perspective
Yvonne Rydin
Learning to change
We may not know exactly what a sustainable city
will look like; right now we have only a partial
window onto this utopian future. But it is clear that
it will be very different to the way we live now,
radically different. Some of our buildings and public
spaces will be quite strange by present-day
expectations. We will change our travel patterns,
using some familiar but underused modes and
some quite unexpected ones. We will buy new
goods in new locations and using new methods.
Our relationship to urban nature will be transformed.
And we will interface with the water and energy
systems that underpin our urban lifestyles in quite
different ways. Urban life will be a mixture of the
recognisable and the strange.
All this means that we will have to plan, design and build our cities
differently. This is an important challenge for built environment
professionals. It will involve a change in priorities and value sets.
It will involve a creative challenge to imagine new built forms and
public environments. But above all it will involve a learning process.
Central to this is an understanding of how urban living relates to a
variety of natural systems, notably water, energy, biodiversity and
climate systems. We need to understand these systems, their support
for how we live and our impact on their processes.
Then we need to know how contemporary technological systems can
be used and developed in order to change these inter-relationships in
order to reduce our impacts on natural systems. This is not a purely
technological question though. The application and development of
technologies is always dependent on economic, social and political
frameworks. So we need to understand these dependencies,
otherwise new technologies will not deliver the anticipated benefits.
We also need to think about both the social and economic
impacts of following particular technological routes and whether
implementation options can be identified that avoid the downsides
of harm to specific economic sectors and social groups.
If we want to consider how renewable energy systems can be integrated
into the built environment of cities, we need to understand how they
can be made financially viable, both for installation and continued
operation. We need to ensure that the skills are available for installation,
maintenance and operation within specialist labour markets but also
that the users of such systems – the firms and households that occupy
buildings and ultimately use the energy generated – appreciate these
new ways of generating and consuming energy without unexpected
and perverse effects. We need to think about the cost implications for
households and firms and how that might impact on fuel poverty and
the viability of SMEs. We need to think about innovative social and
economic delivery mechanisms for renewable energy such as
community-based biomass Combined Heat and Power plants or wind
turbine schemes, with ownership and management based in the
community group. Or, again, how new forms of institutional
arrangements between energy suppliers, building owners and building
occupiers – such as green leases and local Energy Service Companies
(ESCOs) – could ensure that technological applications go alongside
behavioural change to deliver desired outcomes.
Taken from the Summer 2009 edition of ‘palette’, UCL’s journal of sustainable cities
www.ucl.ac.uk/sustainable-cities
So the learning that is involved in delivering sustainable cities is much
more than knowledge of the right equipment to buy and the right bit
of kit to invest in. Just as sustainability is a holistic concept, so the
learning challenge is also holistic and will place demands on all
disciplines. More importantly it will require the different disciplines
to engage with each other so that the economic incentives work with
social and cultural change, so that all such change supports the
desired technological developments, and so that new technologies
impact on natural systems as expected.
This begs the question of how such learning can best be fostered,
an important question for any university. There are several different
dimensions to learning for sustainable development.
First, it is clear that individuals need new types of knowledge and
understanding. Sustainability needs to be incorporated into all the
courses that educate professionals who contribute to how cities work
and change. Work is already underway to achieve this, with the
backing of disciplinary and professional bodies and the Higher
Education Funding Councils. It is not without difficulties though.
There are the problems of overloading the curriculum, pushing
against established ways of doing things and creating turf-wars
within academe.
Second, it could be argued that we need a new type of professional,
a sustainability professional who has a multidisciplinary education
and is able to see a problem from many different perspectives – social,
economic, technological and political. It would be unrealistic to
imagine that any single professional could encompass all the
knowledge needed to deliver sustainable cities, so perhaps what is
needed is a range of new sustainability professionals – sustainable
energy professionals, sustainable design professionals, etc. Again,
movement is happening towards multi-disciplinary cooperation to
deliver new programmes along these lines.
Third, we need to think about how existing professions engage with
each other and with newly educated professionals. The literature on
learning and knowledge within the social sciences has been
emphasising the importance of knowledge networks in which people
engage with each other and exchange information and understanding,
fostering learning by individuals and within the network as a whole.
In particular, communities of practice have been highlighted as a way
of generating change. Such communities are groups of actors focused
on a specific shared problem; they are identified by agreement on the
nature of that problem and repeated, ongoing exchanges on how to
tackle that problem. The essence of such communities is that
members learn from each other and, importantly, that they come to
change their view of themselves and their work through such
exchanges. Engagement in a community of practice based on a
sustainable cities issues will create a group of people who align
themselves with the sustainability goal and define themselves as
sustainability practitioners.
