China.
On first glance, you might mistake him
for the dean of a leading business school
or perhaps even a kindly bank manager.
But looks, as they say, can be deceptive. Peter Head of the UK
engineering group Arup — motto: ‘We shape a better world’ — is that
rare breed, a law-abiding revolutionary. He is dedicated to
overthrowing the notion that urbanisation is inevitably and
automatically the fast track to environmental collapse. Specifically,
he is fighting to ensure
that a growing number of the world’s megacities — and the associated
megaprojects — embrace sustainability principles from the outset.
And now the most challenging test of Arup’s ability to shape better
megacities is slated to take place alongside the mudflats and wetlands
of China’s third largest island, cheek-by-jowl with the boom city of
Shanghai. If you haven’t yet heard of Dongtan, you will. If the world
of sustainability had its own moon shots,
this would be one of them.
But first, to get some measure of the challenge China faces in relation to what we might dub hyperurbanisation, consider the following two statements. First, the Guangming Daily recently reported government estimates that China’s urban population will reach 1.12 billion by 2050, involving a shift of a staggering 600 million people from rural to urban areas. And, second, ponder the recent statement by Zhenhua Xie, Minister of China’s State Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA), that the country’s current development is ‘unsustainable’ — and, even more worryingly, that ‘the damage will not be reversible once higher GDP has been achieved’.
Many pessimists looking at evolving demographic and resource trends
in countries like China and India warn that the future outlook in such
regions is bleak. They see a grim, Malthusian reality emerging — and
recent stories about China’s increasingly desperate global search for
oil and other resources will have done nothing to undermine their
pessimism. Even emerging economy optimists would have to admit that the
risk picture is getting worse in areas as diverse as air quality, fresh
water availability, energy demand and pandemics.
Incubators
But evolution often happens fastest where the natural selection
pressures are greatest. Think of the way flu viruses ferment and breed
in the swarming conditions of Asian pig and chicken farms. Indeed, the
upside of such pressures are a key reason why SustainAbility has
invested growing efforts in its emerging economies program in recent
years. We see countries like Brazil, India, South Africa and China (in
particular) as potential incubators not just of problems but also of
much of the thinking and many of the tools that a sustainable world of
9-10 billion people will require. And recent media reports on Arup’s
plan for a massive new eco-city alerted us to a megaproject with a
commensurately huge incubation potential.
In fact, some early reports of Arup’s plans
for turning Dongtan into a world-class eco-city made them sound —
frankly — utopian. Having visited the country last year, I have little
doubt that the Chinese could build any sort of city they put their mind
to, but two troubling questions immediately surfaced in my mind when I
read about the Dongtan project. First, how can Dongtan possibly be
described as an ‘eco-city’ when it’s being built in an area of
outstanding ecological value? And, second, how big an impact would even
a highly successful eco-city of 500,000 people have in a country of 1.3
billion people teetering on the edge of major natural resource
shortages and eco-catastrophes?
To find answers, I headed over to Arup’s London HQ. I asked Peter
Head, as the director responsible for the project, to
explain what the Dongtan venture is meant to achieve, why Arup was
asked to help, what got him involved, and how the relevant concepts and
— if successful — technologies might be taken to scale across the
world’s most populous country.
World’s biggest SD project
The aim of the eco-city project, to be built
on Chongming Island and described by Peter as the world’s largest
sustainable development project, is easily stated: to provide 21st
Century living conditions for half-a-million people with no significant
damage caused to the environment. ‘Dongtan’, the new city’s vision
statement reads, ‘aims to achieve environmental, social and economic
development simultaneously. The improvement of one will not be
detrimental of another.’ A bold ambition.
The project is being driven by the Shanghai Industrial Investment
Corporation (SIIC). The cost of building the city, whose scale and
complexity will dwarf the 2008 Beijing Olympics and whose eventual
population will be a third the size of Manhattan’s, will run into
billions of dollars. By 2040, the goal is that Chiongming Island will
link China’s biggest city, Shanghai, with the neighbouring province of
Jiangsu. With a new deep-water harbour, the resulting urban nexus is
seen as providing the country’s main financial and commercial gateway
to world markets.
In an article in the UK newspaper The Observer, Head predicted that,
‘Dongtan will be the turning point in China’s frenetic urban growth …
(and will) provide a model for future development across China and east
Asia. It will be a post-industrial sustainable city of the highest
quality.’ The city will be self-sufficient in both energy and food,
with the main form of transport being electric and hydrogen-cell
vehicles. There will be no industrial emissions and no landfilling.
Clearly, as Head puts it, Dongtan potentially represents a ‘seismic
shift’ in urban development. But, he stresses, ‘this
isn’t Utopia. It will use existing or near-market technologies.’
Why Arup — why Head?
Fine, but how did Arup win through, when so many other firms were
bidding for the extraordinary contract? Head reflects that part of the
answer must be the scale of the company. To my surprise, it has 70
offices in more than 30 countries, with over 10,000 projects running at
any one time. Founded in 1946 by Ove Arup, the company is also a wholly
independent organisation, owned in trust on behalf of its staff. ‘With
no external shareholders,’ the Arup website declares, ‘this
independence enables us to shape our own direction with no outside
pressure or influence.’
From the earliest days, the firm offered a fully integrated and
holistic approach to clientsan approach Ove called ‘total design’. This
approach has been the hallmark of Arup’s work, from the structural
design of the Sydney Opera House in the 1960s to the development of the
route for the Channel Tunnel Rail Link in the 1990s. For Dongtan, Arup
will use SPeAR, its Sustainable Project Appraisal Routine – with most
of the development kept well back from the ultra-sensitive wetlands and
tidal mudflats along the island’s downstream edge in the flow of the
mighty Yangtze River.
Arup is responsible for the integrated master-planning of the built
environment in Dongtan. It is providing services like urban design,
planning, sustainable energy management, waste management, renewable
energy process implementation, economic and business planning,
sustainable building design, architecture, infrastructure and even the
planning of communities and social structures. And one of the key
challenges the team is facing involves dealing with the ‘sliced up’
quality of much Chinese decision-making. The very nature of the
Communist Party means that it is often very difficult for officials to
implement holistic plans, even if they can be developed. ‘No one has a
broad, cross-disciplinary approach,’ Head says.
So how did he get involved? He mentions that he is a recent recruit.
Arup pulled him in to help in ‘knitting together’ all the skills needed
for projects like the Beijing and London Olympics, and Dongtan. When I
ask him for a turning point in his own thinking, he says ‘Schumacher
College’ which, he stresses,
‘isn’t for the faint-hearted — but I needed
to be shaken up!’
Will it scale?
This, ultimately, is the $64 billion question. Dongtan could so easily
become an eco-folly on the road to larger ruin. But, while Head says
that it is too early to be absolutely sure that the Dongtan process
will scale and replicate, he notes that two further eco-cities are
already in the pipeline. And, he insists, the Chinese are beginning to
embrace a fundamentally different paradigm in development.
Quite apart from the demographic and environmental pressures, there are
commercial incentives, too. ‘They are also saying,’ he concludes, ‘that
if we
get it right, we can sell this to the rest of the world.’ (London,
where Head is a member of Mayor Ken Livingstone’s Sustainable
Development Commission, is already wondering aloud why it can’t do
something similar.) And the 2010 Shanghai ‘Quality of Life’ Expo will
offer an early opportunity to recruit even more supporters. Make a note
in your calendars.
