A city is a big container full of life, and there is always something new to discover when viewed from different angles. So we're always looking at the cities, the creativity that is constantly surging and iterating, and asking them questions to see what kind of answers we can get.
This time, the question is: What is sustainable living?
Questionee: Shenzhen
It's interesting to talk about sustainability with a young city, it seems to have to think more about what its future will look like than those old cities with a long history, and it has enough experience to refer to those who have come a long way, and at the same time has more "young" advantages, so you can see some déjà vu and find a lot of surprises.
TOPYS has partnered with R.I.S.E. Sustainable Innovation Platform to draw our findings into a "Sustainable Living Map of Shenzhen" and expand it into a newspaper called "Tomorrow", with creativity as the theme and sustainability as the foothold, to present the more warm and detailed life in Shenzhen, a "city of efficiency", from another perspective.
It is a guide that outlines the longitude and latitude of sustainable living in Shenzhen; It is also a rediscovery, an attempt to look at the past, present and future of Shenzhen people's lives with a broader concept of sustainability. Finally, we also hope that it will be an opportunity for us to explore more possibilities for "sustainable living" in cities, starting from today and finding more ways to tomorrow.
"Sustainability" is becoming a life choice for more and more people. We're not necessarily referring to the purest form of "zero waste" living, but when given a choice, people tend to choose the more sustainable one – go to the coffee shop and bring their own cups, don't ask for plastic bags unless necessary, and are willing to pay for the brand's sustainable actions......
Just like at a fork in the road, when a prominent sign appears, more people are willing to follow the arrow of "live sustainably, please go here".
This "Tomorrow: Shenzhen Sustainable Living Map" hopes to be one such beacon, marking those more natural, healthy, pet-friendly, and earth-friendly places in the rich and diverse urban life, so that you can approach and try sustainable living.
Through cooperation with R.I.S.E., we have selected 30 representative locations throughout Shenzhen, from FMCG products to food and beverage outlets, from shopping malls and supermarkets to public spaces, including brand stores such as ZZER and allbirds, as well as places that provide emotional support without spending money, such as Shenzhen's large and small parks.
In addition to a simple list of points, the newspaper expanded some of the selected points -
Futian Mangrove Ecological Park, what's so fun?
Olé low-carbon experimental store, what is the low-carbon method?
What does Shekou Car-Free Day mean for the community?
What new directions will there be for "pet-friendly" urban practices outside of community parks and pet stores?
……
It's not the most comprehensive guide, but it's enough for you to explore and discover.
Before we chose the site, we had several rounds of discussions around "what is sustainable". The answer seems both precise and full of room for interpretation.
The most direct understanding is that it is about equal to environmental protection and is friendly to natural ecology, but if you think about it carefully, if you want to develop more benign and sustainable, human beings have to deal with not only the relationship with "nature" in the narrow sense, so what we can do in "sustainability" is not only "environmental protection".
Therefore, we tried to reinterpret the concept of "sustainability" from our own perspective, based on Shenzhen, starting from the ten "sustainable living keywords" sorted out by R.I.S.E., such as environmentally friendly products, green space, low-carbon diet, inclusiveness and equity, and animal welfare, and distilled it into five dimensions: innovation, connection, flow, care and self-consistency.
Innovation, focusing on business practices, looks at how brands and institutions can make consumption more sustainable with continuous iteration of technology and innovative concepts and mechanisms, so that we can carry out their own sustainable life more "effortlessly"; Connection, taking Shenzhen's urban construction as an example, tries to explore how we can have a richer life experience in an environment that blurs the boundaries between the city and nature; Flow not only points to the continuity of time, but also to the transformation of spatial functions, and looks at how the city, as an ecosystem, moves forward dynamically. Finally, caring and self-consistency, the former explores our relationship with the "other", and the latter concerns inward self-balance and physical and mental health.
The points we will select correspond to these five perspectives to rediscover the possible directions and forms of "sustainable" urban practices.
You can see them as further explanations and developments of different points to add some extra information to your check-in, and of course, hopefully these contents can become an inspiration and perspective for everyone to reimagine what "sustainability" looks like, to observe and experience how the city of Shenzhen continues to move forward in its own unique way.
The publication is called "Tomorrow" because sustainability is about how we can better reach tomorrow, so that tomorrow will follow, and tomorrow will follow.
And this publication is just the beginning for us, and there is a lot more to talk about "tomorrow".
As mentioned above, "Tomorrow: Shenzhen Sustainable Living Map" is not the most comprehensive guide, and 30 points are far from enough to summarize the attempts made by all people in a city to be sustainable, and it will inevitably not be able to identify the most sustainable place in your heart.
The discussion continues.
We would like to take this as an opportunity to use the content of this publication as an introduction to build a bridge of communication between everyone who is interested in "sustainable living" and discuss with you the future of sustainable urban living.