卦Trigram 2.0
Asian Snowcrash

This didn’t show up when I searched the Straits Times‘ website yesterday, but I just came across it via Google. It isn’t the article I was referring to before, but is pretty informative - and does mention the Finns’ involvement! It’s an article by Tracy Quek: China a leader in developing eco-cities. It’s got an interesting couple of paragraphs deep down:

It intends to stand out from other projects by putting an emphasis on building a strong sense of community among residents, leveraging on 40 years of experience in fostering bonds between people from disparate backgrounds.

‘It’s not just the hardware, but changing the mindsets of people and inculcating in them a whole new way of thinking where they give the environment priority,’ said a source close to the project.

The People’s Association, which oversees grassroots organisations in Singapore, will set up community centres and other grassroots mechanisms that will draw the community closer.

To me, this does reinforce the impression that the Tianjin project is not just a way to boost Singapore’s brand, engineering know-how, and R&D insights, but could also be a way to test social engineering techniques for re-introduction back here - namely, how to build green awareness. And, I have to say, that wouldn’t be a bad thing.

Following my last post, I idly wondered whether YouTube had anything about China’s eco-cities. Here’s what I found:

Simulated flyover of Dongtan eco-city:

A BBC report on Dongtan eco-city:

Finland involved in the Tianjin project?

This was a surprise to me. My reading in the Straits Times here led me to believe that the Tianjin eco-city is a collaboration solely between China and Singapore, but - unless there are two projects near Tianjin - it seems that the Finns are involved as well. Who else? This clip is nearly 5 minutes long and, actually, doesn’t contain anything specific to the Tianjin project, but its YouTube page leads here.

More from China Digital Times: it seems that construction of the eco-city at Tianjin, a collaboration between China and Singapore, will begin in July.

It will be very interesting to compare how this goes with the concurrent Anglo-Chinese project being developed by Ove Arup near Shanghai.

There’s been a lot written over the last couple of years about the latter:

• Wired: Pop-up cities
• The Guardian: British to help China build eco-cities
• China Digital Times: China’s Green Revolution
• IEEE Spectrum: How to build a green city

Between those, and other, articles, there’s a lot of detail available on the design of the new city, Dongtan, near Shanghai. The Tianjin project, on the other hand, seems to have generated lots of press releases, but as yet I can find very little detail on how the city will be designed, or how it’s expected to work. I get the impression that the project is still in its early stages as far as design is concerned, even if construction is will commence soon. There was an interesting piece in the Straits Times recently which mentioned, IIRC, that Singapore would be bringing its substantial knowledge of environmental technology to the project, but that the experience gained in the project would be fed back into future urban planning back home in Singapore - so the project is, in effect, an opportunity for Singapore to experiment with green design and architecture in China, see what works and what doesn’t, and use the winning lessons to re-design “the Garden City”. An interesting strategy from Singapore.

Tianjin isn’t far from Beijing, and I wanted to go there anyway. Perhaps I should make a trip in July…