What does it mean to be a nature lover?

Iceland is a country with the purest air and water I’ve ever experienced. No restaurant asks if you want tap, bottled or sparkling water – there’s no need; the rare smoker seems more illogical than ever. The land was made by accretion of which 30 volcanic systems remain active and by the rifting of two tectonic plates. As such, the country blurs any definition distinguishing the land from the landscape. It can only be called sublime existing at the very limit of human perception. Any presentation of travel photographs would have to be silent as words are inadequate to describe what you see. As such, it questions if being a nature lover extends beyond acts of breathing the air, drinking the water, hiking the mountains and viewing the scenery.

Glaciers, geysers, waterfalls, volcanic moraines, black sand beaches, hot springs, lava fields and floating icebergs on clear lakes make up the geography with each type appearing in rapid bursts as you travel on the narrow, mostly paved, ring road. Less than a quarter of the land area is vegetated with small farms and pastures on coastal plains that appear inserted between the finger-like fiords and bays. The only crop is hay which is grown over a short two-month season to feed the sheep, cattle and horses through the long winter. The fishing industry is extensive and the salmon, trout and cod are as fresh as I’ve ever tasted. Compact cottages are clustered in villages or surround developed city centers such as Reykjavik, the capital where two-thirds of the population of 320,000 people live. On the northern coast is Akureyn, a university town with a botanic garden containing diverse plants capable of growing in this temperate climate. The Gulf Stream (North Atlantic Current) maintains temperate temperatures year round although the country is just south of the Arctic Circle.

Icelanders have the fourth highest life expectancy (OECD) and enjoy socialized education and health care, and have the highest rate of internet access of any country. The lack of pollution is due to their natural resources: hot springs are taped for geothermal with the remaining power generated by hydroelectric plants. The country was deforested centuries ago and soil conservation is a significant problem. Stands of trees have been planted, but grow slowly. The traveler is more likely to see a forest of rock piles with a sign that advises visitors to add another for good luck. A culture of independence and self-sufficiency has supported a strong literary tradition of epic stories called sagas, and a claim that ten percent of the people today will publish a book (Wilcox and Latif, Cultures of the World: Iceland, 2007: 61).

In the past, survival meant understanding, not controlling, this challenging environment. Today, appreciating the landscape means yielding to the quiet, the endless light in the summer and darkness in the winter, and the visual complexity of dynamic geology while knowing the land neither loves human occupiers nor acknowledges our presence. For people to love this powerful nature, one must accept our insignificance.

Reinventing Cities

Recent news about Detroit filing for bankruptcy protection has the echo of other American cities that were in financial crisis during the 1980s recession. Design students who sleep through their history classes have little comprehension that the vibrant city life they now enjoy hasn’t always existed. Modern societies have done much to sanitize urban operations with paved streets replacing mud, zoning to exclude smelly, noisy and polluting industry, tree-planting programs to shade walkways, and waterfront restoration projects for water-related recreational activities. Many reasons, including extensive social welfare programs and an insidious drug trade, threatened the economic stability of cities such as New York where crime and general degradation made public parks and places unsafe and therefore unused. Projects such as Bryant Park in Manhattan and Meridian Hill Park in Washington, DC developed strategies for public/private partnerships that instilled a sense of civic stewardship required to restore these amenities supporting beneficial urban life.

Efforts such as these are part of the reinvention of American cities along with functioning public transit systems, increased densities, and diverse services within walkable distances. Cities that have high-quality public schools are able to retain young professionals who enjoyed city life when single, and now have young families to educate. However, the situation in Detroit is beyond typical remedies. Massive debt (over 18 billion dollars) and the erosion of its tax base have forced the insolvent city to file for bankruptcy protection setting up renegotiations with creditors and pension fund managers. The downward spiral has been exasperated by a non-existent housing market and minimal municipal services. Detroit also has a weak cultural heritage unlike New Orleans where restoration efforts on a grand scale after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina are ongoing.

