EDITOR'S note:

Shanghai and the rest of China are in the midst of a great transition from traditional development characterized by high carbon emissions and reckless urban sprawl to sustainable development. The term "sustainable" is bandied about, but how will it play out when growth clashes with sustainability? Mohan Peck, senior sustainable development officer of the United Nations, spoke to Shanghai Daily reporter Ni Tao on Wednesday at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (SIIS).

Q: Many Chinese megalopolises share a development model that's hardly sustainable, characterized by urban sprawl, high emissions and pollution. How should that model change?

A: You copy too well some of the development patterns of industrialized countries. There are good models that are emerging.

In the city of Copenhagen, for example, 37 percent of the trips are made on bicycle. In most cities it may be 2 or 3 percent.

In Portland, Oregon, and Seattle in Washington state, they have immense green belts, so that people can walk in lush pedestrian malls, ride bikes. They make the cities more people-friendly, people-centered rather than car-centered.

Wonderful place to walk

In one city in Brazil, the mayor said we will close the central downtown district to traffic. The businesses around the place complained, saying this would affect their business. But people flooded there because there was a wonderful place to walk, and businesses' sales rose dramatically.

But then the drivers said we can no longer get to the downtown area, we are going to drive anyway. So the mayor invited children from schools to fill the streets, and the drivers had to turn away.

There are many case studies, we have compiled some of them in the Shanghai Manual, the intellectual outgrowth of 2010 Expo.



Q: How can Shanghai better approach sustainable development?

A: There are best practices for sustainable cities, and what we find is that some cities like Shanghai already have some best practices in place. They need improvement in some other areas. New York City is the same, London the same.

We argue that it's good to have a dense mixed-use development in Shanghai. You can have high-rise buildings mixed with offices and residential space, with restaurants and bars, shopping places, etc.

Another best practice may be for Shanghai to have transit-oriented development, sustainable transport options. In cities like this one, traffic congestion can be a huge problem. So you want to encourage people to use public transportation.

You have a great Metro system here in Shanghai that's been expanded in recent years. You have a good deal of vehicular traffic flow. Perhaps what you need to do is something that China has moved away from - focus on some non-motorized transportation.

Pedestrian malls like Nanjing Road are good. We are promoting bicycles as a way of reducing pollution and having a healthier lifestyle. When I first came to China in 1990, there were no fat people and everybody was riding a bicycle in the middle of winter when I was here.

Now when I come back to China, obesity is becoming a problem because of changing lifestyles. People have more disposable income, they go to restaurants more often. And they are not riding bicycles but driving cars.

There are a number of things Shanghai can improve. I'd like to see it have more green spaces. In Pudong, when I spent time working at the Shanghai Expo, I didn't see anyone riding a bike or even walking. The streets were very wide and weren't pedestrian-friendly. There need to be more connected green spaces in the city.



Q: Organizations like the UN Environment Program and UN Development Program have plenty of best local practices to offer in terms of urban management. What are most applicable to Shanghai?

A: We can talk about the ability of cities to attract a green economy, green talent pools; we can talk about having smart and connected cities, vibrant communication networks, education systems that are enabled by information technology; We can have cities that attract universities to spin off science and technology, which can lead to business development in the city.

There are a whole range of best practices for urban management that have been explored around the world. Guangzhou has created a huge bus-transit system linked with recycling stations.

Bogota and Mexico City have excellent bus-transit systems that move thousands of passengers every hour in an environment-friendly way.

In every city solid waste management is an issue. In many developing countries there is no attempt to minimize, reuse and recycle waste. I'm not familiar with the practices in Shanghai but certainly there are best practices in this area as well.

Q: What suggestions do you have for Shanghai's urban zoning?

A: Firstly, it's important to have mixed-use development. You can have something specialized, one area in media, one area in finance or communications. But it should be mixed use. It should not be just offices, but mixed with finance, restaurants, service companies, supermarkets. Otherwise, if it's just offices, at night the place would become a ghost town.

Secondly, it may be a good thing to cluster. When we cluster industries, we always find a sharing of knowledge or information. So if there's a high-tech area, you will attract a lot of engineers there; if it's the media, you may be attracting the best minds who want to do innovative film production or music production.

Thirdly, for areas connected by transit corridors, in between those corridors there should be some natural space, natural habitats, parkland, because they are like the lungs of human beings. They cleanse the air and ease the mind in addition to being places where people walk, have leisure, think, reflect, do exercises. The green spaces are very important.



Q: Promotion of environment-friendly technologies is often not so easy when they are first introduced. How do the authorities convince the public of their worth?

A: If they have to choose between a heavily polluting lifestyle and a sustainable lifestyle, most people would say they'd like to have a lifestyle that's good for the environment, and that doesn't trash the environment.

Take transportation as an example. Here in China everybody is moving into the motor vehicle club, same as the United States. Our average family may have one, two or three cars. Why? Because of convenience, affordability.

Nevertheless, in a city like Shanghai, the goal should be to make the sustainable transport options the default options. It's hard to find parking lot for cars.

If you can provide a transit stop, let's say subway transit, within 500 meters of your residence, and if that subway transit is clean, affordable, and takes you where you want to go, then it becomes the default options.

Who wants to buy a car, pay to park it, suffer the frustrations of traffic, and maybe have traffic accidents? If you can make the sustainable options the default options, that's the solution.



Q: China is developing clean energy, but wind and solar power generation is somehow overheated. Should the authorities temper the impulse to tap green energy?

A: I would not like to see them temper their efforts. The overheating is perhaps a result of inadequate demand in the domestic market. You can control that by offering the right incentives or in some cases taking away the perverse subsidies that coal and oil typically enjoy.

You can try to establish a level playing field for renewable energies. They are really cleaner alternatives. At the outset of new forms of energy, you have to provide some subsidies, some benefits, to spur the demand.

Socks, shirts, solar

What you need is perhaps that China does things at scale, and that's the success story of China. You have one city that may produce just socks, and another city that may produce just shirts, and there are some cities that focus on solar and wind technology.

China is growing so fast, its housing and cities are expanding so fast, I think one challenge would be to incorporate this renewable solar technology, solar PV (photovoltaic), hot water heaters into the architecture of buildings. This could be a way to boost the domestic demand and help meet the energy needs of the country.

Talking of the trend in energy development in the future, I believe it's going to be more decentralized energy production, as we have more and more renewable energies applied to buildings' facades.

We are going to have small-scale generators serving small districts, communities or housing complexes. This is a trend in United Kingdom right now. There are no electricity losses in distribution in this case.



Q: Some Chinese cities will release daily updates on PM2.5 readings as early as June. It's a meaningful start, but what should follow?

A: The government has been announcing that the air quality is good, but the US Embassy in Beijing has measured the fine particulates that are PM2.5 and said they were dangerously high.

What China is measuring is probably fine 15 or 20 years ago, when you didn't have a huge vehicular traffic on the streets. More people rode bicycles then. You still had some heavy industries in the city but pollutants were mostly PM10, you can measure that.

Then you start burning fossil fuels in internal combustion engines in cars, you get those fine particulates. Maybe the rapid growth of the number of vehicles in Chinese cities has caught the authorities unprepared.

It's a problem that someone else has to point out. I'm sure China is concerned about the health of its citizens and will monitor PM2.5 and report it in the future.

The question is how do you take action now that you have a car-centered transport system.