3 Questions: Dennis Frenchman on making cities sustainable
Over the past two years, Dennis Frenchman, a professor in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), and Christopher Zegras, an associate professor in DUSP, have run an academic group investigating the relationship between urban form and energy use in China. Working with colleagues at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, Frenchman and Zegras have focused their research on the city of Jinan. Frenchman spoke with MIT News about principles of urban sustainability.Q. The project you and Christopher Zegras have run in Jinan, China, aims to make urban planners more conscious of energy efficiency. What are the biggest hurdles China now faces in making its cities more sustainable?A. The biggest city-planning challenge that China now faces is to encourage a different form of urbanization than the design model currently being built. The model consists of widely separated high-rise towers in single-use residential districts — the “tower-in-a-park” model invented in the 1920s in...