Future Perfect What next? And other impossible questions

5. The Future of Cities – More than Half the World’s Population?

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.

Several stars stood out. Anumita Roychowdhury, from New Delhi, one of the authors of Slow Murder: The deadly story of vehicular pollution in India , showed pictures of the blackened lungs of citizens in Indian megalopolises and announced that bad air now kills as many Asians, especially children, as foul water. Nicholas You, an urbane Chinese architect working with UN-Habitat on strategic planning, warned that sprawl is the greatest threat to the world’s cities, as it produces ‘irreversible changes in consumption of land and water’. Both counselled the creation of urban villages within big cities, in which convenient services and work would make walking a preferred option to gridlocked commuting.

As Roychowdhury told us: ‘In the next three decades the population of Asia will increase by one billion, half of whom will live in cities, where automobile dependence is very destructive. For example, in New Delhi, one person dies every hour from pollution. There are 14 million people but only 4 million vehicles, not all of them cars, yet 80 per cent of the city budget is dedicated to road infrastructure.’ Cars are idle for 22 hours a day, yet the land a car occupies is larger than the average home in New Delhi. People are relocated from the cities because there is no space for them, but there is space for cars.

Given the price of land in the USA and Australia, it is staggering to find that some of our major cities sacrifice 40 per cent of their surface to cars or their requirements. The roads, driveways and freeways; the garages, parking lots and tall concrete monstrosities where they lurk during the day; the showrooms and car marts that line metropolitan streets; the repair yards and dumping sites where dead vehicles stack up. What a colossal waste! Imagine how much could be done with only half of that real estate!

New Scientist featured one way it could be tackled in a cover story in June 2006 titled ‘Ecopolis: Last hope for the natural world’. We are reminded that 100 years ago London (where I also grew up) was the worlds biggest city, with a population of 6.5 million. In 2006 London isn’t even in the Top 20. Tokyo is up there with 34 million inhabitants-nearly twice the population of Australia. Tokyo is famous (infamous) for four-hour commutes, tiny homes with minuscule rooms, and capsule hotels where you crawl into a coffin-sized modular sleeping unit. ‘Last hope’, indeed.

China, with even greater population difficulties and horrendous pollution, is now beginning to use its new wealth to experiment with model eco-cities. One is to be a satellite of Shanghai, built on Chongming, an alluvial island in the delta of the Yangtze River. That’s where, as New Scientist’s Fred Pearce observes, low-rise development will begin on the reclaimed mud-a model for the rest of China, with state-of-the-art green technologies, and maybe a model for others as well.

As the Chinese expect no fewer than 400 million people to move to cities in the next 30 years, they will need all the inventiveness they can muster. I heard China ’s Environment Minister warn ten years ago: ‘We may enjoy our economic miracle, with 12 per cent growth, but we must remember the cost of environmental damage removes 8 per cent from that figure.’ The town of Dongtan, now under construction on Chongming, could be the answer.

Australia ’s challenges are different. Some of us debate urban consolidation versus suburban renewal. In the west Peter Newman and his colleagues have taken a different tack and, in doing so, have led to Perth ’s stunning revival. Their approach is based on two vital secret ingredients: ask the people what they really want and make sure all sections of government are in the loop. One example is fast transport. Give commuters trains that are faster than their cars and require no expensive parking costs, and they will use them. Perth now offers some free trains and buses that come so often you don’t need a timetable. There has been a spectacular move, as I’ve mentioned, towards railway convenience in Perth at a time when Sydney ’s services explore new depths of antediluvian frustration and 74 per cent insist on commuting by car. Newman’s 1999 book about the future of cities (Sustainability and Cities, written with Jeff Kenworthy) was launched in the White House by then Vice President Al Gore. His enlightened ideas may seem too much for Australians to contemplate right now but, as with recycled water in Toowoomba, harsh realities will soon force us to take on the previously unthinkable.

Yes, we shall get help from new technologies: intelligent materials regulating pollutants and temperature; fibres carrying daylight as if it were water into every room; waste treatment systems such as Biolytix, recycling 80 per cent of household water by means of living humus full of good bacteria; photovoltaic cells giving home owners near independence from the power grid; computerised vehicles cutting fuel costs in half; and city farms on rooftops growing our daily greens and salads-but, as in Vienna, there will be old-fashioned remedies too. Faced with an urgent need to travel two or three kilometres, I often use a traditional device invented in Africa and refined in Europe -legs. As a boy, I walked to school from the Danube to central Vienna, in snow or sunshine. It was always a delightful trip, fuelled by not much more than a slice of toast. If we design our cities with enough thought, imagination and consultation we could achieve a sublime future: a combination of the best of old and new.

Several years ago I wrote a novel, 2007: A true story waiting to happen. Many of its scenarios have come true, including John Howard’s endurance in the Lodge in Canberra. Now that we have reached my year of reckoning, I am in the position George Orwell, sadly, did not live long enough to enjoy when he wrote 1984- getting ready for my comeuppance. The year 1984, as it approached, held forbidding associations. Nowadays I don’t believe anyone gives it a second thought.