But, fourth, learning needs to extend beyond the individual to the
myriad organisations that are involved in creating and managing
cities. Knowledge networks and communities of practice can help to
transform the organisations they are based in. But learning by
organisations raises other issues. These include questions as to how far
learning is prioritised within an organisation as opposed to routine
business-as-usual. And does the organisation have clear lines for
disseminating knowledge within the organisation? Are there rewards
Hotel/casino, Macau
– Hang Kei Ho (UCL Geography)
“We don’t know what will actually turn out to be
sustainable in terms of urban living and how to
get there. We need to experiment and to innovate.
That means we need to be allowed to fail”
for learning and using new knowledge? Is there someone
– a knowledge node or knowledge entrepreneur – who can act as
a focal point for the flows of new information, knowledge requests
and learning activities within the organisation?
Perhaps though the most important aspect of learning is –
paradoxically – failing. In universities failure is regarded negatively.
Students are supposed to pass their courses. Research projects are
supposed to achieve their objectives and deliver outputs. Knowledge
generation and acquisition is a journey on an escalator travelling
upwards. But on the journey towards the sustainable city there can be
no such certainty. To return to the start, we don’t know what will
actually turn out to be sustainable in terms of urban living and how
to get there. We need to experiment and to innovate. That means we
need to be allowed to fail. Only by trying out new ways of creating
and changing built environments and new ways of living within cities
can we be sure what will deliver the future that will turn out to be
sustainable. In learning to be sustainable we need some space for
failure as well as success and we need to ensure that organisations are
not so tightly managed that such space is crowded out.
The journey to the sustainable city is not yet mapped and the
exploration will have its ups and down. Without doubt though it
will be an exciting journey, one that we can travel hopefully in the
spirit of learning.
Profile / Professor Yvonne Rydin
Yvonne’s research is within an institutionalist
paradigm looking at the networks and discourses of
local planning. She has studied housing land policy,
urban redevelopment, transport management, local
air quality policy, countryside protection and water
management. Particular interests are processes of
strategy development, public participation, the role of
social capital in planning, and the analysis of policy
discourses.
She has also worked on urban sustainability and its
relationship to urban governance in a multi-level
context. Here there has been a particular focus on
sustainability indicators and on the promotion of
sustainable construction. Learning how to be
sustainable within organisations and governance
structures is a current emphasis, looking across the
public and private sectors. This includes consideration
of the response of the property sector to the climate
change agenda, including adaptation to climate risks.
Yvonne researches planning and development, urban
sustainability and governance for sustainable
development. The current focus of her work is
sustainable construction and progressing towards
zero-carbon built environments. She is the Chair of
the Lead Expert Group for the government’s Foresight
Project on Sustainable Energy Management and the
Built Environment.
Contact
Professor Yvonne Rydin
Professor of Planning, Environment & Public Policy
and Director of Learning & Teaching
UCL Bartlett School of Planning
Co-Director (Cities)
UCL Environment Institute
+44 (0)20 7679 4805
y.rydin@ucl.ac.uk
Taken from the Summer 2009 edition of ‘palette’, UCL’s journal of sustainable cities
www.ucl.ac.uk/sustainable-cities
perspective
Matthew Gandy
Less speculation,
more imagination
In the early hours of 26 August 2005 a fire swept
through a dilapidated apartment in central Paris
crowded with African immigrants. Among the 17
dead there were 14 children. In April 2005 another
similar fire had killed 24 people, again mostly poor
immigrants. The buildings in which these people
lived were unfit for human habitation: cracked walls,
lead paint, dangerous wiring, infested with vermin.
By 2004 some 100,000 people were searching for
social housing in Paris, a marked increase on ten
years earlier, but only 12,000 homes were allocated
leading to excessive overcrowding1.
Lagos, Nigeria (2003) – Professor Matthew Gandy
(UCL Geography)
In Paris and elsewhere we find the persistence of 19th-century forms
of poverty and human exploitation. In the cities of the global South
the scale of suffering and human degradation is far worse, yet the
technical means to improve urban living conditions are not obscure
– better housing, improved healthcare, modern plumbing and so on.
Despite the efforts of early social scientists to demonstrate the
connections between labour markets and poverty or the role of public
health advocates in forcing improvements in the way cities are
managed we have nonetheless retained nefarious elements of the
19th-century mindset such as the neo-liberal revival of laissez-faire
public policy combined with renewed moral admonitions towards
people living in poverty.
