'My father was not a farmer, but a parochial school teacher paid in part with free rent for a house on a plot with a third of an acre of garden.'

Working in garden. Falls Creek City Farmsteads, Nebraska. by Arthur Rothstein, May 1936, for the US Farm Security Administration. From the FSA-OWI (Office of War Information) Collection, Library of Congress, Washington DC.

I survived a great drought at an impressionable age, so I can provide some of the feelings associated with becoming a refugee from a Corn Belt township for comparison. Recovery from that status required a drastic change in economic policy beginning with the Roosevelt New Deal. My father was not a farmer, but a parochial school teacher paid in part with free rent for a house on a plot with a third of an acre of garden.

The rains were reduced to sprinkles in 1931, and held off until 1934. Crop yields declined seriously in the first year, so that our neighbors, a young married couple, had to hold an auction to sell their livestock and equipment and join the population of ‘experienced farm managers’, who were reduced to unemployed ‘hired hands’. The following year coincided with the depth of the economic Depression, and limited rain stressed the corn, making the stalks delectable to chinch bugs, thus causing almost a total loss of crops. My father’s salary was reduced 40% to $75 per month. By irrigating the garden from a deep well, the seven of us could barely subsist.

The following year began with dust storms. Father’s job disappeared altogether. We could not survive on the garden alone, even with cracked corn and oatmeal, normal staples for very poor people, provided by the government at a time that the grain price was hardly worth bringing it to market. In midwinter 1933 a government welfare worker helped us to the slums of the nearest industrial city, where we were assigned a vacated flat and a minimum sized subsistence check from the welfare rolls. I took on the purchasing task from an invalid mother, stretching $20 per month, with some distributions from agricultural surpluses, to feed the seven family members. We divided the food into equal portions. I, being the oldest and tallest, was described as being ‘skinny as a beanpole’.

Nevertheless, we felt better off overall than many of our neighbors. There was no allowance for school clothes, so my clothing came from hand-me-downs from an unlucky fellow parishioner who had died. We had to scrounge for cash. My mother baked home made bread, the kids sold ice cream in the streets, picked beans and asparagus for widows, and distributed hand bills for small change.

There was one huge plus factor in town life. The Library, endowed with funds from barbed wire profits, was free, warm in the winter, and cool in the summer. And it was only two short blocks away. Before leaving the village for the small city, I had perused almost all the supply of books available in the countryside. With the city’s large collection suddenly available, it was almost a straight shot to working one’s way through college. Half the boys in college during the depth of the Depression were working. In my rural district the two of us in my cohort, who had hopes of making that leap, recognized that it was virtually impossible, because no one had done it before from the Hinckley High School District, smallest in the State of Illinois.

Opportunities for Refugees in Asia

Obviously, I survived the drought, and found work that made the vision of becoming a scientist with a variety of interests possible. Thereafter, whenever I was working overseas for more than a month in a different country, I would look for the most promising path for a penniless, upwardly mobile person to rise the professional classes in that society.

In China of the twentieth century the tradition of standing for the government exams to qualify as imperial servants still existed, but entry was usually closed to non-urban youth. Gaining the respect of someone in the construction industry is now a more likely route to a good job in the city. Cities need construction workers and big projects must hire specialists. A migrant with a sharp eye should be able to detect an opportunity that enables him/her to stay on in the city.

A boy from a very poor village in India, subjected to repeated failures of the monsoon, must be the promising student of a dedicated teacher. A large extended family, with many households chipping in a little bit, enables the promising child to study for the university exams. If he/she succeeds, the family wins some glory, and the bright child acknowledges their support, but takes an urban job. If none is available, he/she returns home, hoping that something will turn up. Perhaps political connections would help, and someone in the extended family might acquire them, given the unpredictability of politics. The poorest, most desperate societies exhibit 1-3% upward social mobility, so there is always a tiny hope for betterment.

Prospective Citizens

Candidate sites for the proposed ‘drought-proof’ Truly Green Metropolis are to be found mostly in the West of China, in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Mongolia, parts of India where the monsoon frequently fails, and much of Africa on the fringes of the Sahara and Kalahari deserts. The people there have learned to cope with the extremes of their environments, but they are still often defeated.

