Products and Design

A Sustainability Tale of Two Cities:
Dubai and London

The term permaculture, coined by Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in 1978, originally referred to "permanent agriculture" but was subsequently broadened to include "permanent culture”:"Permaculture is a philosophy of working with, rather than against nature; of protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless labor; and of looking at plants and animals in all their functions, rather than treating any area as a single product system." (Mollison)Its three cardinal tenets: care for the earth, care for the people, and return of surplus.

By Sheila Shayon | Published 10 years ago | About a 4 minute read

The term permaculture, coined by Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in 1978, originally referred to "permanent agriculture" but was subsequently broadened to include "permanent culture”:

"Permaculture is a philosophy of working with, rather than against nature; of protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless labor; and of looking at plants and animals in all their functions, rather than treating any area as a single product system." (Mollison)

Its three cardinal tenets: care for the earth, care for the people, and return of surplus.

This calls to mind two proposed projects for groundbreaking developments in different cities across the world — one for its affinity to these principles, the other for its apparent disregard of them.

Dubai is planning an 8-million-square-foot, temperature-controlled mini-city called the "Mall of the World."

“We announced recently that we plan to transform Dubai into a cultural, tourist and economic hub for the two billion people living in the region around us; and we are determined to achieve our vision,” said the emirate's ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum.

No official price tag for construction has been mentioned, but the Wall Street Journal reports the mega-mall will cost $6.8 billion.

But is that vision sustainable? Economically viable? Bank of America-Merrill Lynch is concerned the ambitious plans echo the days preceding Dubai’s property market crash in 2009.

“We worry about potential policymaking complacency and that such ambitious projects could lead to another boom-bust real estate cycle, particularly as there has not yet been major deleveraging in the economy,” said Jean-Michel Saliba, an economist at BoA, told the WSJ.

To environmentalists, those ambitions may also be heralding the next chapter in unsustainable development.

“When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.” — John Muir

As Dubai looks to recreate and best a Disneyland in the desert, are there opportunities for or even attention being paid to building a model that complements rather than depletes nature? Sheikh Mohammed said of his Mall: “Our ambitions are higher than having seasonal tourism.” But how long can we defy the seasons artificially for our ambitions? Attempts to reach representatives for comment were unsuccessful as of press time.

Meanwhile, across the ocean in the UK, city planners are considering turning London's Heathrow Airport, among the busiest in the world — serving 72.3 million travelers in 2013 alone — into a city of 190,000 people based on a modern model of permaculture. London Mayor Boris Johnson has commissioned three proposals from leading architectural firms to envision a new "Heathrow City."

One firm, Hawkins\Brown, plans to build the country’s first airship hub, multiple urban farms and a housing factory to meet increasing population demands in a proposal that most reflects permaculture.

$Hawkins\Brown — "Heathrow City"$

Airships, aka zeppelins, are being developed for cargo transport by six companies in the US and UK due in part to their “improved green credentials,” with freight flights planned for 2021.

Heathrow’s Terminal 5 would be converted to a biomedical campus for teaching and research, while Terminal 2 would become Heathrow City Farms, “an intensive farming operation to churn out rare and high-demand fruit and vegetables both for the city and the country as a whole.”

Existing runways would become a park around the entire city center - “one of the great parks of London” to be used by the public for events and festivals.

“Instead of designating certain key zones for events, these would rotate round the park over time, in a system that takes inspiration from the crop rotation techniques used by traditional farmers,” the proposal states.

Dubai’s aspirant Mall and London’s Heathrow reimagination represent two very different models and approaches to creating the city of the future. Arguably, the Dubai Mall plan seems unsustainable by definition (the energy and resources required to operate it will likely be astronomical) and one more attempt by man to override nature, while all three of London’s Heathrow proposals include iterative visioning of sustainable public planning.

Time will tell which approach is better-suited to meet each area’s future needs. In the words of Henry David Thoreau, “What is the use of a house if you don’t have a decent planet to put it on?”