It is striking how the middle-class mix of fear and disdain for the
urban poor remains so powerful today through the proliferation of
gated communities and the clearing away of informal settlements. In
India, for example, the war on the poor has become one of the
dominant elements of environmental demands to “clean up” cities and
remove “encroachers and polluters” 2. Whether in London or Mumbai,
a vast army of cheap labour is needed to allow the urban economy to
function yet the rich increasingly prefer not to mix with these people.
Many architects and planners acquiesce in these processes, seemingly
willing to transform cities into playgrounds for the wealthy where
professional ethics is subsumed by the cult of celebrity, real-estate
speculation and a new homogeneity in urban life 3.
The 19th-century city has left us with a dualistic legacy of “urban”
and “rural” where the supposed benefits of small-town life are
Taken from the Summer 2009 edition of ‘palette’, UCL’s journal of sustainable cities
www.ucl.ac.uk/sustainable-cities
routinely juxtaposed with the dangers of urban living. The city itself
is characterized as a greedy behemoth gobbling up people and
resources. These antiquated ideas persist today through various forms
of anti-modern architectural and environmental thought. Yet as the
French sociologist Henri Lefebvre argues, it makes little sense to
artificially separate cities from our understanding of society as a
whole: the transformation of the urban and the rural is part of the
same set of processes and the city considered in isolation can never
be properly understood 4.
It is striking how 20th-century utopian ideals in architecture, modern
living and urban design are now in such disrepute: the exhilaration of
speed has been replaced by gridlock and frustration, the high-rise
apartments that were to cut through the gloom and congestion of the
industrial city have become sink estates, and the idea of an inclusive
public realm is now assailed from all sides, whether through the
privatization of public services or the incessant exhortations to
consume.
References
1. David Fickling, ‘Paris apartment fire kills 17’,
‘The Guardian’, 26 August 2005
2. Partha Chatterjee, ‘Are Indian cities becoming bourgeois
at last?’, in Indira Chandrasekhar and Peter C. Seel (eds)
‘body.city: siting contemporary culture in India’
(Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt and Delhi:
Tulika Books, 2003) p178
3. Jonathan Raban, ‘My own private metropolis’,
‘Financial Times’, 9/10 August 2008
4. Henri Lefebvre, ‘La Révolution urbaine’
(Paris: Gallimard, 1970)
What kind of ideas do we need for the 21st-century city? Certainly
we need to begin by disentangling past thinking: retain the
engineering brilliance of the 19th century, for example, but not
its moral hypocrisy; nurture the 20th-century public realm but not
the autocratic or dysfunctional dimensions to state power.
What kind of distinct ideas are now emerging? An alternative to
conservative environmentalism, for instance, is provided by an
emphasis on the “living city” where the ecological dynamics of urban
space become part of public policy: the aesthetic and biotic diversity
of the city is celebrated and encouraged in order to enliven the urban
experience; urban landscapes are themselves used for the production
of food, the cleansing of water or the improvement of flood defences;
and the artificial distinctions between the “natural” and the “artificial”
are extensively broken down.
“It is striking how the middle-class mix of fear and
disdain for the urban poor remains so powerful today
through the proliferation of gated communities and
the clearing away of informal settlements”
In the political sphere, the idea of secular cosmopolitanism presents
a real alternative to the incessant drift towards greater division and
segregation that is fuelled by poverty and racism but exacerbated by
new forms of religious intolerance. London, for example, despite
recent racist and homophobic attacks, presents a remarkably
successful model of a world city with its long history of incorporating
new communities. It is the “island” function of the city as a safe
haven that links the contemporary metropolis with the medieval
city as a place of sanctuary.
A global commitment to improving human health is also a crucial
component of a new urban politics. There are few areas of public
policy that can so easily be transformed yet have been so
systematically neglected. The scale of the threats demands an
emphasis on the politics of human body in all its cultural, social and
epidemiological complexity. Whether we are engaging with the HIV
threat faced by impoverished women in West Africa or the spread of
dengue fever on construction sites in south Asia there is an urgent
need to pool knowledge and expertise from every discipline in order
to exert maximum leverage on governments, international agencies
and others charged with the responsibility for human health.
Finally, we need to recover the urban imagination in order to enrich
21st-century public culture. From galleries to lidos, carnivals to
theatres, the historic role of cities as generators of ideas must be
recognized and nurtured.
