China’s City Of The Future
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Environment, The WorldBill McDonough is a legend among architects. Recently he spoke at TEDGLOBAL, a conference for thought leaders around the world to discuss the issues facing us and what we can do to fix them.
While there he revealed that he was working on a new mega city for China that could house millions. Construction is going on as we speak.
Searching around I found a video of him, introduced by this blurb:
The Chinese plan to build housing for as many as 400 million of its citizens by 2017. With this in mind the Chinese government commissioned world famous eco-architect Bill McDonough and partner Michael Braungart to design a prototype city
However, I have word that this “prototype” city is no prototype. It would be the biggest city in the world, eclipsing others by an amount you can’t even begin to imagine.
So here’s the link to that video where McDonough talks about a sustainable city that produces its own power through green-friendly means.
So why a sustainable city? Well, McDonough gives us some historical perspective in a speech he gave in 2002.
Imagine yourself in Thomas Jefferson’s place in 1776, when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. Imagine yourself a young man, just 33 years old, waking up every morning to the daunting task of articulating the values of a new nation. Given his propensity for design, he may well have seen the writing of the Declaration of Independence as a design assignment. We can imagine him pacing his Philadelphia apartment asking himself, “How shall I design a document that persuasively articulates our right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, free from remote tyranny?” Mr. Jefferson objected to the fact that the British crown was making decisions about local circumstances, about which it knew little and cared less. In contemporary parlance, we might say he believed that “all sustainability is local,” which implies the importance of local knowledge to every human endeavor. He believed circumstances that undermined this essential value called for a new design, a new social framework for a free, sovereign people.Today Mr. Jefferson would perhaps be calling for freedom from intergenerational remote tyranny, the idea that one generation might pollute the earth and destroy the ability of future generations to celebrate its abundance. He wrote in 1789: “The earth belongs to the living, no man may by natural right oblige the land he owns or occupies to debts greater than those that may be paid during his own lifetime.” If he could, then the world would belong to the dead, and not to the living. The world belongs to the living.
I urge you to read the rest of this speech entitled, “A New Design For Human Enterprise.” It’s very compelling.
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