The Taipei City Government has announced plans to expand the floor area ratio (FAR) of about 290,000 buildings that are more than 30 years old in Taipei as part of an initiative designed to keep property prices in the city under control. I wonder whether those behind the plans have taken into account the impact of this measure on the infrastructure and the urban environment. I feel this is an important issue that merits consideration.
By infrastructure I refer to the electricity, telecommunications, water, gas, sewage and transport systems. We can determine the capacity of each of these by calculating population density as a function of building coverage ratio and the FAR in terms of the current urban planning and land usage. If you are going to suddenly double one of these factors, you are going to increase the demand on urban infrastructure by a corresponding amount, and current facilities are going to feel the strain. You will find that water and gas pressure are going to be insufficient, and this will have repercussions for water supplies for firefighting, the sewer network and the capacity of sewage treatment plants to cope.
In addition, the increase in the number of tenants means an explosion in the amount of parking spaces needed, and we’re talking in the tens of thousands (the majority of apartment buildings at present do not have parking). This is going to worsen traffic congestion and add to air pollution. Have any comprehensive impact evaluations been made? Are there going to be policies in place to deal with this?
Urbanization has meant that Taipei is already a heaving metropolis, its residents putting a strain on its resources and their cars spewing out huge amounts of exhaust. This creates a serious heating phenomenon. The problem is particularly acute in the sweltering summer months, when the temperature can rise as much as 5ºC above surrounding areas, adversely affecting the quality of life of residents and the environment, and eating up natural resources.
If you increase the FAR and add another 1.16 million people, the extra heat they produce as part of their everyday activities is only going to exacerbate the situation.
The FAR tends to be proportionately larger in buildings nearer city centers, where there is a higher concentration of high rises and lower buildings in the surrounding areas. Cooler air is drawn in from outlying areas and circulates around the city, creating a stream of air that rises in the city center, lowering the temperature and dispersing air pollution.
Now, if you increase the FAR of the older, low-rise buildings in the surrounding areas, you will obstruct the flow of cooler air into the city, and this will make the city even more humid, adding to urban climate change and making it more difficult to disperse air pollution. All of this will, of course, cause a decline in the quality of life.
There are plans to turn Taipei into a sustainable eco-city, but increasing the FAR of old buildings is a step in the wrong direction. I have no idea whether the Taipei’s Urban Renewal Committee has given any thought to the difficulties involved in overhauling the infrastructure, and how much the systematic implementation of this is going to cost. Neither do I know whether the committee has looked into how it is going to cope when, after all these old buildings have been renovated, it finds it has succeeded in turning the city into a furnace.
The city government is playing with fire. If it wants to maintain the idea of Taipei as a sustainable eco-city, it has to come up with some answers to these problems.
Ouyang Chiao-fuei is an honorary professor in the Graduate Institute of Environmental Engineering at the National Central University.
TRANSLATED BY PAUL COOPER
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