In my novel, 2007 was the year when animals, large and small, decided that the crunch had come. The environment was in a tailspin and climate change had gone berserk. The animals sensed it, freaked and took over civilisation. Roads were blocked (shitting cows), airports closed (3000 pelicans), whaling ships were sunk (by 40 angry whales) and communication lines severed (by rodents chewing optic cables). Soon the normal business of government and commerce proved impossible. The people got very cross and planned to zap the animals.

This was, I thought, a reasonable extrapolation from conditions in 2000. Having now got rid of half of the natural world, we might well decide to cut our losses and eliminate the rest. It will soon go anyway. And the benefits seem compelling. Nearly all our plagues come from contact with domesticated animals. Bird flu is the present preoccupation. Other pandemics will emerge as we squeeze nature into corners. Thus AIDS arose from crowding monkeys or apes, and Ebola fever from hemming in the remains of jungle in Africa. Clear it all away and our worries would cease.

Would we miss animals-pets, birdsong, snuffling dog muzzles, cows in pastures? The Chinese seem to have coped. As for those creatures in the wilderness-the tigers, gorillas and frogs-they are not long for our planet. Some have turned up their paws already. Let’s get real!

Getting real in 2007 meant first committing universal faunicide, then shutting all the farms (most are failing anyway) and facing the turbulent realities of climate change. What would we eat? Easy! Attach food factories to bigger supermarkets and there manufacture mounds and sheets of protein that can be moulded and flavoured to resemble chicken or beef or prawns. Carbohydrates could come from plant-like GM crops developed by NASA for use on other planets. Both kinds of food are not much of a problem for genetic engineers, who even now have bacteria standing by that are capable of fermenting a fairly decent two-hat meal.

The problem is energy. It would need lots. But once you have amortised transport costs (none) and the release of real estate (all that farmland), the price of GM-gourmet grub would be much the same as before.

With new allotments in cities and food virtually on tap, we would then need to think about what we do with the countryside. This decision may be taken from us when Bangladesh goes under the Indian Ocean and 40 million people need somewhere else to go. Australia would be perfect. There are barely a million people in the South Island of New Zealand, half that number in Tasmania. The Bangladeshis might feel a bit cool, but they seem to have coped in England (better than I did!). Both those islands could become one big city, bar the mountains, which look nice anyway. And inland Australia could house the remaining 38 million dispossessed.

If flooding doesn’t happen, or is mysteriously delayed, the rural remains can be developed, as Chongming has been, as 21st century eco-cities.

The odd thing about my novel is the date in the title. I wrote it in 2000, in a burst of rage about the way plants and animals-rainforests, coral reefs, apes and tigers-were being wiped off the face of the Earth. It made me feel a little better, but I did not notice much change. Those concerned were still anxious about what they knew to be an appalling threat to nature, but those in charge did little.

The switch came at the end of 2006. Now, in 2007, you have to be dim, deprived or George W Bush not to realise we have a mega problem. So my timing (I take no pleasure) was right. Will it be that bad? Is this not yet more exaggeration from what Margaret Thatcher used to call the ‘moaning Minnies’, the ‘elites’ keen to denigrate can-do enterprise?

Try doing a thought experiment. Take a house or a town designed for a reasonable number of people, then multiply the inhabitants by a thousand. That is what we are doing both to human habitats and to nature itself. I wrote my novel in a fury, thinking of all those apes consumed as bush meat, all that rainforest pulverised for unsustainable farming, all those fat fools tooling around in boys’ toys. It made me feel better, briefly.

Now the prospects are even more bleak. The worst scenarios offered by sober scientists of good judgement are truly horrifying. But we must assume there is some prospect for putting things right.

We have a chance, a slim one, as I shall note in the final chapter, to do something about it all. Cities are the key. We have to get the cities right-make them work. We have ten years. A narrow future.

No one need go broke, either! As my friend Ron Oxburgh exclaims: ‘It’s a prodigious opportunity.’

The Hunches of Nostradamus

2008 Minority of world’s population now lives in countryside. Fifty-five per cent of city-dwellers don’t know where meat comes from.

2009 Tokyo grows to 47 million.

2010 Adelaide and Brisbane ban flushing urinals. Pee Police set up.

2011 No one earning less than $180,000 a year can now live in Sydney (unless running drugs).

2012 Chinese cities, like Singapore, establish ‘city museum’ to show what they once were like (anything old having been covered in concrete).

2013 New York grows more of its food in rooftop and allotment gardens than it imports.

2014 Bio-identichips allow only locals to be in prestige cities. Visitors must pay by the hour. Beijing, Birmingham and Brisbane remain free.

2015 Pets banned in China, unless eaten.

2016 Intelligent materials, computerised doors and windows installed in London office buildings. Staff die in Stock Exchange when locked in.

2017 London cuts energy expenditure by factor of ten (March). Barrier on Thames breaks and half of city disappears in flood.

2018 Baghdad, Jerusalem, Haifa, Damascus, Tehran, Islamabad and Manchester become holes in the ground. UN conference convened.

2019 Galveston, Texas, and West Palm Beach, Florida, blown away.

2020 Santa Cruz, California, becomes a no-waste city.