lightblueline

In today's WIRED website (April 24, 2007) you will find an article on a proposed new city on the outskirts of Shanghai, China. This city is built on the tip of a nearby island at the mouth of the Yangtze River. What the authors don't say is that building an entire city on land less than two meters in elevation makes no allowance for future sea-level rise. In fact, they chose to build very close to the ocean.
In an email response to this blog, the article's author, Douglas McGray, added that the architects are mindful of the potential for sea-level issues, but felt that Shanghai is going to expand, and that the Dongtan project provides an opportunity to try out solutions to building near the ocean; solutions that might be of value to other coastal cities that might not be able to move their infrastructure out of the zone of vulnerability.
You can read the whole article here: Pop-Up Cities: China Builds a Bright Green Metropolis.
Rejecting previous plans that pulled the built environment back from the sea coast, the architects decided to create a new Venice: "Arup had to figure out how to keep Dongtan above water. Chongming Island is flat and barely higher than sea level. The previous planners, thinking defensively, had pulled development back to the middle of the site, imagining Dongtan as an island city with no harbor, no waterfront caf s, no ocean-view condos. Gutierrez thought that was kind of a waste.

'We went back to the site,' he recalls, 'and, being completely ignorant Westerners, we asked the client, "Have you seen Venice?"' Gutierrez had been sketching Venice's waterways and floodgates. 'They said, very politely, "Yeah, we know about Venice,"' Gutierrez recalls, smiling sheepishly. 'Then they took us to see these fantastic, beautiful water towns in the Yangtze River Delta that are much older. They have decks and terraces and promenades that are very close to the water,' Gutierrez says. 'In one part of a town, they developed a pond to control water levels, in another they had a wider canal, in another they developed a lake. They had a much more fine-tuned understanding of how to manage water than the Italians did.'

Inspired by those ancient Chinese water towns, Gutierrez began drawing canals in one zone, ponds in another, and a big lake in a third. He designed courtyards and lawns to drain away from buildings. And he created flood cells within the city, like chambers in a submarine, so if Dongtan got slammed by a once-in-a-century storm, the seawater would stay in a single cell. At the water's edge, instead of a high levee, he drew a gentle hill that would recede into a wide wetland basin — a park, bird habitat, and natural storm barrier.

The problem seems to be that Gutierrez never looked ahead at sea-level rise predictions. As this city is expected to be completed in 2050, the residents might never move in, or find themselves immediately vulnerable to 100 year storms that in this century are now ten year storms.
See: Dongtan Site under 2 and 4 meters of sea-level rise
In some form of reverse adaptation, the city is planning to copy Venice, a city now contemplating its last century above water.

And so, while the rest of the planet contemplates moving low-lying assets away from dangerous seas, Shanghai looks to build an entire new city under two meters of elevation.