ReNew Town

Adaptive Urbanism and the Low Carbon Community

Andrew Scott, Eran Ben-Joseph

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136580307
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architettura
• Subtopic: Pianificazione urbana e paesaggistica

ReNew Town puts forth an innovative vision of performative design and planning for low-carbon sustainable development, and illustrates practicable strategies for balancing environmental systems with urban infrastructure and new housing prototypes.

To date, much of the discourse on the design of sustainable communities and 'eco-cities' has been premised on using previously undeveloped land. In contrast, this book and the project it showcases focus on the retrofitting and adaptation of an existing environment – a more common problem, given the extent of the world's already-built infrastructure.

Employing a 'research through design' model of inquiry, the book focuses on large-scale housing developments – especially those built around the world between the 1960s and the early 1980s – with the aim of understanding how best to reinvent them. At the center of the book is Tama New Town, a planned community outside Tokyo that faces a range of challenges, such as an aging population, the deterioration of homes and buildings, and economic stagnation.

The book begins by outlining a series of principles that structure the ecological and energy goals for the community. It then develops prototypical solutions for designing, building and retrofitting neighborhoods. The intent is that these prototypes could be applied to similar urban conditions around the world.

ReNew Town is the product of a collaborative design research project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) School of Architecture and Planning, and Japan's Sekisui House LTD.

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Part 1:
Sustainable
Initiatives

Research in Context

Assumptions

Introduction

In 1927, while designing Radburn, New Jersey, Clarence Stein called for a “revolution in planning.” He challenged existing practices that were geared toward facilitating automobile circulation and proposed a “radical revision of the relation of houses, roads, paths, gardens, parks, blocks, and local neighborhoods.” ¹ Stein's call for change is as relevant today as it was eighty years ago. For many years, a false perception of unlimited natural resources and technological prowess has persisted. The apparent abundance of resources, combined with the seemingly limitless abilities of technology, has long been believed to be sufficient to control the consequences of unchecked urban growth. Only in recent years have we begun to recognize that resources are finite, and that technological fixes often cause problems greater than those they are intended to solve. Faced with these limitations, we can ill afford to apply engineered solutions indiscriminately. We must now discover how to do more with less, how to successfully design with nature, and how to ecologically design our communities to take full advantage of the “free work” of environmental systems. If we agree to embrace the goals of reducing our negative impacts on the environment and maximizing the ingrained social and economic benefits associated with ecology, we might expect a golden age of retrofitting, in which our worn-out housing, aging infrastructure, and depleted energy supply are renewed by ingenious design solutions.

In that spirit, the objective of this project is to propose a model of community and housing design that strives for zero net energy, carbon neutrality, and reduced ecological impacts. Concepts such as adaptability, flexibility, and information technology integration are also important parts of the investigation. These aspects are seen as crucial in enhancing livability and maintaining self-reliance in the context of rapid demographic change and tenuous environmental conditions.

Recent, high-profile efforts to address similar concerns have largely relied on the creation of new developments in open, unbuilt green-field areas. The sheer conversion of natural areas for development, however, runs counter to the notion of long-term ecological resilience and sustainability. Rather, an emphasis should be placed on the transformation and retrofitting of existing cities and suburbs. This is crucial as cities across parts of Asia, Africa, and South America enter an unprecedented phase of exponential growth, while an opposite trend of infrastructure deterioration and population decline is emerging in many of the world's post-industrial nations.

This effort focuses on a planned new town, Tama, built in the 1970s outside of Tokyo, Japan. However, the issues, challenges, and opportunities explored are not unique to this place; indeed, Tama epitomizes the modern shrinking city phenomenon. It is our hope that the lessons learned, as well as the actual processes of analysis and design represented in this work, will help to inform similar interventions throughout the world where urban expansion trends have reversed and previously thriving new developments are falling into physical, social, and ecological disrepair.

