A brief introduction to the Starting Area of Guangzhou International Financial City
The Starting Area of Guangzhou International Financial City is located along the north side of the Pearl River to the east of the Guangzhou downtown area. It is adjacent to the CBD of the Pearl River New Town area and faces the Pazhou International Exhibition Center across the Pearl River, constituting the core functional area and pioneering development area of the Financial City. The Starting Area covers a total area of 1.32 km2. The total planned building area covers about 4,980,000 m2, including an underground building area of about 530,000 m2. Functions in this area cover offices, hotels, business, culture and entertainment, and residential buildings. The area accommodates a planned working population of 178,000.
In accordance with the development requirements of new urbanization featuring a “low-carbon economy, an intelligent city, and happy lifestyles” and adopting a global perspective, this project plans to build the Starting Area of Guangzhou International Financial City into a leading financial cluster in China. Set in Guangzhou, relying on the Pearl River Delta, and facing Southeast Asia, this project aims to build a best practice area of new urbanization, a leading financial cluster in China, a Central Activities Zone (CAZ) with local characteristics of the South of the Five Ridges region, and a world-class ideal eco-urban area. Figure 1 shows the aerial view of this project.
Implementation philosophy of the green eco-urban area
The general purpose of the Starting Area of Guangzhou International Financial City is to embody the characteristics of green, ecological, energy efficient, and environmental friendliness throughout the whole construction process. To achieve the above purpose, one feasible approach is to build a quantifiable green building technology indicator system and monitor all buildings based on this indicator system to form scale effect, so that the overall green construction costs can be reduced while the demonstrable green effects can be reinforced.
To build a quantifiable green building technology indicator system, the following four questions need to be addressed:
1) What content does the green building technology indicator macro system in the entire area include?
2) How is the green building technology indicator macro system allocated to each land parcel?
3) How to select appropriate green building technology in order to meet the green building technology indicators allocated to each land parcel and to take the local conditions into full consideration?
4) What are the benefits of the green building technology indicator system?
Figure 2 shows the implementation approach for the green eco-urban area in the Starting Area of Guangzhou International Financial City.
Exploration of the indicator system for the Green Eco-Urban Area
To ensure that the green technology indicator macro system is complete, advanced, and in line with current science, this project studies the existing project documentation, green building technology advances at home and abroad, and green technology indicator systems for urban areas of similar size. By analyzing the existing project documentation, we can determine the green ecological technology indicators already covered in the project from the regulatory plans and related research results to ensure that the indicators are complete (for example, the regulatory plan of each land parcel has mandatory requirements regarding the field comprehensive runoff coefficient and the green area ratio of the skirt building roof). Based on this, we have studied the updates of green building technologies and standards in China, selected green technological measures suitable for the Guangzhou climate and this project’s functions, supplemented with additional green ecological indicators to ensure that the technical measures are advanced. Finally, we compare the green ecological indicators of this project with those of the districts of similar size (such as Shenzhen Qianhai Planned Area, Technology Ecological Park in Shenzhen Bay, Chongqing Yuelai Ecological Urban Area, and Xiamen Technology Innovation Park), so as to determine the indicator system for the green eco-urban area of the Starting Area of Guangzhou International Financial City (as shown in Table 1).
Indicator allocation, verification, and cost-efficiency analysis of the green eco-urban area
Allocation of ecological indicators
To avoid previous problems such as grandiose macro indicators, failure to highlight characteristics of land parcels, and unclear area specialties, this project classifies and allocates indicators into three levels (area, district, and land parcel) according to the general objective, and sets preliminary indicator values based on the fundamental conditions of each land parcel. Technologies for the area and land parcel levels must be implemented for all land parcels. Land parcels differ from each other mainly in technology indicators at the district level. District-level indicators are set to avoid blindly investing the difficult and costly technologies into all land parcels with an emphasis on technology characteristics and highlights of each land parcel. Perform the following three steps to set such indicators:
Step 1: Divide districts based on the regulatory plan design concept of the Starting Area of Guangzhou International Financial City.
The regulatory plan generally divides the Starting Area into five parts: special living district, financial office district, waterfront leisure district, HQ office district, and comprehensive commercial district. Due to functional similarity and geographical connection, we combine the waterfront leisure district with the financial office district, and thereby the Starting Area is divided into four districts geographically.
