Eco-cities in Japan and China

Here’s a paper comparing and contrasting two eco-city developments in Japan and China.

Ecological urbanism in East Asia: A comparative assessment of two eco-cities in Japan and China

The growth of projects translating the concept of eco-city into practices has accelerated during the last fifteen years, making the eco-city a global phenomenon. Asia in particular has witnessed notable developments, characterized by strong governmental intervention and national initiatives to create model eco-cities. In Japan, the central government launched an “Eco-Model Cities” program in 2008 and has designated twenty-three model cities. In China, hundreds of municipalities have pursued plans to become an eco- or low-carbon city following the government’s demonstration projects. Across East Asia, the eco-city is promoted as an innovative urban policy capable of advancing the agendas of sustainable urbanization and the realignment of the post-industrial urban economy.

This paper compares the policies and strategies of developing eco-cities in Japan and China using Kitakyushu and Tianjin Eco-city as case studies. It examines these cities’ common and contrasting approaches to ecological urbanism, their respective technological and urban design strategies, the relationship between eco-city building and local economic development, and the roles played by different stakeholders in this effort. The research focuses on their Key Performance Indicator systems and the spatial qualities they anticipate, which reflect fundamentally different ideas about what societal role an eco-city should best play. The comparative method sheds light on debates around important aspects of planning and managing an eco-city––namely, between new town and retrofit development, between top-down directive and bottom-up force, and between the eco-city as technology and as culture. This paper thus offers critical insight into the changing notions of urbanity within Asian society.

passive house

This article describes how an old home was retrofit into an extraordinarily energy efficient “passive house“.

I’m guessing the owners are not poverty-stricken. Then again, there must be some payback period and I wonder if it is measured in years or decades. If it pays back reasonably, there should be some kind of financial arrangement that would allow ordinary people to do this.

adjusting productivity/GDP for ecosystem services

Here’s a new paper on a method of adjusting productivity/GDP (they seem to use the terms interchangeably, which confuses me) for ecosystem services and natural capital depletion.

Environmentally Adjusted Multifactor Productivity: Methodology and Empirical Results for OECD and G20 Countries

This paper extends the analytical framework for measuring multifactor productivity in order\ to account for environmental services. A growth accounting approach is used to decompose a pollution-adjusted measure of output growth into the contributions of labour, produced capital and natural capital. These indicators allow the sources of economic growth, and its long run sustainability, to be better assessed. Results presented here cover OECD and G20 countries for the 1990–2013 period, and account for the extraction of subsoil natural assets and emissions of air pollutants and greenhouse gases. The main findings suggest that growth in OECD countries has been generated almost exclusively through productivity gains, while BRIICS countries have drawn largely on increased utilisation of factor inputs to generate additional growth. Regarding natural capital, in countries such as Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Chile, reliance on subsoil assets extraction has contributed to a significant share of income growth. Results also point to a shift towards more environmentally friendly production processes in many countries. In fact, most OECD countries have decreased their emissions over the last two decades, and these pollution abatement efforts result in an upward adjustment of their GDP growth rates, allowing for a more accurate assessment of their economic performance.

It’s a little hard to tease out (from the abstract, since I haven’t read the paper) whether this means we are turning the corner and becoming more sustainable as a planet, or simply becoming more unsustainable at a slower rate than the past. I suspect it is the latter – so while it might be good news, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we are on a sustainable path.

July 2018 in Review

Most frightening stories:

  • The UN is warning as many as 10 million people in Yemen could face starvation by the end of 2018 due to the military action by Saudi Arabia and the U.S. The U.S. military is involved in combat in at least 8 African countries. And Trump apparently wants to invade Venezuela.
  • The Trump administration is attacking regulations that protect Americans from air pollution and that help ensure our fisheries are sustainable. Earth Overshoot Day is on August 1 this year, two days earlier than last year.
  • The U.S. has not managed a full year of 3% GDP growth since 2005, due to slowing growth and the working age population and slowing productivity growth, and these trends seem likely to continue even if the current dumb policies that make them worse were to be reversed. Some economists think a U.S. withdrawal from the World Trade Organization could trigger a recession (others do not).