Profile / Professor Matthew Gandy
Matthew completed his PhD at the London School
of Economics in 1992. From 1992 to 1997 he was
a lecturer in the School of European Studies at the
University of Sussex. In 1995 he was a visiting
scholar in the Graduate School of Architecture,
Planning & Preservation at Columbia University,
New York, and since 1997 he has taught at UCL.
His book ‘Concrete and clay: reworking nature in
New York City’ examined five interrelated aspects
to New York’s urban environment: the building of
a modern water supply system; the creation and
meaning of public space; the construction of
landscaped roads; the grassroots environmental
politics of the ghetto; and the contemporary politics of
pollution. It won the 2003 Spiro Kostof award for the
book within the previous two years “that has made the
greatest contribution to our understanding of urbanism
and its relationship with architecture”.
With Professor Alimuddin Zumla, Director of the UCL
Centre for Infectious Diseases & International Health,
he edited ‘The return of the White Plague: global
poverty and the ‘new’ tuberculosis’.
His ESRC-funded project ‘Cyborg urbanization:
Theorizing water and urban infrastructure’ involved
research in Berlin, Lagos, Los Angeles and Mumbai,
and his AHRC-funded project ‘Liquid city’ led to the
production of a film which has just been shown at the
London Documentary Film Festival. In addition to his
research on the metabolic dimensions to urban space
he also writes on the representation of nature and
landscape in the visual arts, including recent essays
on Michelangelo Antonioni and Todd Haynes.
Contact
Professor Matthew Gandy
Professor of Geography
UCL Geography
Director
UCL Urban Laboratory
+44 (0)20 7679 5517
m.gandy@ucl.ac.uk
Less speculation, more imagination!
Taken from the Summer 2009 edition of ‘palette’, UCL’s journal of sustainable cities
www.ucl.ac.uk/sustainable-cities
perspective
Mark Maslin
Future vision
of a sustainable
zero-carbon world
“ Technological solutions to both emission reductions
What could a future sustainable world look like?
One of the key concerns is climate change and
and adaptation to climate change have occurred at
moving to a zero-carbon world. But many people
a faster and faster rate through the 21st century,
now throw around the terms zero-carbon cities
producing a global developed society unrecognisable
and zero-carbon economy but have no idea how
from that a hundred years previous”
to achieve them. What this article provides is a
look at how our world will have to change to achieve
ıı the house is as water efficient as it is energy efficient. Outside you can see
these goals. Because we must realise that our
the pipework for the rainwater-harvesting system, collecting water into a
buildings, neighbourhoods, transport networks
special tank for feeding through into the house’s plumbing system. Water
and cities will all have to change.
separation is a feature of the house’s plumbing but the household hardly
notice this or the water saving features in the toilets, showers and sinks
Home of the Future
ıı the three-storey town house is part of a group of houses, which
collectively make up the GreenHomes Neighbourhood in Anywhere
Town in Any Country. They are grouped around a pleasant green space
with some play and keep-fit equipment in the centre. There is lots of
greenery, some of it acting as sustainable urban-drainage systems and
the rest as shade from the midday sun. There is a network of local
pathways, which are well lit and well used
ıı close by are local shops, a primary school and a community centre.
The community centre noticeboard is testimony to the amount of local
activities occurring there. Just outside the centre is the express tramway
stop and behind is a small car park with some of the community
electric car-share vehicles and communal bicycles
ıı the house displays its zero-carbon energy certificate in the hallway but
the high levels of insulation in the building fabric are invisible to most
visitors. Next to the certificate is the smart meter. This shows the
remarkably low levels of electricity usage within the house, thanks to
the energy efficiency measures and the solar water heating system on
the roof. But the meter also shows when electricity is being generated
by the household through the photovoltaic cells incorporated into the
roof-tiles, window shutters and other flat surfaces
ıı the house is built to deal with the extreme weather predicted for the
region. High ceilings, solar shading and efficient air conditioning
powered by solar panels for the more frequent heat waves. Raised
ground floor and flood channels in the surrounding area to deal with
floods, especially urban flash floods. Deep foundations prevent damage
to the house from soil shrinkage
ıı there is no garage or off-street parking for the house. Instead there
is a secure cycle store, next to the composting unit. The rest of the
household’s waste goes into a vacuum waste removal system that
also automatically sorts waste for collection and recycling at the
community centre.