Other cities have suffered extreme devastation and prevailed. Setting aside concern for human suffering, the Great Fire of London in 1666 cleared medieval slums and allowed the central core to be rebuilt with wider streets and new building codes mandating the use of non-combustible materials. Paris never experienced such a fire, but anticipated it in the 1860s giving vast power to Baron Haussmann who widened and straightened medieval streets into boulevards, and constructed extensive water and sewer infrastructure projects. In 1871, the Great Chicago Fire burned over three square miles of the city core made up primarily of wooden structures clearing the way for a building boom of newly-devised skyscrapers.

Detroit’s recovery will depend on the reconsideration of its social systems and turning its dysfunctional suburbs into urban farms. Creditors want to sell assets including the art at the Detroit Institute of Arts, but what if instead the Institute became a national beacon attracting artists to the city. If the city provided inexpensive housing in the central district, organized farmer’s markets and had excellent public schools, people would come. Work, eat, learn – when a city supports the simple needs of a productive life, people want to live there. More economic maneuvering only fuels the negative economic spiral. People can make a positive creative spiral.

Scale: Part 3 - Environmental Concerns in China

The recent development of China’s cities provides lessons for densification that is being promoted for American cities. The trick, of course, is improvement without losing the beneficial qualities of the past. Clear-cutting neighborhoods for new development loses the rich texture of a city with historic neighborhoods. Just as a tree plantation cannot replicate a forest, ecological diversity is hard to design and must be allowed to grow. Nevertheless, China’s determination to densify their cities has required and received governmental commitment to build mass-transit systems and improve roads, to upgrade water and sewer systems, and to provide electrical power. What has been lost are the bicycles and the civic scale this kind of transport supports.

Another consequence is the pollution of the air and waterways. China has rich deposits of coal, unfortunately the soft bituminous kind that burns producing more carbon dioxide pollution. A vast majority of China’s power is supplied by coal fuel, both at the local and industrial scale. Mostly unregulated, coal mining is unsafe and many injuries occur. Air quality is reported on daily weather reports on a scale from excellent to severely polluted with all fifteen major cities identified with ambiguous color coding that shows a moderately polluted to worse range, along with a website that is inaccessible outside the country. In cities the smog is constant and many wear masks almost as a fashion accessory. Many more develop a “Beijing cough” after a few days in the city, and the countryside provides little relief.
  

China's climate includes seasonal monsoons. Attempts to control coastal flooding has prompted channelizing the three primary rivers of which the Three Gorges Dam has been successful in this regard, but like all civil engineering projects, they require a commitment for maintenance. Pressure to industrialize, especially in nearby villages with cheap labor, have allowed manufacturing practices that pollute. Given lax inspections and the lack of judicial recourse, violations occur. For instance, the Shanghai Daily reported on 18 April 2013 that villagers east of Zhejiang province in Lanxi City have protested that an aluminum factory has caused excessive pollution and fluoride poisoning resulting in a cancer cluster, but the government response was that “waste discharges meet national environmental standards.”

The economic drivers that have produced the recent “modernization” have occurred on the back of the Chinese people to the detriment of the environment. John Bryan Starr in Understanding China (2010, page 214) notes that sixteen million areas of arable land has become desert due to deforestation since 1949 with more lost to converting farmland for development and its supporting infrastructure. Given the limited amount of land suitable for farming and the growing population, it is alarming to think of the ecological and social consequences of China’s recent development. One landscape architecture firm, Turenscape in Beijing, is responding with public projects that clean polluted water in un-channelized waterfront parks with plants including productive crops. The health of the Chinese people and the global impact of failing to responsibly manage natural resources will be the true evidence of progress in this ancient, fascinating and important country.

Scale: Part 2 - Public Space in China

Having been to the three largest cities in China, several impressions are consistently revealing about life in public spaces in these dense cities. While some effort to preserve historic neighborhoods, such as Beijing’s hutongs, is supported with on-going repairs and tourist related services, the way of life is essentially gone. For centuries multiple generations lived in courtyard compounds with social structures based on intimate proximity, impossible to duplicate in typical apartment complexes. Public parks at historic sites are sometimes restricted for use by retired people at prime times, who gather there to practice dancing and singing, and to exercise. The grass lawns are closed off, but paved areas in the shade are popular and these provide space for the social activities that have survived.

