Tackling the challenge of the world's swollen, unsustainable megacities

Bright lights, bigger city — much, much bigger. Already, more than half the world’s seven billion people live in urban areas, and estimates place that number to rise as high as 80 per cent of the population by the end of the century.

Even if, as some experts believe, the human population will max out by 2100 — Japan and Russia, two of the world’s most populous countries, are already facing a steep drop in birth rates — there is no question that cities are going to have to grow.

The question then is: Can we shape that growth, so that bigger is actually better?

“We’re in an extraordinary period of transition from what we would now think of as unsustainable forms of urbanization,” says Ken Greenberg, the former director of urban design and architecture for the City of Toronto and the author of Walking Home: The Life and Lessons of a City Builder. “Those are largely the legacy of the post—Second World War period — assumed unlimited supplies of cheap energy, heavy reliance on automobiles as a mode of transportation, not really paying attention to climate change — which we only dimly understood in terms of CO2 emissions and not understanding the public health issues around inactive lifestyles. Just a whole bunch of things that are problematic in terms of how we’ve developed cities.”

Greenberg explains that recent decades have seen urban design “go further and further upstream from the embellishment of the city streetscape — improvements, beautification, the look of the city — to fundamental problem-solving around topics such as mobility, energy, waste management and dealing with contamination of air, land and water from the previous centuries.”

Cities such as Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Malmö in Sweden, as well as Canadian developments like Toronto’s West Don Lands and Vancouver’s Coal Harbour, are “test beds functioning as R&D labs,” notes Greenberg. “They’re trying out as many ideas as they can, and they’re sharing information and ideas, so you could say it’s a collective learning curve,” he says.

“One of the best places to point to is Vancouver’s Southeast False Creek area,” suggests Rob Voigt, an urban planner who focuses on helping small- and mid-sized communities develop structures for healthy growth.

That “brownfield” development (repurposed former industrial property), built in 2010 to become Olympic Village, is now moving into a new chapter as an energy-efficient “green” mixed-use neighbourhood. Voigt sees it as a good example of the power of harmonizing top-down infrastructure planning and bottom-up sustainability policies. “It allowed the city to really come into itself with the next leap forward in sustainability at a grand scale. It’s very impressive,” he says.

Voigt’s own projects include recently helping Collingwood, Ont., to set guidelines for its growth. Having already protected its heritage downtown, the town wanted to take steps to ensure that any future growth “needed to feel and function like Collingwood always had.”

His task wasn’t to create an aesthetic rulebook, so that new buildings looked like the old buildings. “It wasn’t about mimicking that heritage. It wasn’t about building a Disney World,” he says. The goal was to enshrine the core principles of what makes a community livable.

“A lot of times, people go straight to the aesthetics,” says Voigt. “It’s too easy to be trend-oriented. Underneath that, there are very sound principles of what makes an environment comfortable for people.

“Regardless of what the materials are on a building, the scale and mass of that building, and its relationship to the street, you need to be able to create design regulations and policies to make sure you get those principles first and foremost. The real challenge is to then take policy statements, which are the big motherhood statements, and then successfully write the design standards that help form the three-dimensional world that we live in. Every word that we write, as planners, at some point becomes buildings and parks and the public realm.”

André Sorensen wants to know whether that same principle-based approach can be applied to cities that don’t even exist yet — and, in fact, are too big to even be considered cities.

Sorensen is a professor of urban geography at the University of Toronto Scarborough. He studies a new scale of urban growth that is bigger than even megacities — like Tokyo and Jakarta — which are defined as having populations of more than 10 million.

His current research focuses on China’s emerging class of massive, high-density regions that pack in between 120 and 150 million people, with average densities of up to 1,000 people per hectare. (Toronto’s density, by contrast, is a mere 42 people per hectare.) These areas are economic powerhouses too, accounting for more than 10 per cent of national GDP.

The Yangtze River Delta, the Pearl River Delta and the Beijing-Tianjin area, for example, are continuous urban webs, each one essentially a cluster of several megacities integrated with rural patches. But at this scale, even those relatively sparse rural areas have the population density of a fully built-up North American suburb. These places are big, and they’re growing fast, as much as 5 per cent per year.

Prof. Sorensen wants to know if urban areas of this unprecedented scale can be designed in order to address problems like pollution and congestion before they even start.

“To some degree, these are self-organizing systems where there aren’t central actors who are making big decisions,” he says. “The most important and long-lasting decisions are being made in decentralized ways by private actors — land developers, investors, people buying houses or buying goods, people making decisions about how to move about — that are feeding off each other. One person’s set of choices influences everyone else’s to some degree.

“So here’s the question we’re really seriously asking: Is there any way to plan such processes?”

Part of the answer, he says, lies in the past.

The Tokaido Megalopolis is a high-density urban web that stretches from Tokyo to Osaka. By the late 1960s, Tokaido was home to 50 million people — half the population of Japan. The area’s population is now shrinking, Prof. Sorensen says, creating an urban life cycle ripe with lessons germane to future growth.

Tokaido isn’t so much a case of best practices, he notes, “but a look at one way this has played out with pluses and minuses.”

Although the Japanese government had a very effective top-down planning system for Tokaido’s infrastructure — bullet trains, ports, highways, airports — Prof. Sorensen found that things were “unplanned, haphazard” at the neighbourhood level. An even bigger knock was the great cost to human health.

“In the 1960s, hundreds of people died and thousands grew up with genetic deformities from mercury pollution” says Prof. Sorensen. “There was an asthma crisis, tainted food from the pollution in the water and the air. It created a political crisis. There were large-scale environmental movements that almost toppled the majority government.”

Tokaido offers a hopeful lesson, however, in how the government responded to that outcry. “They created some very strict pollution regulations,” he says. “So it’s possible to solve those issues, if there’s political will.”

There won’t be a Canadian urban development equivalent to the Yangtze River Delta, or even close. Canada just doesn’t have the population or density. “We’re not going to take urban planning lessons from these places,” says Prof. Sorensen. “But how they grow is still of huge consequence to the world. The significance comes from the impact on global economic development and environmental impact. Over the next 30 years, world cities are going to more than double in area. That will have massive long-term impact on energy consumption, fossil fuel consumption and pollution generation. Cities are where most energy is consumed, and how you build your cities has a big impact on how efficient they are.”

Ken Greenberg expands on that perspective. “I would say there’s a pool of ideas in all these areas that is very ample and has been around for a long time. Now it’s all about how change can occur, and how you engage a variety of different parties — the public, the marketplace, the decision makers at a political level, municipal staff, property owners — in working together around a set of objectives in order to make these places come to life. It’s getting from the theory to the practice that is really the challenge now.”