• What’s an Eco-City?

• The Chinese Solution: Dongtan

• The Making of an Eco-City: Masdar

• A Floating Home

Speaker: Valentina Dall’Asta

The term Eco-City was first used by Richard Register in his book “Ecocity Berkeley: building cities for a healthy future”, published in 1987, and with this word we indicate a city in which everything is thought in order to respect the environment, producing great quantities of energy, releasing in the atmosphere a minimal quantity of polluting substances.

Nowadays we have to face some important events:

-In 2008, for the first time in history, more than half of the world’s population lived in cities.

-Over the next 30 years the population of cities in Africa and Asia will double.These are the conditions that let the experts create the project of the eco-cities.

This city will be built on an island (Chongming Island) and it will be connected with Shangai thanks to a bridge and tunnel link. The main advantage that this city will bring to the environment is that it will require 66 per cent less energy than a conventional city.

This result will be achieved using wind turbines, solar panels and biological sources. With that word we mean human sewage and municipal waste, that will be collected for energy recovery and composting.

The location of the new city will be the desert of the Gulf state, in which it’s so hot that you cannot go outdoors for three or four months of the year. The architets have planned a city in which to get a greater shade, there are only tight streets and the height of the buildings has the limit of four or five floors.

The city has got a square shape and a wall that stands on its perimeter, like a medieval city. It seems very strange, but it’s the usual shape of an Arabian city, that cannot be enlarged because the heat prevents you from going far.

The city has been planned on two levels. Masdar will be raised on a deck, 5.5 metres high, and in this pedestrian level no car is allowed; while below it, in the underground will be there the first PRT system.PRT stands for: Personalized Rapid Transit, and it consists of a network of “podcars” that carry people around the city. On every podcar six people can take seat.

The PRT system will be composed by 2500 vehicles that will make 150,000 trips a day and stop in one of the 83 stations located into the city.

An example of a totally shaded street.

One of the most important buildings in the city will be Masdar Headquarters. It will have: seven floors (differently from all the other structures), a photovoltaic roof and some conical wind towers in which warm air is drawn up to the roof while a ventilation and cooling system provides fresh air at ground level. Further more will be there an under-floor distribution system in order to permitt the air circulation.

The plan to create Headquarters

The inner of the Headquarters

Vincent Callebaut, a Belgian architect, has invented a floating city that would follow oceans’ currents. The floating home is thought in order to use energy, produced without polluting the environment (like wind, solar, thermal or hydraulic energy).In the centre of the structure would be there a lagoon that purifies rain water for the population to drink.People would be housed in the three mountains that stand around the lagoon and everything would

be covered by plants and gardens.

Virtual images of a lilypad city