Greenfield City Designs: Criteria and Implementation Scenarios

The conventional thinking around urban design is deeply rooted in organic incremental development and upgrades. Only in some rare cases are entirely new cities designed. Two interesting examples come from New Manila Bay and New Clark City in the Philippines. While the first is part of a 407 hectares reclamation project off the coast of Manila, the second will be built 75 miles outside the congested Manila metropolitan area in Capas, Tarlac, covering around 9,450 hectares located within the Clark Special Economic Zone and housing up to two million people. Their design principles and benefits include sustainability, the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for optimum city operation under all circumstances, economic growth, the provision of more luxurious living circumstances, better resilience against flooding and typhoons through natural features (location chosen for elevation and nearby mountain range), the use of green areas and parks as flood catchment basins, and high-tech features like driverless mobility, drones, robots, automated buildings, and high-speed rail links to bring in commuters.

With very high costs and completion expected to take up to 40 years, it can be questioned whether these types of greenfield urban development make sense, becoming in turn outdated even before being fully delivered.

Greenfield design principles can or should include and support any or all of the below paradigms and technologies:

• A city-wide zero or negative carbon footprint
• Circularity: 100% recycling, local manufacturing, and local energy generation to achieve self-sufficiency
• Actively managed green infrastructure and vertical gardens
• Connected and energized road infrastructure featuring smart embedded sensors, Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X), built-in solar energy generation, and continuous wireless charging
• Built environment collectively designed for maximum solar energy exposure
• Modularity of roads and buildings allowing reconfiguration for changing use cases
• Transportation infrastructure accommodating new forms of smart mobility and freight like driverless cars, delivery robots, and passenger-carrying drones via landing platforms, drop off and pick off locations, and fast trains and hyperloops.
• Sidewalks featuring embedded kinetic footfall energy harvesting
• LED-based smart road crossing
• Resilience-based design requirements
• 100% AI-based surveillance coverage, including both fixed and mobile cameras.
• Fully electric cities based on distributed micro and nanogrids for renewable energy generation
• 100% Wi-Fi and 5G coverage
• 100% electric and driverless car sharing and Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS)— no consumer-owned vehicles allowed
• Application of the sharing economy for both residential housing and office buildings
• Fully automated eGovernment
• Decentralized, distributed delivery of healthcare and educational services

While many of the above design guidelines are related to turning physical assets into smart energy generating systems Operational Technology (OT), comprehensive Information Technology (IT) layers will include Internet of Things (IoT) platforms, smart city Operating System (OS) software, and urban models and digital twins to allow generative design for the cross-vertical optimization of energy generation and usage, asset utilization maximization, and extreme levels of operational efficiencies based on advanced demand-response management.

Designing and building entire cities from scratch will remain the exception rather than the rule. Sometimes, there is no other choice. This might be the case for Jakarta, Indonesia, which is slowly sinking away. A more realistic option is the upgrade of cities, neighborhood by neighborhood, based on a long-term master plan. This is already happening, with airports, venues, malls, and stadiums being turned into high tech, luxurious, and economic city-in-a-city islands and clusters in the middle of aging and often disadvantaged, impoverished, and unsafe areas. Clearly, better thought out urban planning is needed to gradually but systematically upgrade entire cities to benefit all layers of the population.

However, this alone is not enough. With such long-term planning cycles, a way must be found to flexibly upgrade physical infrastructure in order to extend its useful lifecycle. However high tech a greenfield concept might be, it will unavoidably get outdated and ultimately irrelevant. Enter modularity on every level. Modular buildings. Modular roads. Modular and reconfigurable paving systems have already been proposed in the form of Sidewalk Labs’ (Alphabet) Dynamic Street concept. Not only should physical structures be easy to reconfigure, but they should also allow various types of electronics to be embedded into them (think parking sensors and wireless charging). There is no way the huge differences in lifecycles between physical infrastructure and electronics can be addressed. Modularity is the only way forward, and requires new materials, which will of course be recyclable.

Another way to address this fundamental issue is the adoption of virtualization is doing away with physical infrastructure altogether and replacing it with digital equivalents. Connected car technology can replace traffic lights, traffic signs, digital signage, and tollgates. LED-based smart road crossing can replace permanent, fixed structures, though in-vehicle pedestrian detection technology could replace them entirely.

Cities are facing some hard choices, and spending tax payers’ money in the most optimal, value-creating way will require creativity, vision, and leadership. Which cities will step forward and show the way?