Thinking Beyond the Eco Block

The Green Dragon Media Project: Qingdao Eco Block:

"'China has been able to succeed in this incredible development process by developing what we call 'superblocks'. These are roughly 1km2 residential developments where the city provides the arterial streets and then the developer buys the rights to build everything inside the blocks. Superblocks can have anything from 2,000 to 10,000 units of housing in them, and because the Chinese are so efficient, they're building something like 10-15 of these per day. For 3 years my students and I at UC Berkeley have been trying to develop an alternative to the superblock which is completely off the grid, generates its own electricity, processes its own water and own its waste. Mass replication of a model such as ours is the key to China really becoming sustainable - I'm talking about ecoblocks as far as the eye can see - not superblocks.'"

Charles Sanders Peirce - Thinking in Threes