Future Perfect

There are schemes to bring the country into town: urban forests, rooftop gardens which spread down the walls of tall buildings (incidentally cutting the heating and cooling bills by 20 per cent); rivers and streams flowing through cha

Many of these additions have hidden costs. The roof gardens and forests will require more concrete and structural support, for example. But all this is a matter of finetuning, like many aspects of green engineering, from biofuels to hydrogen power. We need to find out the limits of what works and keep within them. But the potential is huge. The current waste is staggering. London is four times more profligate with power than it need be. Most of this energy is lost by the city’s buildings and could be fixed using existing technology. (Airconditioning, which may cost more in power than a city’s cars, can now be designed into a new building, and be essentially free). Add the energy cost of congestion, now successfully being tackled by Ken Livingstone’s congestion charge, and the figure would probably double: you could make London, and presumably most Australian cities, eight times more energy efficient today.

The ABC’s Sydney headquarters, where I work, is a choice example. The older part is now seventeen years old. The recently added tower is about four. Despite this newness, you see many flagrant signs of bodge as you walk around. After even moderate rain you will find from ten to fifteen buckets placed on the expanse of the third floor to catch torrents coming through the glass-and-steel roof. A little way along is the grand new library. Fifty-seven powerful lamps are cantilevered to shine their hot illumination through the glass ceiling skywards, as if trying to bleach the clouds. I asked the folk working there whether they were puzzled by this weird and wasteful engineering, but they said they hadn’t even noticed it.

As we wrestle with stories about the wide brown, increasingly desiccated land, I still note the incessant automatic flushing of the ABC men’s toilets (we must have 70 or 80) pouring drinking water into the pissoirs every five minutes morning, noon and night. It’s nuts. (Am I the only one, incidentally, to be gobsmacked by the public infatuation with bottled water? Not only would the plastic bottles America discards every hour reach ‘all the way to the moon’, but the money we’re prepared to squander on ‘spring’ water-which we can’t differentiate from the tap variety-beggars belief. In 2005, Sydneysiders were challenged to assess the cost of two displays of water set up in Martin Place: a full 18,000-L rain tank versus the equivalent in bottles. The tank water cost $21.60, the bottles $29,880!)

I was delighted to hear that one of the first actions of our new ABC CEO, Mark Scott, was to bring in energy consultant Gavin Gilchrist. First, he asked Mark whether he really needed 28 lights on in his office in the middle of a bright summer’s day; would he be inclined to do the same at home? Then Gavin revealed that most firms would save 30-40 per cent on their energy bills just by applying bog-ordinary commonsense measures. (Now the ABC has a

All these ideas, and more, were showcased in Brisbane at the end of July 2006, when five Nobel laureates, including an exuberant Mikhail Gorbachev, and scores of experts on the urban challenge, attended the Earth Dialogues. Much discussion was idealistic and ranged from global concerns to parochial gripes about Queensland ’s dams and tu

Several stars stood out. Anumita Roychowdhury, from New Delhi, one of the authors of Slow Murder: The deadly story of vehicular pollution in India , showed pictures of the blackened lungs of citizens in Indian megalopolises and a

As Roychowdhury told us: ‘In the next three decades the population of Asia will increase by one billion, half of whom will live in cities, where automobile dependence is very destructive. For example, in New Delhi, one person dies every hour from pollution. There are 14 million people but only 4 million vehicles, not all of them cars, yet 80 per cent of the city budget is dedicated to road infrastructure.’ Cars are idle for 22 hours a day, yet the land a car occupies is larger than the average home in New Delhi. People are relocated from the cities because there is no space for them, but there is space for cars.

Given the price of land in the USA and Australia, it is staggering to find that some of our major cities sacrifice 40 per cent of their surface to cars or their requirements. The roads, driveways and freeways; the garages, parking lots and tall concrete monstrosities where they lurk during the day; the showrooms and car marts that line metropolitan streets; the repair yards and dumping sites where dead vehicles stack up. What a colossal waste! Imagine how much could be done with only half of that real estate!

New Scientist featured one way it could be tackled in a cover story in June 2006 titled ‘Ecopolis: Last hope for the natural world’. We are reminded that 100 years ago London (where I also grew up) was the worlds biggest city, with a population of 6.5 million. In 2006 London isn’t even in the Top 20. Tokyo is up there with 34 million inhabitants-nearly twice the population of Australia. Tokyo is famous (infamous) for four-hour commutes, tiny homes with minuscule rooms, and capsule hotels where you crawl into a coffin-sized modular sleeping unit. ‘Last hope’, indeed.

China, with even greater population difficulties and horrendous pollution, is now begi

As the Chinese expect no fewer than 400 million people to move to cities in the next 30 years, they will need all the inventiveness they can muster. I heard China ’s Environment Minister warn ten years ago: ‘We may enjoy our economic miracle, with 12 per cent growth, but we must remember the cost of environmental damage removes 8 per cent from that figure.’ The town of Dongtan, now under construction on Chongming, could be the answer.

Australia ’s challenges are different. Some of us debate urban consolidation versus suburban renewal. In the west Peter Newman and his colleagues have taken a different tack and, in doing so, have led to Perth ’s stu