Office of the Future
ıı FutureOffices are proud of their new headquarters. Approaching it from
any of a number of nearby bus-stops, tram-stops or the train station,
visitors are often surprised by its attractive design incorporating greenery
at the ground floor, on numerous balconies and right up to the green
roof. The blades of the wind turbines catch the light, giving a clue to how
some of the electricity demands of the occupiers are met
ıı less obvious is the system of district heating pipes that connect the office
building with other local uses – shops, restaurants, the cinema, local
health centre and the college. The mix of users means that the heat
demand is more or less balanced over the day and the week. All these
users are connected in to the area’s combined heat and power unit
ıı however, FutureOffices have found the energy demands of their new
building are much lower than those of its older buildings. The building’s
fabric is highly energy efficient but equally as important is the design that
maximises natural daylight while providing shading during the middle
of the day, even when the sun is at its hottest. This and the natural
internal ventilation system have removed the need for air conditioning
except during extreme heat waves and made for a much healthier
internal environment
ıı FutureOffices have made the health of its workers a key aspect of the
building. The stairs are visible features linking floors, with cafes on
mezzanine levels. These are heavily used; the lifts don’t stop at every floor
so it is often more convenient to use the stairs. In any case, they are
tucked away rather than being the focal point of the lobbies
ıı water efficiency measures have also reduced the water bill hugely.
This is despite a dedicated cycle-and-shower unit on the ground floor,
with secure cycle storage and changing room facilities
ıı most of the office functions are not at ground floor level, however, and
neither are the core services. The building is not far from the river and
flooding has become more common recently, so the ground floor is
flood-proofed to ensure that the next flood will not disrupt business.
Taken from the Summer 2009 edition of ‘palette’, UCL’s journal of sustainable cities
www.ucl.ac.uk/sustainable-cities
Cities of the Future
Economy of the Future
ıı our cities have been transformed across the world. Mixed-use
developments are situated around vibrant public spaces. These spaces
create a strong sense of distinctive place for new developments.
The old is integrated into the new, with high quality urban design
ıı Carbon Auditors Ltd have just opened their new headquarters in
London using all 143 floors of the first zero-carbon skyscraper.
This attests to the huge market created in carbon trading since the
momentous post-2012 international agreement
ıı pedestrians are given priority over the car in the planning of cities.
There are dedicated routes for trams, guided buses and cycles linking
the different land-uses
ıı renewable and alternative energy companies flourish, replacing the old
oil giants as one of the main profit-generating industries in the world.
They have been made so profitable by global carbon trading, which is
driven by the gradually shrinking global cap on carbon dioxide and
other GHG emissions
ıı a mix of micro-generation technologies provides energy for building
users. Combined heat and power and district heating schemes are
routine for new mixed-use developments, some using renewable
fuels. Many of these schemes draw the existing buildings into their
scope as well
ıı greenery abounds on the ground but also on roofs, providing
multi-functional spaces for amenity, leisure, natural habitats and
water drainage. Sustainable urban-drainage systems are standard,
transforming the look of urban areas. Cities are as green and
attractive as the countryside
ıı nearby rivers are managed for their landscape, leisure, and nature
conservation value. But they also form part of urban transport
networks, with riverside cycle paths and walkways. Most importantly,
the riverbanks and surrounding land absorb rainfall run-off and
prevent flooding of built-up areas
ıı such cities encourage people to use their urban areas and to be active
within them. Safe, pleasant and green, cities therefore contribute to the
physical and mental health of their residents all over the world.
ıı technological solutions to both emission reductions and adaptation
to climate change have occurred at a faster and faster rate through the
21st century, producing a global developed society unrecognisable
from a hundred years before. Everything from how plants grow to
how we produce electricity has been improved
ıı contrary to the doom merchants, the global economy in the middle
of the 21st century is growing at nearly 5% per year, twice the yearly
average in the early 21st century. This is due to the increasing flow of
money and expertise to the developing world through the post-2012
agreement and global carbon trading. The increased spending power
of the developing world has stimulated the global economy, benefiting
everyone with increased standards of living. The threat of global
warming thus ultimately led to a more equal distribution of wealth
across the world, and a stronger, faster-growing global economy.
Transport of the Future
ıı local travel is now routinely made with public transport which includes
underground trains, trains, buses, trams, and boats. The majority
of private cars and taxis are electric. A significant proportion of goods
are moved by rail and then efficient electric vans and lorries. Separate
cycle lanes and clear, well-lit pedestrians walkways are provided in all
urban areas
ıı continental travel has been revolutionised as air traffic has been
replaced with Maglev (magnetically levitating) trains travelling at
900 km/h (about 600 mph) using renewable sources of electricity.