After leaving their birthplaces, families typically construct temporary dwellings laid out like a squatter settlement with 8-18 sq. meters of living space per household. But they remain alert to employment opportunities, and hope to do better after resettling. Most of them profess to be Muslim, but many are Buddhist, Hindu, and even evangelical Christians, or followers of new prophets. Educational levels range up to middle school, with self-help additions likely to be accessible through the electronic media, a 'bootstrapping' approach to creating their new kind of civilization.

China has a special problem in planning a new city, because it will have a sex ratio of one male to about 0.7 females or less for the rest of this century, without a tradition of polyandry (Chun Jumhung, 2001). India has a similar bias against raising girl babies, but to half the extent of China. How will household compositions sort themselves out?

Charter and Finance for Startup

The principal concept underlying the formation of a green metropolis is the solution of a number of urban supply problems, most of them raising environmental issues that spill over national boundaries. The first large cities to be designed are expected to set standards to fit those that follow. Citizenship or membership may be much in demand, so could be auctioned off as a matter of fairness. Payment for the purchase of dwelling units could be in the form of public service. To be successful, institutions should be open, democratic and transparent, but workable and trustworthy.

The World Bank is an institution set up to pioneer the funding of important new categories of investments to promote development. It has recently become interested in advancing investments in education, health and infrastructure. The Bank has the credit and financial experience to swing the loans of a billion dollars or so for infrastructure, prior to speedy startup. The capital requirements of a truly green metropolis could be recovered through payments of residents during the first thirty years of operations, and probably in much less time.

Planning Phase for a Green City

A new city in a developing country has huge symbolic significance. The top politicians become involved, and so the national image is at stake. A new city must also help solve some pressing political problem, such as an increasingly restive floating population in China, for example. In India, overcrowding of Bombay could be relieved to allow its remarkable 'economic engine' to continue to boost the national economy. New cities often fail, however; and it is common for utopian thinkers to kidnap the project of building a new city, setting up experiments claimed to create the superior urban environment.

As a planner, I have been associated with various stages of a half dozen such buildups. Some did not get launched, and the remainder were disappointing; India received technical assistance for several which were also unrewarding. I attended a noisy meeting of the Indian Institute of Planners in 1966 when it was resolved never to accept another new town, free of charge, from a Western society, because ‘they did not work and failed even more dismally in India for Indians’. So an Indian consortium of architects, planners and engineers took on the industrial city for the Durgapur Metallurgical Complex. Ten years later it failed even more dismally to satisfy the workers and the managers. Success in new urban design is rare, requiring multidimensional observation, and learning as one proceeds. It is worth trying again, however, because partial successes, as in Islamabad, capital of Pakistan, can now be reshaped and improved.

New Kinds of Planning

Planning has left the drawing board and moved to the computer for a new century. Anything that has not been done before should be designed in modules of equipment and operations for replication thousands of times.

The Essentials

Kitchen gardens are essential for a green metropolis. They should be cantilevered out into space from the building wall to expose plants to sunlight, but can be retracted into the kitchen for planting and harvesting. Basically they are pads of flexible foam plastic, most likely polyurethane from discarded mattresses, resting on filament nets, and previously impregnated with the trace elements necessary for vigorous plant growth. Add a dozen approved pest controls, schedules for planting dates, and rules for irrigation regulation. The vegetable and seed producing experts can make fair guesses about optimal growing time, but close attention to density of planting, and immediacy of replanting could very well double the annual yield, as compared to a current market garden, because every bit of the surface is covered all of the time. The future home gardener, using the diluted, sterilized urine available from the household will apply it at root level. S/he would consult the multi-channel TV and DVDs for advice on implementing a new Green Revolution.