The project and this book propose a different way of approaching the planning and design process, by making a leap across disciplinary boundaries and scales. The program begins by addressing the broader issues of urban sustainability and the challenges of retrofitting communities for a new low carbon future; it then progresses to applied prototypes and their related design outcomes. Additionally, environmental issues and broader demographic and socio-economic factors that impact the notions of sustainability in communities are identified and addressed. The applied prototypes comprise a range of integrated design solutions for housing, mobility, land use, agriculture production, and energy generation. The performance levels of these solutions are made explicit through metrics associated with reductions in energy consumption and carbon reduction over time.

A key aspect of the methodology of the design research was finding the means to measure performance at an urban scale and enabling these results to influence design concepts and strategies. The major infrastructural systems of mobility, energy, water, solid waste, and green space were researched for their potential to deliver significant reductions in carbon and energy over a 40-year period and then used as integrated metrics to influence design decisions.

The project teams developed four coordinated planning concepts to shape the transformation of the site through the future; they include various prototypes for low, medium, and higher density housing. Each prototype was designed to adapt to future growth and reconfiguration; to facilitate on-site solar energy generation; to provide for water detention, storage, recycling, and treatment; to support food production; to utilize ecological construction techniques; and to incorporate mobility infrastructures.

Projected results from the proposals include up to 80 per cent reduction in household energy consumption by 2050, an increase in solar power generation of 111 per cent, and a distribution of 40 persons per car through shared mobility scheme.

1. Stein, Clarence S. 1951. Toward New Towns for America. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press. P. 42

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Research in Context

Research Through Design

New Towns + Shrinking Cities

Research Through Design

Balancing infrastructural systems with urban community prototypes.

Tama New Town, as a commuter suburb of Tokyo, was constructed in the early 1970s and follows a model and pattern of post 2nd World War suburban redevelopment commonly seen both in Japan and in Europe, most notably with the rise of the British new town movement. It was constructed in a time when issues of sustainability and ecology in urbanism were far from being part of the discourse. Land was carved and tabled with little regard or understanding of the natural systems to make way for the new urban housing, while rivers and water courses were buried so few signs would remain of the natural topography of the region. Instead, Tama was seen as the escape from the density of the emerging mega-city, to a place that afforded a better quality of life, social condition, and the benefits of rapid transportation as a commuter community. In archived material from the time, families can be seen lining up to get a slice of this new suburban lifestyle.

Fast-forward 40 years and Tama New Town is having to rethink itself. It is a commuter suburb with an ageing demographic, little vibrant industry; a place where few young people want to live, a city that has run up a vast budget deficit as the administrations struggles to keep afloat with the cost of city services, and where about 20 per cent of the rental housing units remain unoccupied. Is the city capable of rethinking its physical form such that it can exist for another 40 years to the year 2050 and beyond? If it can, what should it aspire to be such that all age groups want to live there again – what is the new vision for this urban community that also ties into national goals for sustainability, climate change, and carbon reduction? How can it be truly sustainable in social, economic, and environmental terms and be retrofitted such that it is a model for the many other decaying modern urban communities that are similar to Tama New Town?

The work in this book represents a body of research that attempts to make headway on the issues of how to design and build sustainable communities – and retrofit, re-model, re-conceive, or re-shape them according to a set of clearly defined local, national, or international environmental targets. The challenge in this work as research lies in the multiscaled, interdisciplinary nature of the exercise. It becomes about interactions that stem from a series of design decisions about a variety of systems, from infrastructure and mobility to industry, to housing, to density, to the deployment of productive open space, to energy systems, water and waste streams. As design, it is focused upon integrating and balancing the various ideas and systems such that they also make a great place to live, work, and to play; all contributing the rebuilding of an urban community that can thrive and be sustainable in the broadest definition of the term.

