On a conference visit to Shanghai, John Thackara brings back a rich harvest of eco-civilisational practice
More on the robot espresso machine below
We occasionally check in with the mighty guru of regenerative design John Thackara, particularly in his engagements with green Chinese progressives and intellectuals. In his November newsletter, John has picked up a brace of practices and innovations from Shanghai’s streets, shops and institutions. Here’s a choice selection:
1. “The biggest smart home appliance store in Shanghai is lined with paper books – as well as the intelligent doorhandles shown here. The books are for sale, and seemed to be selling briskly.”
2. “More than 500 million people have ordered a meal online that’s delivered by to a smart hive-box by couriers riding electric scooters. Customers pay 2-4 euros per meal. Couriers earn about 70 cents a drop. (The largest courier platform alone, Meituan, has about three million riders). Most of the food delivered comes from small local restaurants, not from from dark kitchens”
3. “Shanghai’s biggest shipbuilder is pivoting into equipment for craft breweries. This is a smart move: in pre-modern times, every neighbourhood had its own brewery.”
4. “Sony is trialling an AI-driven permaculture app that tests soils, and orders seeds”. mp.weixin.qq.com
5. “Almost no white delivery vans are to be seen in downtown Shanghai. Everything is delivered on battery bikes – not bad for a city of 25 million people. This transformation was not predicted; China’s cities were planned with cars in mind”. sixthtone.com/news
6. “To keep all those scooters moving, a battery-swapping boom is being led (for now) by the Taiwanese firm Gogorogogoro.com/gogoro-network (motto: “Electric Fuel Reimagined”). But an informal battery-swapping service has already been introduced by couriers on battery bikes: the guy here is putting a scooter battery into a hive box outside someone’s apartment block. None of this was forecast by any energy futurist I ever read.”
7. “I felt sorry for the robot espresso machine at our conference site; hardly anyone seemed to be using use it except me. The coffee wasn’t all that bad.”
8. “My main collaborator at Tongji University is the Ecology and Cultures Lab. They explore new relationships between the city, nature, and rural – such as on bioregioning in Shanghai’s watershed.”
ecology.shanghai-visual.org/web/urban-nature-2022
9. “The use of phytoremediation to clean up Shanghai’s rivers is spreading. These plants are called hyperaccumulators. A hyperaccumulator is a plant capable of growing in soil or water with high concentrations of metals. Such plants absorb these metals through their roots, and concentrate them in their tissues. No machines or chemicals are involved.”
“An article in Noema Magazine headlined ‘The World China Is Building’ [see this blog post] concludes that our futures will be a choice “between Shenzen or San Francisco”. This is a false binary. A third (and fourth, and fifth) approach to city development is emerging from a global swarm of community retrofit projects. In Shanghai, these include”:
— 15-Minute Community Life Circles (shown above: Xinua Street) planning.org.cn/nua
—NICE 2035 fablabs.io/labs
—MeetU Lab meetulab.com/environmental-design-program-studio-course
—3511 TFEP m.cnwest.com/bwyc