Utopia

Low-rise, environment-friendly houses, people cycling to work, generating energy locally, reusing waste, reducing water consumption… Stockholm’s Hammarby waterfront is proving to be a role model.

September 19, 2014 07:51 pm | Updated 07:51 pm IST

WELL PLANNED The Hammarby waterfront in Stockholm is considered the best green suburb of Europe

WELL PLANNED The Hammarby waterfront in Stockholm is considered the best green suburb of Europe

It was a rather grim piece of inner-city landscape with industries and a harbour with a lot of pollution when the city of Stockholm decided to intervene and clean up the area and turn into a mixed land-use space which would be environment friendly. Starting in the 1990s the city bought up the land paying higher than market value and then started to develop it to meet the housing requirement of a fast growing city. The beautiful area known as Hammarby-Sjostad (Hammarby waterfront) housing 20,000 people is the resulting stellar development, winning the City Climate Leadership Award amongst many accolades for Stockholm.

Setting itself a six-fold goal, the objective was to transform a brown field area into a green field one, building low-rise environment-friendly houses, encouraging walking, cycling, a free ferry and public transport, generating half of the energy required ‘on site’ using solar photo-voltaic cells and bio-gas, reusing waste through sorting, recycling and reuse and reducing water consumption by half to 100 lpcd and reusing waste-water after treatment as a resource.

As we walked around as a group, proudly being shown around by a resident guide, one could see young children playing in the parks, older ones cycle about and relaxed residents waving a friendly greeting on a bright Stockholm day. People were also busy at work in the many offices dotting the space and there were a few sunning themselves close to the waters. The stress levels were definitely low.

The project, started in 1996 as part of a proposed Olympic village in a failed bid by Stockholm, will be completed by 2017. Starting when the population was just about 500 it will have 12,000 residential units housing about 28,000 people. Being a mixed land-use space, there will also be about 10,000 working places, reducing the work-home-education transportation requirement. Already nearly 80% of the people walk or cycle regularly to meet their transportation needs.

The low-rise buildings, a feature of Stockholm which says that the tree line and the fire fighting equipment freeze the height to which a building can go (no more than 25 metres in height except for churches and certain tower blocks) makes for a pleasing urban fabric.

It is interesting to see the waste-sorting centre. Sorting places are kept and when one puts the segregated waste it is vacuum sucked to a central collection centre. It is here that the garbage truck comes and takes away the segregated waste for reuse and recycling.

By consciously deciding to halve the load on the environment as compared to other developments started during the same time,Hammarby Sjostad is showing the way to be a responsible urban development in the forefront of the climate change battle which cities as the enormous energy guzzlers and green house gas emitters have to address.

As India sets itself the target of a 100 smart cities, clearly the environmental goals could be the six-fold ones as shown by Hammarby Sjostad. The social goals would definitely have to be more local but for a start the imagination would have to be clear on reducing transportation energy needs, creating an environment of mixed land-use and integrating the old and the very young into the fabric of development in a secure atmosphere. Stockholm and Hammarby Sjostad is one such example to learn from.

zenrainman@gmail.com

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