When families visit one another in their green apartments, the subject of vegetables could be expected to dominate the early small-talk: ‘What beautiful beans you are growing! Where did you find that huge flower in the middle?’ The urine collected in the house guarantees a lush green carpet. Because the vegetables selected for eating are picked daily and promptly replanted, they represent the physical and mental health of the household. About ten or twenty species of vegetables are sharing the sunlight at any given season (Schneider, 2001). The garden thrives outdoors, but it can also be covered with plastic sheet for protection from frost.

The other donation human residents make to the environment, the separated feces, would be dusted well with deodorant (probably a granulated, activated clay will be preferred), transferred to a public composting facility for several months, and thence to the surrounding soils. Migrants afflicted with faecophobia are not likely to choose to live in a Truly Green Metropolis. Fortunately they are not numerous among the most needy.

Table scraps would normally be saved for the small livestock grown for the premium banquets in the restaurants and food stalls at street level. Cottage cultured fish in these downtown locations would regard this recycled product as a treat. The silver and golden carp can put on a great show jumping for favorite morsels at feeding time. Doves, peacocks, rabbits, pheasants, even ordinary chickens can add to the entertainment and decoration on the streets.

Potable water would be sold in conveniently sized containers, competing with cold drinks and ice cubes at the small end, and the ration for shower baths at the other. Filtered water can be accepted by dishwashers, and automat laundries. A water market comprising different water qualities at prices that vary according to scarcity is likely to be established. Water recycling technology is already well known, but until now, little used. The price of water would depend upon the amount stored in reserves, but weather forecasts of heavy storms could cause a sharp drop in the water bill due to prospects of a seasonal water surplus. That might also trigger a quick boost in water-demanding crops, such as sugar cane, lettuce, and rice.

Investment Strategy for Human Resources

A worker’s time would be similarly modularized in a Truly Green City. Researchers at the UN University have made an important recommendation for reducing poverty while urbanizing is in process. All non-supervisory jobs in the industries and trades requiring some training for public safety (butcher, baker, brickmaker, engine driver, paramedic, etc.) should be split in half to make a ‘livelihood'. If instituted all over the world this would pay enough for subsistence support for 1.5 - 2.5 people at local prices, and would eliminate the sense of hopelessness and desperation created by the large pool of unemployment. Workers could use their other half-time to acquire qualifications for other livelihoods, while perhaps half of them would voluntarily elect secondary or higher education.

It would take two livelihoods to support an average family. Taxes and medical services could be adjusted to be fair. This is a policy also suited for an aging society, where half-time jobs enable retirees to be self-supporting, so it can be institutionalized as a partial substitute for pensions that 'sick' organizations are unable to pay to pension-off long term employees in China and India. A large share of the labor force released by agriculture can be absorbed by jointly planned productive investment in education and training that develops human resources. When questions are raised about job-sharing among surpluses of college graduates, the solutions depend upon society-wide issues. In the past second class graduates became clerks, schoolteachers, salespersons, and self-employed entrepreneurs. It is possible to be more fair with a single policy and then gain efficiency by finding the right person for new job openings.

Temporary Housing for Permanent Shelter

One of the most intractable problems encountered by city planners when building the structures of a new city is the accumulation of temporary construction workers and service personnel working with them, expecting that they would be dismissed when the job was finished. The standard method of preparing for the job at hand (allowing the labor the contractors hire to squat in temporary quarters) did not work well. In a couple years the shacks became homesteads for families, some with political connections. When the contract was completed, most households refused to move. Planners found that the neat, orderly city that they had envisioned was surrounded by a trashy collar of chaos and congestion, This, for example, was a visitor’s first impression of Brasilia, the new capital of Brazil, which was designed by invited Europeans. The typical solution in India was to raise a fence to cordon off the actual site. It disabled the surrounding territory, because the fabric of village life had been severed. The fence had to be defended most strongly at the gate, which was the principal checkpoint. Outside the gates bazaars quickly developed, brothels flourished, and moneylenders appeared who depended upon strong-armed goondas to help with loan collection. The peripheral markets had superior variety of goods to those shops assigned space inside, so at least on special, celebratory occasions like weddings, women were forced to shop in an unsavory locale. Islamabad succeeded to a major extent because it created an umbilical cord which depended upon services to workers in a nearby city, who were encouraged to learn from each other and patronized its markets. Islamabad authorities also required construction workers to arrive to the new townsite by bus.

