think or thwim

Almost 3 years ago I posted a little blurb about Dongtan, one of China’s planned new eco cities. The plan was to have phase 1 completed by 2010. So, how’s it going?

Here’s a report by Christina Larson: China’s Grand Plans for Eco-Cities Now Lie Abandoned

Today, almost nothing has been built. Some residents have been moved off the island, many of them becoming cab drivers in bustling Shanghai. Although the project was widely publicized internationally, most locals knew little about it. The political leaders who championed the project were ousted in a corruption scandal, and their successors have allowed construction permits to lapse.

Dongtan in 2006





Dongtan in 2009

In the case of Dongtan, as Paul French explains in a podcast posted on the Ethical Corporation web site, one problem was a feud over who would actually fund the project. “Both sides — Arup, on one side, who call themselves the ‘master builders’ of the project — and Shanghai Industrial Investment Corporation (the Chinese government arm that owns the land) —thought the other was going to pay for it. So Arup thought they were brought in on a project that they would then be able to design, the Chinese would build it, and pay them a large amount of money. The Chinese thought that Arup was going to build the project and that they would get themselves a free eco-city.

What’s Chinese for “Are you fucking kidding me?”

:: e360.yale.edu

BTW, it’s “你他媽的在開玩笑吧？”

architecture, china, dongtan, eco city, shanghai, sustainability, sustainable

On September 3, 1967 Sweden switched from driving on the left to driving on the right.

As Dagen H neared, every intersection was equipped with an extra set of poles and traffic signals wrapped in black plastic. Workers roamed the streets early in the morning on Dagen H to remove the plastic. Similarly, a parallel set of lines were painted onto the roads with white paint, then covered with black tape.

On Dagen H, Sunday, September 3, 1967 all non-essential traffic was banned from the roads from 01:00 to 06:00. Any vehicles on the road during that time had to follow special rules. All vehicles had to come to a complete stop at 04:50, then carefully change to the right-hand side of the road and stop again before being allowed to proceed at 05:00.

On the Monday after Dagen H, there were 125 reported traffic accidents, compared with a range of 130 to 198 for previous Mondays. No fatal traffic accidents were attributed to the switch. However, many older people gave up driving rather than learn to cope with the new rule of the road. Experts had suggested that changing to driving on the right would reduce accidents, since people already drove left-hand drive vehicles, and would therefore have a better view of the road ahead. Indeed, fatal car-to-car and car-to-pedestrian accidents dropped sharply as a result. Some of the decrease was attributed to a reduction in speed limits by 10 km/h for some time after the switch. The accident rate rose back to its original level within two years.

:: Wikipedia

sweden, traffic