The city I would like to talk about is Beijing, China, where I spent six years there. As the capital of the most populous country, the population reaches 21.15 million as of 2013. So there are lots of neighborhoods, located all over the places in Beijing’s metropolitan area. However, there are all types of neighborhoods, pedestrian-oriented, automobile suburb and urban downtown. In terms of transportation, in general, the car possession rate is not so high comparing to it in U.S. So people mainly commute by public transportation. Roughly 10 million people take subway every day. The central city is really dense with numerous high-rises. Neighborhoods spread over the city and business areas scatter among them. In terms of density, the center city of Beijing is like Manhattan without a Central Park but a few smaller ones. I love living in Beijing with all kinds of parks I could hike in and all kinds of delicious food I could eat despite the ugly sides like smog and traffic congestion.

Curitiba makes the best example when I am going to talk about the BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) system of a city, particularly metropolitan. From the text content one must be familiarized what this concept differentiates from the normal buses. BRTs has special lanes to avoid the traffic, metro-like stations to speed up boarding process, and high-capacity articulated buses that function as a small metro unit with much lower cost, much, much lower. Beijing has 4 BRT lines with a few branches, connecting suburb areas to inner city transit hubs. However, these lines aren’t efficient enough as the buses were set with 30mph speed limit and lots of private vehicles use bus lanes. A more sustainable way of doing this is to have BRTs running across the city on all major roads, set strict rules to give highest priority to buses, and use environmental friendly buses just like Curitiba does. A large BRT network attract commuters from driving and taking the subway, thus relieve the stress on subway system and traffic congestion.

The second city I would like to talk about is Detroit and its urban farming strategy. In the video locals and the city clean up the abandoned houses and yards and started growing vegetables. It helps people to get a healthier diet, supply the local markets to avoid transportation cost, and helps with the environment by relieving the heat-island effect by more vegetation coverage. Beijing could also use this strategy to relieve its heat-island effect to get more sustainable. As the air pollution problems getting more serious, city is moving all of its industrial factories out to nearby provinces. The places left by massive abandoned factories could be converted to urban farmlands, rather than converting to business districts or high-density neighborhoods. Beijing is heavily relying on the vegetables and fruits that being grown and transported from hundred miles away. When the weather conditions worse prices on these greens would go up and nobody likes to see that. It would be more reliable and sustainable to do some urban farming in Beijing.