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Cities to try air corridors to clear smog
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NANJING, capital city of Shanghai’s neighboring province of Jiangsu, plans a “clean air corridor” to disperse polluted air covering the Yangtze River Delta region faster on heavily polluted days, officials said early this week.
The city plans to use forests, mountains and valleys along with space between buildings to guide the wind from the northeast to cross the city and blow away polluted air.
Nanjing plans six such corridors that are expected to bring in fresh air from the rural areas to the city in hot weather to also relieve the urban heat island effect.
“We aim to fight the air pollution through all phases of the urban development to build a cleaner environment for our children,” said Xu Xiaotie, an official with Nanjing’s environmental protection office.
According to the plan, the city will choose the routes of the corridors by the end of the year and then root out all factories along the corridors by 2017, when the air channels will begin working.
A starting plan is to build a 4-kilometer-wide belt along Changlu, Yudai and Baguazhou districts across the city where local enterprises have always wanted to build new construction, another official with the bureau said.
The Yangtze River Delta region has been encountering more and more polluted days in recent years with PM2.5 particles, the tiny airborne particles hazardous to health, remaining the main pollutant.
The nation as a whole faces an uphill battle in curbing a deteriorating environment, as one fourth of the land area is suffering from air pollution.
The authority has taken some short-term measures, including halting construction and limiting vehicle use during polluted days. Yangtze Delta cities have also launched cooperative measures with each other to tackle the problem.
Many cities have brought forward similar air corridor concepts in their urban plans while hoping to improve the ability to purify polluted air in the longer term.
Shanghai’s neighboring Hangzhou, capital city of Zhejiang Province, also plagued by air pollution in recent years, is building a “wind corridor” across the city that can bring in wind from its suburban areas and blow dirty downtown air east to the sea.
Meanwhile, the city government of Wuhan, capital of central China’s Hubei Province, is evaluating how the wind passes through the city to plan its corridor.
“The wind corridor serves like exhalation channels that can effectively cut the number of haze days to the cities,” said Jiang Youshan, deputy director with the Nanjing Meteorological Observatory.
However, it’s a difficult task for the cities to actually realize the plans in their future urban construction, said Dong Wei, deputy director of the School of Architecture of Southeast University.
“Beijing and Nanjing made wind corridor plans long before, but the so-called corridors were soon occupied by new buildings,” Dong said.
Shanghai also initially planned to build the Century Avenue in the Pudong New Area as its wind corridor during planning for the Lujiazui area, but it failed to take effect with an increasing number of skyscrapers built in the region.
But local experts said it’s unreasonable and also impossible to rely on just one road or “corridor” to clean the air for the whole city.
“Smog in Shanghai involves hundreds of square kilometers, while Century Avenue is just one line. So how can a line improve or eliminate an area of smog?” said Chen Zhongyuan, director of design at Shanghai Urban and Rural Construction & Design Institute.
Apart from city planning, the buildings in the cities should also be designed to let the air pass through, said Cui Kai, deputy director with China Architecture Design and Research.
Cui said the disorder of buildings share part of the blame for the severe air pollution in Chinese cities.
Some 92 percent of Chinese cities failed to reach the national air pollution standard in 2013, with 32 at double the national standard while the worst 10 were at three times the standard.
The Yangtze River Delta region, including Shanghai, has seen increasingly severe air pollution in recent years.
Ten cities among 13 monitoring data in Shanghai’s neighboring Jiangsu Province recorded double the national standard for PM2.5 last year, while nearly all the cities in Zhejiang Province, to Shanghai’s south, exceeded the standard.
In December 2013, when PM2.5 readings were at their peak in Shanghai, the index was at four times the standard in Hangzhou and Nanjing, according to the environmental organization Greenpeace.
Northern Chinese cities, especially those in Hebei Province, suffer the most serious pollution. Seven of the top 10 most polluted cities are in Hebei, led by Xingtai and Shijiazhuang. Both are important industrial cities.
Xingtai’s annual PM2.5 density reached 155.2 micrograms per square meter.
The air in China’s central and western cities, such as Xi’an in Shaanxi Province, Zhengzhou in Henan and Wuhan in Hebei, was also highly polluted last year, according to Greenpeace.
Haikou in the island province of Hainan had the best air quality among the 74 cities, with an annual PM2.5 density of 25.6, followed by Lhasa in Tibet and Xiamen in southeastern Fujian Province.
China is to spend 5 billion yuan (US$818 million) to curb air pollution in northern China and aims to slash PM2.5 density by 25 percent in the region within five years.
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