ABSTRACT
With half the world’s people now living in cities and 25 megacities or urban agglomerations of over ten million people, the need for applying urban ecological principles and practice has never been greater. Cities are centres of consumption that have been encouraged by globalisation to source raw materials, food and manufactured goods from producers around the world, regardless of environmental cost. The problems of such cities cannot be solved by trying to relocate people, by continuing to spread existing agglomerations further and further into the surrounding countryside, or by creating new growth poles. New forms of city living have to be developed that are more sustainable and allow cities to function more like natural ecosystems. People require a technologically sophisticated lifestyle, with electrification, computers, modern communications and multiple transport options. This is possible if a new form of city living, Ecopolis, is adopted by greening urban areas through the integration of architecture, planning and ecology, essential to the development of truly viable ecological cities. One of the groundbreaking views of cities as ecosystems was probably first presented in the study of Hong Kong’s ecology in the 1970s (Boyden et al. 1981) but was largely overlooked by ‘western’ planners. Today it is not surprising that China is taking the initiative in trying to develop ecological cities as a result of a strong commitment to the development of urban ecology as a science and planning tool since the 1980s (Ma and Wang 1984; Wang 1991, 1994). This chapter examines the ideas on urban ecology and Ecopolis developed and applied in China, compares them with developments elsewhere and looks at future opportunities for applying urban ecology to develop truly green and sustainable cities. The concept of ‘Ecopolis’ differs from more traditional concepts of urban sustainability that tend to focus on resource conservation (Downton 2009). For example, in relation to the biosphere, urban sustainability aims to have a ‘mostly harmless’ relationship with the biosphere, while Ecopolis specifically aims to produce urban areas that are harmoniously integrated into biosphere processes to optimise their functioning for human purposes. The Ecopolis concept sees city evolution as an adaptive process of the interaction between man and nature. Its natural subsystem, economic subsystem and social subsystem are engaged in a co-evolutionary process, having both positive and negative effects on ecosystem service
and human well-being. Because adaptive Ecopolis development (AED) involves both people and institutions affected by the management strategy, it can also be described as social learning (Bandura 1977). AED recalls that decisions made long ago by architects and urban planners, when streets were first laid out and buildings first constructed, continue, for decades and even centuries, to have a great influence on the amount of waste produced. These decisions include the orientation of the house and the choice of heating-system, which affect emissions directly, or the insulation level which is important for the fuel-consumption and thus for emissions. Sooner or later buildings will be demolished, creating ‘demolition waste’ that can be recycled when there is an appropriate new use. Thinking in terms of Ecopolis when designing a new building can reduce future demolition-waste. Architects and planners can avoid and reduce many types of environmental damage through appropriate design. They can also greatly influence the green infrastructure and thus the urban ecology of the future. Adaptive Ecopolis development includes the adaptation to or learning from physical environmental change, technological innovation, economic fluctuation, institutional fragmentation, demographical mobility, behavioural pattern and data uncertainty. On the other hand, the local natural ecosystem under the urbanisation stress has also responded to human society by changing its physical and biological structure, function and process in response to human disturbance. To adapt to different conditions of varying levels of urban socioeconomic conditions, from less developed, fast transition to highly developed, Ecopolis development can vary in its focus on some or all of the following evolutionary goals in practice:
1 Ecological sanitation to provide citizens with a clean and healthy environment by encouraging ecologically oriented, affordable and people-friendly eco-engineering for treatment and recycling of human wastes, sewage and garbage, reducing air pollution and noise etc. Eco-sanitation is a kind of man-nature metabolism system dominated by technological and social behaviour, sustained by natural life support systems, vitalised by ecological process. It interacts with the human settlement system, the waste management system, the hygiene and health care system, and the agricultural system. Sanitation is an eco-complex between humans being and their working and living environment (including the sources of food, water, energy and other materials; the sinks for wastes such as odours, faeces, flies, pathogens and fertilisers; flows that could be enhanced by physical, chemical and biological purification; and pools for buffering and maintaining, such as the kitchen, bathroom and toilet within a house, and its social networks (including culture, organisation and technology).