Most hopeful stories:

  • Looking at basic economic and health data over about a 50-200 time frame reminds us that enormous progress has been made, even though the last 20 years or so seems like a reversal.
  • Simultaneous Policy is an idea where multiple legislatures around the world agree to a single policy on a fairly narrow issue (like climate change or arms reductions).
  • I was heartened by the compassion Americans showed for children trapped in a cave 10,000 miles away. The news coverage did a lot to humanize these children, and it would be nice to see more of that closer to home.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

Surveillance in western China

Der Spiegel describes the Chinese government’s surveillance of a minority population in the western part of the country.

Beijing is equipping the far-western province with state-of-the-art surveillance technology, with cameras illuminating every street all over the region, from the capital Urumqi to the most remote mountain village. Iris scanners and WiFi sniffers are in use in stations, airports and at the ubiquitous checkpoints — tools and programs that allow data traffic from wireless networks to be monitored.

The data is then collated by an “integrated joint operations platform” that also stores further data on the populace — from consumer habits to banking activity, health status and indeed the DNA profile of every single inhabitant of Xinjiang.

Anyone with a potentially suspicious data trail can be detained. The government has built up a grid of hundreds of re-education camps. Tens of thousands of people have disappeared into them in recent months. Zenz estimates the number to be closer to hundreds of thousands. More precise figures are difficult to obtain. Censorship in Xinjiang is the strictest in China and its authorities the most inscrutable.

Later the article talks about reeducation camps and a point system that rates how “trustworthy” families are.

best performing urban economies

Here are the world’s 10 best-performing urban economies according to Brookings.

  1. Dublin, Ireland
  2. San Jose, USA
  3. Chengdu, China
  4. San Francisco, USA
  5. Beijing, China
  6. Delhi, India
  7. Manila, Philippines
  8. Fuzhou, China
  9. Tianjin, China
  10. Xiamen, China

Here is a brief explanation of the methodology:

This Global Metro Monitor employs several key variables to assess the economic performance of metropolitan areas: gross domestic product (GDP), employment, population, and GDP per capita, all from 2000 to 2016. For static analysis and cross-border comparison, this study employs nominal GDP at purchasing power parity rates. For trends analysis, it uses GDP data at 2009 prices and expressed in U.S. dollars. Data availability and comparability at metropolitan level precluded expanding the economic analysis to other indicators of interest, such as housing prices, employment rates, unemployment rates, and income distributions.

Clearly, there is no consideration of health, ecosystem services, or sustainability here.

U.S. housing bubble starting to deflate?

This Reuters article suggests the current U.S. housing bubble may be starting to deflate, if not pop. I don’t quite follow the logic, because it seems to suggest at the same time that the rate of housing starts is not sufficient to meet demand, and that the cost of construction is rising due to rising material, land, and labor costs. In basic economics 101 class, if there is an unmet demand, prices are supposed to rise until supply equals demand. But maybe people are just not willing or able to buy houses they want at the current market prices. What do they do instead? Again in textbook economics land, they should move to less expensive locales, buy smaller houses, live with roommates, rent extra rooms on AirBnB, etc. I guess there are all sorts of legal and cultural reasons these things don’t happen enough or fast enough for the market to equilibrate. Still, even knowing that the real world is not the textbook economic world, it’s hard to buy the argument that developers aren’t building houses because there aren’t as many houses for sale as people who want to buy houses.

Giants: The Global Power Elite

This is a new book from Project Censored (or at least that’s where I became aware of it). I’m not sure whether I agree with the politics 100%, but numbers are numbers and these are a bit shocking.

As the number of men with as much wealth as half the world fell from sixty-two to just eight between January 2016 and January 2017, according to Oxfam International, fewer than 200 super-connected asset managers at only 17 asset management firms—each with well over a trillion dollars in assets under management–now represent the financial core of the world’s transnational capitalist class. Members of the global power elite are the management–the facilitors–of world capitalism, the firewall protecting the capital investment, growth, and debt collection that keeps the status quo from changing. Each chapter in Giants identifies by name the members of this international club of multi-millionaires, their 17 global financial companies—and including NGOs such as the Group of Thirty and the Trilateral Commission—and their transnational military protectors, so the reader, for the first time anywhere, can identify who consitutes this network of influence, where the wealth is concentrated, how it suppresses social movements, and how it can be redistributed for maximum systemic change.