These rail networks extend between major cities throughout the world
and fast connections allow you to travel between continents. The first
coast to coast train verses plane race in the USA was won by the train;
as the walk-on walk-off train service removed any lengthy delays which
occurred at the airports
ıı intercontinental travel still uses traditional airplanes but these
super-sized commercial jets carry over 1000 passengers each and are the
most efficient ever made. Flights have become very expensive due to
the global carbon tax on aviation fuel and thus are always operating at
full capacity. They are towed to and from the runway saving a
significant amount of fuel and of course money
ıı by the end of the 21st century resources to fuel the new low-carbon
global economy are running low. This is due to both the huge demand
as the world rapidly develops and strict new global environmental
protection laws. Space exploitation thus becomes cost effective in the
early 22nd century. Carbon tax breaks on international space launches
enables private companies and countries to set up orbiting space
stations and the mining of the Moon begins.
Profile / Professor Mark Maslin
Mark is a leading climatologist with particular
expertise in past global and regional climatic change,
and has published more than 80 papers in journals
such as ‘Science’, ‘Nature’ and ‘Geology’.
He has been awarded grants of more than £3 million,
19 of which have been awarded by the Natural
Environment Research Council. His latest
co-authored paper in ‘Science’ provides a new view
on the causes of human evolution. His areas of
scientific expertise include global warming, causes
of past and future global climate change, ocean
circulation, ice ages, gas hydrates, Amazonia, East
Africa palaeoclimates and human evolution, and
climatic consequences of volcanic eruptions.
In addition Mark has written five popular books, more
than 20 popular articles (eg, for ‘New Scientist’,
‘The Guardian’ and ‘EOS’), appeared on radio and
television, and is consulted regularly by the BBC.
He was a consultant and filmed for the BBC’s highly
successful ‘Supervolcano’ and is currently consulting
for their follow-up series ‘Superstorm’. His latest
popular book is the second edition of the Oxford
University Press ‘Global Warming: A Very Short
Introduction’, a pocket-sized book summarising the
historical background, scientific debate, future
impacts and the politics of global warming.
Contact
Professor Mark Maslin
Professor of Physical Geography and Head
UCL Geography
Director
UCL Environment Institute
Member
UCL Environmental Change Research Centre
+44 (0) 20 7679 0556
mmaslin@geog.ucl.ac.uk
Taken from the Summer 2009 edition of ‘palette’, UCL’s journal of sustainable cities
www.ucl.ac.uk/sustainable-cities
perspective
Mark Tewdwr-Jones
Governing London:
World city,
local tensions
The institutions of change are constantly
undergoing reform and modernisation, in order
to set a strategic framework for growth and
investment. But choosing an appropriate governing
and institutional framework for London has always
been problematic. With the city serving as the
economic core of the UK’s global position and as
her capital city, London’s effects are felt over a
much wider territory than the administrative
boundary of London alone. Questions have been
addressed continually as to the nature and form of
the governance of London. Should London possess
a city-wide top-level authority? How should this
authority be established and over what
geographical area? What is the relationship
between the national government and London, and
between the South East region within which London
is situated and the city itself? And what is the
governing relationship between London and its
constituent boroughs?
London’s role as the capital city and as the location of central
government, global business interests and the financial markets,
significant arts and cultural facilities, a place of tourism, and as a
renowned worldwide centre for education, have all justified successive
governments’ desire to promote London and its wider region
economically, and to protect the city as a world urban power. A range
of interventions by government have demonstrated a commitment to
promote and strengthen London further over time in the face of
global competition and as the UK’s premier city. This is evidenced by
decisions to support massive regeneration schemes in and around the
capital such as the Thames Gateway, to invest in infrastructure and
transportation developments like the Channel Tunnel rail link, the
extension of Heathrow Airport, and Crossrail, to lead on the Olympic
Games 2012 bid, and to support the city financial hub of London as
a focal point for global business. The provision of highly specialist
support systems for international finance and business generates
economic growth that is in the interests of the UK’s economy.
This is London as the world city, a success story that is physically
bursting out of the urban core, forming new patterns of growth and
pressure around the capital, and causing externalities that Londoners
experience through high prices, housing and transport costs, and
social polarisation, and makes the city one of the world’s most
expensive cities to live and work within. House prices remain ten
times the average London salary and there remain difficulties to house
and accommodate key workers essential to deliver London’s services.
