Greening the Concrete Jungle

Whether the cities of the Anthropocene will be environmentally sustainable or not depends on how the slum districts of developing world cities evolve. Will cities follow the inefficient North American model: suburban sprawl of highway-linked satellite towns, or rather the closely packed high-rises of Hong Kong and Singapore? Seoul is one example of how a city can transform in a couple of decades – from a filthy slum in which one-third lived in low-rise squatter settlements, to a shining functioning city of metro-linked skyscrapers in which most of the 25 million population live in healthy surroundings.

Apart from a few examples, most cities were never designed or planned, they grew - sometimes over thousands of years – in an ad hoc pattern. Occasionally, sections would be entirely rebuilt according to architects’ plans, but these opportunities were usually the result of disasters, such as earthquakes or bombings, or because of grand schemes, such as slum clearance, industrial development or large-scale municipal constructions, such as a new highway or transport system.

Now architects are having to re-think the city in the age of high population, strained resource use and global environmental impacts. In some places, such as Tianjin in China, planners are designing entirely new cities for the Anthropocene, trying to avoid errors of the past and achieve a sustainable solution from the outset.

Sustainability in the new urban age (BBC Future)