Ngai FP Studio (Fall 2011)
Parametric Urban Sustainability
Faculty: TED NGAI, Lecturer
Introduction: Urban Sustainability Performance
2010 marked the year when more than half of the world’s population was residing in urban areas. The dramatic rise of urban population in the twentieth century, from 13% in in 1900, 29% in 1950, 46% in 2000, to finally reaching 50.46% in 2010, marks an unprecedented condition of our human – urban – ecological environment. With global urban population increasing at a rate of 1 million per week, cities are growing faster than planners and policy makers can react, and it is strangulating city infrastructure across the world.
Lagos, one of the largest megacities in the world with a population of 11.7 million, is growing at an average rate of 4.44% a year. With a growth of more than half a million people a year, this newly urbanized population would fill up Manhattan in merely 3 years time. The implication of such accelerated and often uncontrolled growth is immense since there are more than a half dozen cities growing at this rate, many of which are without adequate public infrastructure to even support a fraction of this growth.
Cities that prospered in the 19th and 20th Century often grew out of a similar rapid industrialization and economic expansion. Without exception, all disregarded human health and ecological impacts, leading to many serious urban related crisis such as high oil prices, high energy / resource consumption, depleted fresh water access, intensified industrial farming, and last but not least, ecological collapse due to poor waste management and rapid land use conversion. When facing the inevitable growth of these new megacities, we must ask and anticipate how such an accelerated growth would mean to a city’s infrastructure such as potable water and sewage system, power grid, waste management, and transportation network? In addition, we must also be cognizant of the deeper ecological impact due to the hugely intensified food consumption, waste generation, pollution, land use conversion, and seek to symbiotically thrive with its immediate biome.
This studio seeks to provide a sustainable and parametric framework to support and augment the accelerated growth rates of megacities. Students will work with a scenario of providing housing for 0.5 million people per year in some of the largest, fastest growing cities around the world. Students will learn and utilize spatial data mining to aide in their research, analysis, and visualizations. The focus will be on the development of a Urban Sustainability Performance Mapping for each site rather than on the housing development. This study will be followed by a comprehensive housing development proposal in the Spring semester.
Research Sites
Megacities Growth Statistics and Potential Sites
Delhi 3.48% 16 million ppl 0.5568 million ppl / year
Lagos 4.44% 11.7 million ppl 0.519 million ppl / year
Dhaka 3.79% 13.09 million ppl 0.496 million ppl / year
Mumbai 2.32% 18.84 million ppl 0.43 million ppl / year
Jakarta 3.03% 13.67 million ppl 0.414 million ppl / year
Karachi 3.19% 12.2 million ppl 0.389 million ppl / year
Calcutta 1.74% 14.57 million ppl 0.253 million ppl / year
Sao Paulo 1.06% 18.61 million ppl 0.197 million ppl / year
Cairo 1.56% 11.29 million ppl 0.176 million ppl / year
Mexico City 0.9% 19.24 million ppl 0.173 million ppl / year
Tokyo 0.34% 35.53 million ppl 0.12 million ppl / year
* City Mayors Foundation. www.citymayors.com
Parametric Framework
An evaluative framework will be developed for each megacity to cross link human health, urban growth and ecological stability. There are a few existing frameworks such as LEED by the Green Building Council, the Environmental Performance Index co-developed by the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and the Center for International Earth Science Information Network at Columbia University, and the Urban Sustainability Index jointly developed by Columbia University, Tsinghua University, and McKinsey & Company. While these indices provide good indicators for the performances of countries, cities, and buildings, these metrics often stay within their relative scales and do no necessarily provide planners and architects the necessary insights to understand the consequences of their actions across multiple scales.
To create our own inter-scalar framework, we must understand the efficacies and inadequacies of such systems. We will critically study and learn from the 3 aforementioned indices, and propose a revised version that will incorporate geospatial and climatic data, developing metrics that will adjust to geography, geology, climate, ecology, hydrology, and thus becoming parametrics.
Studio Structure – Case Studies
The studio will begin by questioning the state of cities. Cities have come to be associated with being green, urban populations consume less energy and have, in general, smaller carbon footprint due to its high density and public transportation network. We will use New York City as a case study model and compare its performance in human health, urban growth, and ecological stability, against other U.S. cities. This case study will be our baseline model as well as the vehicle for the students to learn all the necessary tools for spatial data processing, mining, and visualization.