London’s population doubles during the working day as millions of
people commute into the city from a significantly wide and
Taken from the Summer 2009 edition of ‘palette’, UCL’s journal of sustainable cities
www.ucl.ac.uk/sustainable-cities
increasingly extensive catchment area. The infrastructure necessary to
support this growth and pressure remains archaic and so delay and
frustration have become part of the commuting experience for many.
London has also been a principal gateway for in-migration into the
country, a subject politically controversial, and one ever-folding to the
extent that in 2006, London plays host to 300 different nationalities
of people, speaking 200 different languages. The social and ethnic
mix of London today is in marked contrast to the London of 60 years
ago, when the politicians and planners first attempted to coordinate
change and bring about reconstruction in Patrick Abercrombie’s
Greater London Plan of 1944. It was a subject concerned with
questioning the ability of government to exercise authority over a
significant metropolitan territory, the meaning and extent of London
itself, and of those various populations and communities that make
up the city. These are exactly the same issues that London is facing
today: numerous and overlapping contentions for future direction
between competing interest groups.
These tensions are associated with divisions between advocates of
continuous growth for wider regional and national economic benefit,
and proponents of restraint and environmental – and to some extent
social – protection. They encompass not simply growth vs. protection
interests, but also national and local priorities, and inner London and
outer London contentions. These arguments are persistent, often
hostile, and are played out within a turbulent theatre of governance
which itself is often changing. Generating a vision, strategy and plan
to coordinate change in London is a task that politicians and policy
makers find incredibly difficult to undertake.
London, governmentally and institutionally, is in a continual state
of flux, searching for an institutional fix to govern and coordinate
intervention, while arguing about the delineation of power to
strategise the range of ongoing economic, social, and environmental
problems and bring about change. Since 2000, London has been
governed by an elected Mayor, within a broader governmental
framework provided by: central government; regional governing
structures; local municipalities; an elected London-wide Assembly;
a range of quasi-autonomous central government bodies; and ad hoc
partnerships. There has been little consensus by commentators in the
period since on the right relationship and degree of responsibilities
between these bodies, even though the Mayor was awarded further
powers in 2007, particularly in relation to strategic matters. The
growth of mayoral powers raises significant wider issues concerning
democratic accountability across the region, and serves to highlight
the ongoing and perhaps historic tensions that exist between the
agencies of change on the one hand, and different forms of
democracy and claims to democracy that are indecorously present in
London on the other.
The direct powers of the Mayor remain limited, when compared to
similar offices in other world cities, but he does perform an essential
catalytic and influencing role across agencies, performing an
ambassadorial role both outside the UK and inside government,
and with the business community. This new role has, in turn,
created a new form of integrated strategic planning at the London
metropolitan scale, with a commitment to planning, and a
determination for public, private and voluntary actors to enter into
partnerships to realise development. If anything, this should have
taken some of the political heat out of controversial large-scale
development projects. But the fact that both central and decentralised
government each operates at the Greater London level (through the
Government Office for London and the GLA) exacerbates the
landscape of governance and also leads to a confusion of roles at this
level. There remain huge questions about London’s capacity to deliver
and to galvanise political leadership across multiple competing
agencies, particularly in relation to issues such as planning, housing,
transport, and other public investments.
“There is no doubt that London – whether intentionally
or not – has been given a competitive edge over other
world cities by this institutional structure and flexible
responsive and partnership style of working”
These tensions have been ever-present in London for most of the last
120 years, despite government restructuring and questions over the
division of power and responsibilities. Despite or perhaps because of
this, the surprising point is that London nevertheless seems to have
been highly successful in its transition from a manufacturing to a
global–financial city and remains an attractive place to live and work
with new migrants from within and outside of the UK. This has been
achieved, perhaps in part, because the office-holder of London Mayor
has been instrumental in circumventing such a tightly-defined set of
parameters to nevertheless carve out a role for themselves that creates
achievements. With little in the way of direct responsibility for social
services and housing (unlike council leaders and directly-elected
mayors elsewhere) the London institutional framework has forced the
Mayor to concentrate specifically on economic development,
planning and transport policies while also engaging in the type of
networking, brokerage and partnership that New Labour requires in
the new elite governance structures.
The post-2007 powers vested in the Mayor provide a powerful but
potentially controversial set of tools for planning. The degree to
which they will be utilised will probably vary according to the
personal interests of the office holder. The relationship between the
Mayor and the boroughs to work the new powers is essential but
may lead to further, or perhaps that should be on-going, friction.
