An Island in the Sustainable Stream

Following two decades of exuberant growth, the fastest-developing city in the world’s most populous nation has begun refocusing its millennium development philosophy towards environmental sustainability. The early 2004 decision to call off construction of the Hutiao Gorge Dam in Yunnan Province exemplified China’s increased sensitivity to its endangered natural environment. That same year, Shanghai’s regional government challenged a group of the world’s most creative urban designers to a master planning competition for the development of Chongming Island. The SOM team won the competition with a “green” proposal based almost completely on best-practices principles of sustainability.

Chongming, a 750-square-mile island at the mouth of the Yangtze River, is the world’s largest alluvial island. Located some 20 miles east of Shanghai’s downtown Financial District and seven miles across the Yangtze by ferry, Chongming’s extraordinarily rich, flood-replenished soil had for decades made the island-district the agricultural “rice bowl” for China’s burgeoning commercial colossus.

Prior to the competition, a new bridge/tunnel connecting Chongming to Shanghai was being planned, placing the Island directly in the path of the seemingly unstoppable Shanghai sprawl that had, in less than twenty years, witnessed the construction of three times the number of high-rises that exist on the entire western coast of North America. Chongming, in comparison, was decades behind Shanghai in development, with a per capita a mere one-fifth of that in the central city.

Beginning in late 2004, the SOM team took an entirely contrary approach from competitors who saw Chongming as Shanghai’s newest high-rise district. SOM instead uniquely focused on Chongming’s agrarian orientation as the key to sustainable plans for new environmentally-based communities that allowed the preservation of farming as the core function.

In SOM’s conception, Chongming was positioned as a “green island” with its urban development confined to eight new, distinct, and highly-compact coastal cities. Each would consist of walkable, transit-rich districts built at a high-enough density to enable a population of nearly a million people to live and work in only 15 percent of the island’s total area. SOM similarly proposed a “green” framework for the use of renewable energy production, taking advantage of the Yangtze's steady estuarial winds. New transportation and transit infrastructures would be designed to bring rail connections to the center of each of Chongming’s new towns and thus encourage foot and bicycle traffic over automobiles.

Also included in the plan were a number of literally ground-breaking new agricultural techniques, capable of overcoming such problems as the infiltration of sea water into underground aquifers under stress from new development and more intense agriculture. The plan called for a chain of artificial lakes running down the island’s spine, providing additional potable water and creating hydrostatic pressure to push back against brackish estuarial tides. The lakes would also be linked by canals to Chongming’s periphery to transport polluted water through wetlands designed to act as natural gray-water “bio-filters.”

The SOM plan set aside large amounts of wooded park lands and wetlands, making the island Shanghai’s largest open space and one of Asia’s most significant parks within easy commute of a major city. Protecting the wetlands was essential to the SOM plan, both to protect one of central Asia’s primary avian flyways and to encourage eco-tourism.

Sustainability was central to virtually every aspect of SOM’s proposal. The plan not only mandated that agriculture remain the island’s alpha function, but insured it virtually in perpetuity by switching over the island’s output to the production of organically grown, high-quality fruit and produce. Based on such examples of intensive crop production as California’s Napa, Sonoma, and San Joaquin valleys, Chongming’s new high-end agricultural focus would be strengthened through the development of a series of farmers markets proposed for Shanghai. These markets would allow farmers to sell directly to the city’s upscale markets and restaurants, thus providing the quality fruits and vegetables increasingly demanded by Shanghai’s newly affluent shoppers and diners.

SOM's plan for Chongming comported nicely with the thinking of a new generation of young, rising Chinese planners. Among these was the director of Tongji University's School of Architecture and Urban Planning in Shanghai, Zhou Jian. "The reality is that China lacks land for farming and energy resources, and has a huge population on top of it all," Zhou says. "It was inevitable that we would favor a sustainable-design plan like SOM's."

Regarded as the “Chinese MIT,” Tongji University has matriculated cadres of planners who now work in virtually every city in China. Many, particularly the younger graduates, were critical in spreading the news about sustainability throughout the country. In 2003, the government appointed one of Zhou's university colleagues, Jun Hu, as Chongming's new governor. Early in Jun’s term, an intense debate reverberated at both national and regional levels of government about the importance of a sustainable plan for Chongming.

In July 2004, "Green Chongming" received a huge boost when Chinese President, Hu Jintao gave a speech to farmers in a village on Chongming. In his speech, President Hu promoted Chongming as a national model for sustainability, energy efficiency, and environmental awareness. The president's speech reflected an acknowledgment by officials at the very highest levels that resource-starved China could only prosper by forging a truly sustainable national economy and an environmentally-aware lifestyle.

Richard Rapaport