The first stages of working with Tama New Town (Parts One and Two), which acted as an introduction to the problem, resulted in a series of speculations about what it might take to sustain the urban community in the broadest sense of the word. Instead of approaching sustainability as a pre-condition related to just the environmental demands, what emerged from the work was a series of analysis and conjectures around the root causes of the community's long-term problems. Examples range from addressing the issues of gender balance and employment opportunities in the workforce, to having a physical framework of uses and programs that can mesh more productively to generate synergies; from examining and refiguring the resources, waste flows, and metabolism in the community, to making the physical topography and landscapes connect more effectively to the region's ecological system; from creating more local identity and ownership of community with the housing areas to examining potential densities as a condition for zero carbon. These studies raised essential questions about how to address the problem of urban retrofitting while also introducing conversations about the scope of the environmental agenda – and resulted in a subsequent rigorous study, through a design studio, of the appropriate conditions for implementing ecologically oriented development.

The second stage of investigation (Part Three) is a series of prototypical design studies into potential solutions for physical and social transformation of the 43 hectare Nagayama area of Tama New Town into a new community of 10,000 residents for the year 2050. Carbon was used as a common metric for balancing the environmental systems on the assumption that it will become the common currency in measuring unified performance. The design assignment, fundamentally, was to re-vision the form of the community for the next 40 years – and to develop and speculate upon the various environmental principles that this community should aspire to achieve. In order to achieve a high level of integration between the design prototypes and metrics for achieving quantifiable sustainability goals, the work includes a series of scenarios for the progressive reduction of carbon through the design of the infrastructural systems of energy, land, water, and mobility – and then to explore the means by which these establish criteria or conditions for the design of housing at various densities. The intention has not been to propose a fixed and rigid plan – but to develop a flexible set of conditions and an adaptable framework for achieving a new qualitative vision for the area where a diverse population wants to live, together with quantitative environmental and social targets for sustaining the community.

New Towns + Shrinking Cities

The building of new towns is often associated with utopian ideals and reactions against existing conditions. By the late 19th century, city life and urban conditions had become intolerable: disease, filth, overcrowding, and poor housing were the norm. The environmental chaos of the central city became linked to the social problems of urban life. Reformers argued that social disorder, which was bound to occur, would be best disciplined by proper environmental conditions. As reformers realized the difficulties in attaining inner city improvements, many started advocating multi-centered growth patterns. Dispersal of population from the city center was seen as the perfect solution to the urban dilemma. Suburbanization was seen as a vital force in not only urbanizing the countryside, but also in revitalizing the city. In Ebenezer Howard's 1902 Garden Cities of To-morrow, for example, a vision of town living was presented where networks of communities are set away from large cities, residents have access to verdant countryside, jobs are local, and the town is economically self-sustaining and propagating. This “Garden City” ideal took many shapes and forms across the globe, from small villages to large sprawling suburbs, to new satellite cites. In Britain, Howard's ideal of “a town designed for healthy living and industry; of a size that makes possible a full measure of social life, but not larger; surrounded by a rural belt,” morphed into a legislative agenda that produced over 30 new towns across Britain and Ireland from 1940s until the late 1970s.¹

With the unprecedented post-war economic growth worldwide and massive population influx to major metropolitan areas in North America, Europe, and Japan, the development of new towns in outlying areas was seen as the solution to accommodating housing needs. New towns sought to offer an alternative “urban” lifestyle for a population intent on avoiding or escaping the overcrowded city centers. In general these towns followed similar design and planning principles:

• All were planned before construction began.

• Most integrated a mixture of low and high-rise residential housing, with some townhouses and cluster developments.

• Most employed separated ways for pedestrian and vehicular traffic.

• Neighborhoods were grouped to include schools, shopping and community facilities, and common green spaces for recreational use.

• Public transportation, both within the community and between it and the nearest metropolitan area, was incorporated.

New towns based on these principles sprang up all over the world. From Russia to Australia, from Argentina to Japan, new towns held the promise of balanced and self-contained communities, tight-knit neighborhoods, cutting-edge urban design, and an abundance of open green spaces. However, amidst the euphoria of accelerated progress, little thought was given to possible futures beyond growth. Now, suburban areas in a number of developed countri...