As China attempts to bring environmental sustainability in line with its economic goals, one architect is hoping to reduce air pollution by implementing a radical urban planning strategy.
According to The Guardian, Italian architect Stefano Boeri, creator of Milan’s tree-clad Bosco Verticale, is currently devising a plan to create what he calls “forest cities”: compact, sustainable urban areas covered in plants, trees and shrubbery.
Boeri’s first project in China, a pair of Bosco Verticale-inspired skyscrapers planned for Jiangsu province’s Nanjing, will serve as a precursor to the larger project. By the time the Nanjing towers are completed next year, the structures will feature a museum, luxury hotel, office space and a green architecture school indoors, as well as 23 different species of trees and more than 2,500 shrubs around their exterior.
Once complete, the Nanjing towers’ greenery will be able to produce roughly 60 kilograms of oxygen per day and remove 25 tons of carbon dioxide from the city’s air each year, the Italian architect told The Guardian.
Nanjing, however, is just the beginning. From there, Boeri has plans to develop his first Forest City prototype in Guanxi province’s Luizhou, home to 1.5 million residents, the news outlet reports. A second, more ambitious Forest City is also planned for Shijiazhuang, a mid-sized metropolis in northern Hebei province where, according to Australia’s ABC network, air pollution levels reached 40 times the limit of PM2.5 fine particulate matter deemed healthy by the World Health Organization last December.
Sustainable projects such as Boeri’s are a much-needed development in China, where air pollution is a major concern. In 2015, Beijing-based performance artist Nut Brother sought to raise awareness of the issue by carting an industrial vacuum around the capital for 100 days, sucking up the air to create a single, solid brick from its dust particles. Though the government is several years into its efforts to reduce air pollution in and around large cities, episodes of heavy pollution in December of last year renewed public concerns about air quality as China issued “red alert” warnings in 23 of its cities, ABC reports in another recent article.
This is where China’s energy policy faces challenges, as new coal plants threaten to undo the progress of the country’s recent war on pollution. On one hand, China has also taken an aggressive approach when it comes to investing in renewable energy: Fortune writers Chris Nielsen and Mun Ho point to the country’s wind and solar power capacity, both of which are the highest in the world, as well as the government aim to triple China’s hydropower production.
On the other hand, however, is a glaring contradiction. A staggering 200 new coal plants are slated to open up in the next 10 years, reports ABC, and 70% of the country’s energy consumption still comes from coal. Though the government recognizes the danger of fossil fuels – an estimated 1 million people die in China each year from air pollution-related illnesses, according to the Financial Times – officials continue to expand heavy industries like coal-fired power plants in order to create jobs and maintain China’s economic rise.
Boeri’s Forest City is by no means a solution to these problems, however the project does aim to create a greener, more sustainable urban space which reduces both land use and urban sprawl in addition to improving air quality for its residents by grafting ample plant life onto its buildings, which Boeri refers to as Vertical Forests.
For the Shijiazhuang project, Boeri plans to build a 100,000-resident community spanning 225 hectares, according to his firm’s website. Its compact, vertical structures will be divided into five districts, each of which is described as a “mix-use social environment, with residential housings, offices, retails, malls, public spaces and gardens”. These neighborhoods focus around a small central area which will house public facilities such as schools, hospitals and cultural venues.
“What [Chinese officials] have done until now is simply to continue to add new peripheral environments to their cities,” Boeri told The Guardian. “They have created these nightmares – immense metropolitan environments. They have to imagine a new model of city that is not about extending and expanding but a system of small, green cities.”
[Rendering via Stefano Boeri Architetti]
