Are Trees Making Shanghai a Smarter City?

28.10.2024 - 19:05 / cntraveler.com

Almost as soon as I land in Shanghai, it strikes me that this megalopolis is getting greener. As I gaze out the window on the drive from the airport, the cityscape seems to contradict the smoggy stereotype I’d harbored from a trip here over a decade ago. The view from my electric car—in a country that is the biggest producer of EVs—reveals green pockets in all directions. Would it be love at second sight?

In truth, I don’t have the best memories of my time in this city in the aughts, when I came as a presenter of a TV show about hotels for the Discovery Channel. I remember yearning for more trees and the sound of birds amid the mechanical cranes around me. Witnessing the scale of intense concrete development made me worry about the scale of the loss of nature. Could this visit be that different?

1,000 Trees is a mixed-use development in Shanghai's northwest Putuo District that features over 1,000 trees and 250,000 total plants cascading from their planter-pillars over the collection of shops, stores, and public spaces.

By the time I get to my sleek, glassy corner suite at The Middle House in downtown Jing’an, it’s dark, and the monochromatic metropolitan scenes outside hark back to my childhood in Manhattan—all sharp silhouettes and LED-lit spaces set in widescreen. By morning, however, as I buzz up the electric blinds, what strikes me in the daylight is the abundance of green: the welcome sight of thickets of trees poking out between the human-made shapes.

Orianna Fielding, chief sustainability advisor and program director of the Sustainable Design China Summit is the person who lured me to this city that never sleeps for a second chance. Later that day, as I step out of my DiDi taxi into the hot air to meet her at the convention center hosting Design Shanghai, I reflect on another big reason to love more trees in cities: they bring down temperatures.

Fielding and I pause for a cup of tea at this gathering of design gurus, and I ask if she’s seeing a rise in biophilic design. Absolutely, she says, lauding the city’s urban designers for recognizing the vital role it plays in improving public health while aligning with traditional Chinese philosophies such as feng shui and Taoism. “Green corridors, planted rooftops, and vertical forests are tackling ecological and social challenges,” she says, as we weave our way through expo stands showcasing circularity and innovation.

If design is, by definition, humans solving problems, foliage in all forms is not just a lovely-to-look-at enhancement of urban sprawl. Naturalist EO Wilson, who popularized the term “biophilia”, preached that the natural world is our greatest muse. Factoring it into our built environments is a winning route in helping us navigate a