Clearly re-planting projects are part of infrastructure development. Highways are bordered by dense vegetation with the look of American office park design that will improve as it matures. These landscapes block views of the surrounding developed areas or of community gardens on land that will eventually be developed. Green roofs are rare, but most new buildings have flat roofs and may be added later. Streets, such as in Shanghai’s French Concession, are lined with mature sycamore trees that provide welcome relief from the overwhelming scale of the nearby business districts.

Historic gardens, such as the 16^th-century Yu Yuan Gardens in Shanghai, are open to the public and have attracted preservation of the surrounding district made up of low stone and brick buildings used for shopping boutiques and restaurants. Housing in these charming neighborhoods is extremely expensive, and most people live in the high-rise apartments, discussed in Part 1 of this series.

The scale of these public spaces contrasts sharply with recent construction of tall skyscrapers whose height rivals any throughout the world. What is missing in the city is the parochial scale as discussed by Lyn Lofland. Housing developments are linked together by the mass-transit system that most use because owning a car is expensive and the traffic is perpetually congested. Because the government subsidizes housing, developers have little incentive to provide the amenities needed to support social communities. People new to the neighborhood get to know each other in several ways. Taking children to playgrounds brings people with shared interests together, but only the elementary schools are local and many children are sent to boarding schools for higher education. Dog walkers are unusual. Public parks are provided on a city not neighborhood scale. Perhaps the government is leery of unsupervised public gathering for protest that might occur in such places, or it is just too soon. One type of public space might be used to greater advantage is the network of elevated pedestrian walkways that allow people to safely cross the new highways, common in dense areas. Getting from here to there need not be the shortest distance between two points. Meeting others for tea, much like the community life of coffee shops in the United States, might be the needed public space that initiates a “there” to these dense civic places.

Scale: Part 1 - The Cities of China

No research, visual or statistical, prepares even an architect for the scale of China’s cities. Compared to the United States, China has nearly the same land mass (3.7 million square miles to 3.6), with similar latitudes. The great difference – and ultimately a key difference – is that 40 percent of the United States is cultivatable land compared to only 10 percent of China. Population statistics are also quite incomparable. As of the end of 2012, China had over 19 percent of the world’s population at 1.354 billion people; today, the US has less than a quarter of that at 4.46 percent at almost 316 million. The people of China are concentrated along the east coast and three major interior rivers, and seven cities have populations that exceed the largest city in the United States. Looking at the panoramic view from a hotel room in the center of any of these cities shows a surrounding skyline that is vast, continuous and overwhelming.

China’s economic policies of the past two decades have led to mass migration from rural villages to urban centers. Relocation programs, either due to building the Three Gorges Dam requiring the relocation of 1.3 million people or for personal advancement, has prompted massive construction projects. The national government has invested heavily in urban infrastructure with elevated highways and mass-transit systems to move people from the fringe housing developments to business and manufacturing centers. Unfortunately, the “magic mile” of walkable communities is interpreted as a crowded subway commute of a “magic hour.”

Developers have converted historic city courtyard housing and aging five-story apartment buildings constructed by the Soviets in the mid-twentieth century to 20 to 30 story concrete apartment buildings. Taking a single design, 10 or 20 buildings are erected simultaneously in clusters reminiscent of Le Corbusier’s Radiant City concept. Of course, he never imagined that the occupants would dry their laundry on the balconies and stick HVAC units on the wall outside their bedrooms. The flats are unfurnished and include no doors, finishes, cabinets, appliances or fixtures leaving that expense to the new occupants. Typically, even new developments look like vertical public housing slums. Scandals over bribery and the corruption of construction inspectors provide little confidence that structural designs for seismic activity were followed.  

Socialist policies mean that housing, education, medical and retirement needs are subsidized. Documented workers are entitled to these services; undocumented people, if unneeded for menial labor, are involuntarily shipped back to their villages. Car license plates are rationed, electricity is expensive, and the Chinese spend four times their annual per capita on food when compared to the United States. Advancing through the educational system depends on passing rigorous exams to enter middle, high school and the university. The country’s hope for an expanding middle class is based on graduating 6 million students annually of which 1 million enter the Communist Party and work as civil servants running the government. These exams test students on three critical areas of study: Chinese, mathematics and English. The taxicab drivers may be illiterate, but the professionals speak English.