How Asia Is Paving the Way for Cleaner, Greener Cities

(April 22) -- For the first time in human history, there are more people living in urban environments than in rural ones. This monumental demographic shift has come as cities in growing nations are growing at a breakneck pace, and not always with an eye toward efficiency and sustainability.

Environmentally, these quickly expanding cities can prove problematic, to say the least, generating massive waste management difficulties, air quality problems and traffic that would make even L.A. blush.

But giant cities don't have to be a pox on the planet. If done a certain way, densely packing people into concentrated areas can be the best way of managing the needs of a human population that's been growing exponentially since the Black Death. And that's just what some developing countries are attempting, with new cities being built to offer green living to teeming masses of future urbanites.

One of the most ambitious of these green development projects is New Songdo International Business District, a city being built from scratch on 1,500 acres of fill near the city of Incheon, adjacent to Seoul in South Korea. The developers, an American company called Gale International, are betting that it will serve as a model of green development than can be transplanted across Asia, particularly to city-hungry China.

Gale envisions New Songdo as a business hub and a "smart and sustainable city," featuring extensive public transportation, open space, water management and a centralized pneumatic waste-disposal system. Every building in the city will be certified by Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) for energy efficiency.

"What we do is borrow the best from the best and intertwine those," Tom Murcott, executive vice president of Gale International, told AOL News.

The city will feature bike paths a la Amsterdam, pocket parks a la Savannah, Ga., canals a la Venice and a 100-acre central park a la New York City, albeit one that waters itself. The city will also be wired to a degree that would surely have Americans crying Orwell: One example cited by The New York Times involves recycling bins that use identification technology to credit recyclers for disposing of bottles.

Of course, New Songdo is far from the first city to make almost-utopian promises about building the great city of tomorrow. Its designers say they hope to learn from the mistakes of other planned cities like Brazil's Brasilia to answer the complex challenge of building a city that didn't evolve organically but still feels human and livable.

And while high-profile, ultra-green projects like New Songdo attract attention, its planned capacity of 67,000 residents will barely dent the housing needs of a region that's expanding by millions every year.

"It's a small step, and it's not gigantic in the scheme of things," Songdo Master Plan Architect James Von Klemperer and principal at international architecture firm Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates told AOL News. "But it's such a compelling paradigm that the mayors of Chinese cities, pretty much unsolicited, have come to visit New Songdo City as a kind of living instruction manual."

Any discussion of Asian population growth inevitably comes back to China. The surging economic powerhouse doesn't have the best record with environmentalism. Deforestation, overgrazing and urban sprawl have led to a desertification crisis that threatens an estimated 20 percent of the country's land area, and booming megacities like Beijing are plagued by smog and traffic.

But some also hope the Chinese government will embrace sustainability and take the opportunity to grow the country in more energy-efficient and carefully designed ways than it has in the past. According to Murcott, Gale has already entertained more than 40 offers from Chinese municipalities that are hoping for developments similar to New Songdo in their own areas, and the company has plans for several new projects throughout the country. One project in Meixi Lake will feature a five-mile-long network of urban farms.

China's centralized government power and planned economy give selected urban planners strong-arm control over the character of new developments, which -- while eschewing the public input that's an often messy but democratic part of building in the U.S. -- can lead to a strong focus on sustainable building.

At the same time, the Chinese government also hopes to raise the standard of living for its 1.3 billion people to something closer to what's enjoyed in the Western world. Some, like Lester Brown, author of "Who Will Feed China?," have painted a grim picture of what the world would look like if the entire population of China (along with that of India) began consuming like Americans.

The question, then, is whether rapidly developing countries will be able to grow in such a way that they provide their people with Western luxuries without the same kind of environmental impact people associate with Western development. And that's where the planned green city could play a role.

"I think there's tremendous potential in China now for real change at a macro level. It will be very interesting to see what the balance is of those divergent forces," says Von Klemperer.