Step 2: Analyze problems and external conditions of each district.
Figure 3 shows the external conditions, problems, and suggestions for each district.
Step 3: Clarify green indicator requirements for each district.
Comprehensively analyze the problems and conditions of each district according to step 2, provide improvement suggestions accordingly, and clarify green indicators for each district. For details, see Figure 4.
The indicator “renewable energy utilization ratio” is used as an example to describe how an indicator is generated.
For this project, it is suitable to adopt solar energy as the renewable energy. According to the above-mentioned district division, solar energy should be used in the special living district and financial office district, where the residential buildings adopt solar thermal power while others adopt solar photovoltaic power.
However, considering the high cost of implementing the renewable energy utilization system, when formulating technical requirements for all land parcels, we have to exclude the land parcels that are not suitable for solar power to ensure efficient operation of this technological measure and to reach the star-standard target for green buildings in each land parcel. Specific cases include the following (Figure 5):
1. Some land parcels, such as AT090938 and AT090940, are not suitable for solar energy utilization, because the overall efficiency of the solar system is affected by building shading.
2. Some land parcels such as AT091008 are long and narrow and stretch from east to west, and thereby are not suitable for solar panel pavement.
3. For land parcels with low star ratings (star 1), the renewable energy utilization technology is not required when comprehensively considering the cost performance ratio of the costs and technologies.
Figure 6 shows the land parcels with no requirements related to the “renewable energy utilization ratio” indicator in the special living district and financial office district. For other land parcels, renewable energy utilization measures should be taken.
After calculation, the renewable energy utilization is 0.381% for the field. To highlight the advancement of the Starting Area of the Guangzhou International Financial City, the technical standard of renewable energy utilization should be equal to or greater than 0.4% for this project.
Example verification of ecological indicators
The Guangzhou International Financial City project has 20 indicators in total for green eco-urban area construction. Among these indicators, 14 are technological measures of the area and land parcel levels, and these 14 technological measures should be implemented for all land parcels. For the remaining 6 district-level indicators, specific technical indicator requirements should be determined according to the corresponding district and actual project characteristics of each land parcel. To ensure that the work approach is in line with current science, we used the AT090908 land parcel as an example to conduct case verification, reviewed the case based on the indicator and design conditions, and provided suggestions. The details are shown in Table 2.
According to the case verification, although some indicators of AT090908 do not meet the requirements or cannot be determined, they can be improved in subsequent designs. That is, the working approaches of the indicator system for the green eco-urban area and values specified for each land parcel are basically in line with current science and preliminarily feasible.
Cost-efficiency analysis
Cost analysis
If the Starting Area of Guangzhou International Financial City is constructed according to the technical indicators (20 in total) of the green eco-urban area, the total incremental costs are about CNY 163,000,000 and the incremental costs for a unit of the building area are about CNY 33.90 per square meters. For details, see Table 3.
Efficiency analysis
1) Resourceintensification efficiency
After the indicators of the green eco-urban area are implemented, it is estimated that 106,000 m2 of construction land can be saved; 27,908,000 kWh of energy consumption can be saved per year; 1,180,200 tons of municipal tap water can be saved; operation expenses of CNY 33,896,000 can be saved per year; the static investment payback period is about 4.8 years. For details, see Table 4.
2) Environmentally friendly efficiency
With this project, the sewage discharge is reduced by about 1,180,000 tons per year; the rainfall emission is reduced by about 600,000 tons per year; the energy saved per year is 27,908,000 kWh; the CO2 emission reduced per year is 8470.5 tons. Table 5 and Table 6 list the environmentally friendly efficiency and other areas of increased efficiency respectively.
Conclusions
The green ecological civilization construction pattern is an inevitable choice for new urbanization in China. The green eco-urban area indicator system for the Starting Area of Guangzhou International Financial City has been researched based on a full understanding of the local conditions and resources. Taking the area’s development purpose into consideration, we have formulated a green eco-urban area indicator macro system for the Starting Area and innovatively divided technical indicators into three levels: area, district, and land parcel. As for district-level indicators, indicator policies can be formulated according to the external conditions and requirements of each corresponding area, thereby achieving consistency between the advancement of the overall green indicators and the feasibility of green indicators for each land parcel.
The Author(s) 2016. This article is published with open access at engineering.cae.cn
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