Urban living eventually came to the Pakistani capital many years after its occupation. A Saturday market, permitted one day a week on the the school grounds for Afghani refugee business people, was expedited by the town planning unit. Originally an act of desperation, the impromptu bazaar converted into a social asset and was given a permanent status More recently, in China, the new city Shenchen leaned upon adjacent Hong Kong in the same way for early supports.

The 'Sweat Equity' Option for New Citizens

These hard-won experiences offer no fully tested solution for building a sustainable green city in a drought prone area. The best hope in China is to set up a competition between experienced design and building firms by starting high-rise residential structures in a way that residents can learn from each other. Then the first floors finished could be lived in while the upper floors are being completed. Newly trained workers should earn 'sweat equity’ by working on buildings in which they are paying down on a share and managing a cooperative The location could be conveniently close to spaces evolving into permanent markets, clinics and providers of training. The very first floors would probably be built by young people without families while they lived temporarily in tents or temporary barracks. They would be working with bricks, concrete, glass, steel, wire, plastic tubing and many kinds of fibre and foam. Surface coatings with both traditional and modern wear-resistant films will protect many interiors. Brightly colored flooring could be asphalt tile cushioned, and thermally insulated with foam for foot comfort.

Living space for a household would be kept at the lowest sizes and qualities initially, aided by built-in features. Beds are often three-deckers and the commodes also serve as misty spray baths. Staying cramped, lacking visible extra space, provides a reason to keep the relatives from moving in and overcrowding service facilities. Experience in poor settlements shows that when space is rented at a comfortable 6 sq. meters per capita, it tends to be reduced later to meet pressing obligations, which pushes crowding down to 2.5 sq. m. per capita. As families accumulate savings and assets, they may bid for lease of neighboring space.

A growing urban ecosystem approaching the size of a metropolis, which has a life cycle on the order of centuries or millennia, contains many levels of living and organization, and each has its own set of development scenarios progressing from birth, growth, maturity to decline, death and replacement.

The mass drama begins with the surplus population of young men, and some women, from the countryside, whose prospects are homelessness for a lifetime in the hinterland. As migrants, they have no rights to stay in the established cities. Sex ratios in China are so skewed there are two men in their cohort for each woman available for marriage. The law and traditions reduce the surplus every year. Insufficiency of brides exists in other regions where new cities are needed to provide homes for the homeless. The smuggling of young women across political boundaries promises to become an increasing international human rights issue, in addition to becoming increasingly profitable, especially if the women find employment that can be generated in cities.

With qualifications for alternative livelihoods, and a strong social network, temporary jobs can result in a permanent niche for a jack-of-many-trades' with a stable household. A young ambitious male who handles academic examinations well might get into the educated scientific professional stream, and thereby qualify to become a permanent urban citizen; but that would be an illustrious career open to only a dozen or so immigrants each year for a million size metropolis.

Urban Environments for Growing Organizations, Firms and Industries

Cities sustain themselves by producing goods and a multitude of services for export. People in them are taught by innovating entrepreneurs how to manufacture garments or vehicles, or design services like insurance or entertainment that will be less costly, or recognized to be of higher quality, so the world’s consumers will prefer the products from a special up-and-coming firm to those of its competitors. It takes vision and drive to organize the production and sales. In Asia the entrepreneurial insights come in families, frequently from an ethnic minority. In Africa women are brought up to be better entrepreneurs and managers than the men. Their roles have been limited by cultural prescriptions which tend to prevent them from building larger organizations than household size, but the efforts of NGOs (non-governmental organizations) are changing this pattern.

Consider, for a moment, a person in our city who sees a future market niche, perhaps because he was associated with the initial design of the 'no-flush toilet' equipment. She or he sets out to manufacture it for the world market, reaching a capacity of perhaps 100,000 units per year for apartments, public baths, and public toilets. In addition, about 1000 people would be employed full-time to work with automatic molding machines. S/he would need a line of credit going beyond a million dollars, a site for manufacturing operations, and sponsorship of the government agency promoting foreign trade.

That output would consume only a few thousand tons of plastic raw material per year, which is not enough to justify a plant for integrating a bulk plastics polymerization facility. Perhaps another thousand employees would be engaged in sales and distribution. The bulk of the plastic would have to be shipped in from Taiwan or Shanghai by the same routes the boxed product would be shipped out.

These order-of-magnitude calculations based upon industrial economics suggest that new employment in a green metropolis must follow the path by which China already dominates world trade in light manufacturing, where textiles and garments are replaced by light machinery, electric, electronic, and otherwise. Thus the new city must manufacture for export at cut rates if it is to mature. The competitive advantage is primarily that of greater satisfaction with performance, and agility with emerging opportunities exhibited by assiduous local entrepreneurs.

People can be guided by incentives shaped by the enforcement of rules and crystallize into a form of peaceable settlement that absorbs new flows for decades on end. What visual form might such a settlement take after expending a million lifetimes? What kind of vision can its leaders, both homegrown and self-appointed, impart to it?

Securities for Financing Rural Pensions

Where will the money come from? The Chinese government belatedly awakened to the need for pensions for rural workers and the complications that arise when attempting to do the socially just thing. This is not as easy as one might think in a society that is exceedingly poor. The first attempt requested at least $2.40 per month being paid in before collecting and matching funds for subsistence payments. However, farm families did not trust local government to manage and disburse such accounts.

Another objection was that rates of return on savings in rural, non growth areas of 2-3 percent were too low for pensioners to subsist. The Center for Employment and Security of Qinghua University was asked to make a market in insurance and property investments where the return in China would normally range from 6-8 percent. Thus a tidy combination can be achieved between the wants of the elders and the youth of rural origins who urgently need to grasp urban opportunities. Poor people dream of security through acquiring property. A home of ones own will transform a desperate radical into a stodgy conservative, and will induce a constructive program with the reasonable hope for such a future.

Urban Design for a Green Metropolis

A new metropolis will grow naturally around two centers. The first is a central marketplace, or bazaar, which offers perishable foods, packaged edibles, clothing, household equipment, and the repair services of artisans. Streets are narrow, and primarily for pedestrians and pedlars. The other center may build up around city hall, which is the source of all permits and licenses, including marriages, births, and titles to property. Clinics, and then a hospital with a cluster of pharmacists to supply medicine, will set up somewhere nearby. A computer alley would squeeze in next to gates of a university to sell the latest software. A museum or two in the background would open their exhibits to scholars, students and tourists. The street pattern for this emerging center would be more generous, perhaps including a couple of tree-lined boulevards, one of them connecting with the airport by a formal route designed for ‘very important persons’. A four star hotel is most likely to find an imposing site along that route (Lin. 2002).

Growing a metropolis with an exterior that stays green in all seasons (people's kitchen gardens) as high as the eye can reach, is already unique, so it needs much less to distinguish itself among its peers. Its arts are limited by education and the earthiness of the first generation of inhabitants, small farmers anchored to stingy land, herders lacking forage, and nomads seeking places to settle for a while. The urban environment offers opportunities to grow neighborhoods and associations for propagating new cultural achievements rapidly.
Planners and officials wishing to influence cultural growth have an advantage in the early days of settlement, because they can disseminate many more images of feasible futures in print, in lessons, and over television than have ever been available before. Those that are economically affordable and attractive are likely to be embraced with enthusiasm, and people's pride in their new 'home of their own' will advance the future of the rising new settlement.

In the huge residential highrise structures of a Truly Green City large, extended families may be encouraged to outline the perpendicular wall boundaries of their family homesteads with colors or lights, for example. Although monuments to leading families and institutions, such as banks, could reach the skyline, the view lines from the kitchen gardens would soon be overwhelmed by the growing mass of new leafy green structures reaching the horizon.

The Australian Power Tower

(EnviroMission Ltd's Power Tower and Solar Mission Project was widely reported in the popular press in late 2002.)

A good guess about future urban form can be attained by reviewing the body of world knowledge and subtracting from that the typical implementation and maintenance failures already evident in contemporary government. However, a new concept for energizing a green metropolis, the Australian Power Tower, could add to quality of life in drought prone regions, which have more than their share of sunlight, wind and dust(The Economist, November 2, 2002).

The Australian team proposes that the Power Tower be very tall (one kilometre or 3,300 feet high) so it can take advantage of the strong draft produced by the prevailing higher-altitude winds. The draft could then be tapped with a turbine to produce electrical power in cities where it is most needed. Instead of being located on a wind farm far-distant from energy consumers, the generators could be right in the centre of the city surrounded by energy consumers. Such a setting would save on distribution costs.

The partial vacuum the draft would create introduces added benefits. The tower could, for instance, suck out noxious pollutants from the daytime operation of diesel-powered machines and primitive vehicle engines, delivering them for dilution in the high winds well above the earth's surface. It could also collect and expel air heated from contact with sun-drenched pavements, thus adding to the comfort of the city's inhabitants. Aggravating dust could also be captured along the way. Finally, the chimney/tower could offer a site for antenna connecting with communications satellites in outer space and cellphones on the planet's surface. The Power Tower therefore has a great future, if it can be designed to withstand peak windstorms.

The ultimate vision

The primary vision of city planners is to promote a sustainable environment with freedom and justice for all. Such a city should be healthy and long-lived. It should be prosperous, but not wasteful. It should provide safety and security from natural disasters for all its inhabitants. With foresight and risk prevention the construction of such an environments is now possible. For the millions of people who are expected to become homeless in coming decades, a green metropolis should provide the strong satisfaction of having a place that could be called 'a home of one's own' that might remain in the possession of family members for generations. With appropriate collaboration between local and global planners, such a successful scenario could be developed and implemented.

The outcome from this approach is expected to be an urban ecosystem that increases in resiliency over time.



Notes

The observation that the customary community subsistence level income for an organized craft could normally keep at least two persons alive, but not a full size family, has been rediscovered in many locales, but the idea of declaring it a livelihood and using it as an easily understood tool of management for urbanization was found at seminars held by the United Nations University.

References

Andersson, Ingvar, and Hannan, Carolyn, (2002) Gender perspectives on ecological sanitation, p.61. Please also see Esrey, Steven, et al ‘Ecological Sanitation for Food Security’, The Water Page, August/September 2002.]

Brown, Kathryn, (2002) 'Water Scarcity: Forecasting the Future with Spotty Data,' Science , 297,926-7, 2002.

Chu Junhong, (2001) 'Prenatal sex determination and sex selective abortion in rural central China', Population and Development Review 27, 259-82.

Jenkins, Joseph, (2001) Humanure Handbook, White River Jc2, Vermont.

Jian Yu, (2002) 'Food scraps make perfect (edible) plastics', Environmental Science and TechnologyDOL 10. 1021 ff, 2002.

Li Ziang, (2001) Strangers In the City: Recognition of Space, Power Social Networks Within China’s Floating Population, Stanford.

Lin, George C.S. (2002) 'The growth and structural change of Chinese cities: a contextual and geographic analysis', Cities 19, No 5, October 2002.

Mahasine, Aurora, Studies on the Greening of Perpendicular Urban Spaces, http://www.tesselation.com.

'Multi-Level Systems for Accelerating Urban Reform in China', International Journal for Housing Science and its Applications 26, 2002, 87-97.

Nair, P.K.R. (2001) 'Do tropical home gardens elude science?', Agroforestry Systems, 53,239-45, 2001.

Schneider, Elizabeth, (2001) Vegetables from Amaranth to Zucchini, New York, Harper Collins.

Wong Grace and Kwame Addae-Depaak, (2002) 'Age in Place: Is Home Modification a Viable Solution in Singapore?' International Journal for Housing Science and its Applications, 26.

Zai Liang (2001) 'The Age of Migration in China', Population and Development Review, 29, 499-524.


Copyright Richard L. Meier.
Fixed March 20, 2003.


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