The unique combination of a strong institutional framework of
government, with a flexible and responsive form of working, has
enabled the bidding of projects (that can benefit the whole of
London) to be streamlined, and to be embedded within local
municipalities. There is no doubt that London – whether
intentionally or not – has been given a competitive edge over other
world cities by this institutional structure and flexible responsive
and partnership style of working, as the successful Olympic bid
illustrates. Between 2000 and 2008, London witnessed a form of
government working that owed its style and origins to New
Labour ideology, but also to the legacies of working within a
strategic vacuum in the 1980s and 1990s. This period saw a new
political commitment to strategic enabling, rather than strategic
governing, and was the breeding ground for innovation and
competitiveness across governance actors in London. Confidence
was created in collaborative working, but the style of London
politics and governance is already changing markedly. Party
politics has returned to the centre stage in London political
debates, and as the mayoral office has gained enhanced powers and
the office-holder cemented his position within the institutional
framework much more prominently, so older tensions and
conflicts have begun to emerge. The key question is whether the
legacies from the early 21st century experience of governing
London will deliver in the long term and provide social as well
as economic benefit.
Profile / Professor Mark Tewdwr-Jones
Before joining the UCL Bartlett School of Planning,
Mark held the posts of: Planning Assistant, South
Hams District Council; Lecturer, Department of City &
Regional Planning, Cardiff University; and Reader,
Department of Land Economy, University of
Aberdeen. He is co-author of ‘Decent Homes for All:
Planning’s Evolving Role in Housing Provision’ and
‘Shaping and Delivering Tomorrow’s Places: Effective
Practice in Spatial Planning’.
Mark’s research focuses on the politics and
governance of planning, including spatial planning,
urban and regional development, governance and
devolution, and certain substantive disciplines within
spatial governance including regional planning and
development, representations of planning and urban
life, economic and spatial governance, and the
relationship between housing and planning and
second homes in Europe. His current research is on:
the spirit and purpose of planning, including reforms
and modernisation of planning; the principles of
spatial planning; and media representations of
planning and planners.
Contact
Professor Mark Tewdwr-Jones
Professor of Spatial Planning & Governance and
Director of Research
UCL Bartlett School of Planning
Steering Committee Member
UCL Urban Laboratory
+44 (0)20 7679 4873
m.tewdwr-jones@ucl.ac.uk
Taken from the Summer 2009 edition of ‘palette’, UCL’s journal of sustainable cities
www.ucl.ac.uk/sustainable-cities
perspective
Iain Borden
Sustainability and
architectural design
In April of 1958, a momentous event took place in
the history of UK architectural education: the
“Oxford Conference”, at which 50 architects met to
consider how architecture was to be taught. Their
decision? That, in contrast to previous
arrangements involving architectural practices,
architects should be predominantly taught within
universities, leading to a higher standard of both
professionalism and academicism among
architects. The result was a profound shift both in
the content and practice of architecture in the UK.
Half a century on, another “Oxford Conference” has been held, with
similar ambitions to “reset the agenda for architectural education”.
But this time around the focus is different, no longer about general
operations and standards, and instead concentrating on sustainability,
climate change, environmental responsibility and renewable energy.
The need and urgency for such discussions is, undoubtedly,
considerable. The exigencies of a world in which temperatures,
sea-levels, populations, pollution and fuel costs are all rising, while
fossil-based energy reserves are falling, mean architecture must do
more to help in the creation of truly sustainable cities and buildings.
So why do I feel a certain sense of unease at the clarion call of this
latest Oxford Conference, and why, indeed, could it even threaten to
reduce architecture’s great capacity to contribute creatively to our
cities today?
One of the suggestions implicit in many discussions of sustainability
is that the architectural profession in general and architecture schools
in particular are somehow unaware of the environmental agenda, and
that some kind of enormous restructuring or “resetting” of
architectural education is therefore required. This is just poppycock.
Most if not all architectural schools are acutely aware of the relevance
of sustainability, and even the most cursory of glances at the various
summer degree shows held around the country shows an incredible
variety of approaches. At the UCL Bartlett School of Architecture,
both whole teaching groups and innumerable individuals are
looking at a whole range of different ways in which sustainability
can be developed and embedded within architecture in general
and architectural education in particular. Perhaps most readily
understandable here are technical solutions to problems of
sustainability in architecture – those dealing with materials,
insulation, construction and the like in order to decrease energy
usage and increase energy-efficient performance.
Taken from the Summer 2009 edition of ‘palette’, UCL’s journal of sustainable cities
www.ucl.ac.uk/sustainable-cities
Prototype pavilion with deployable external insulation.
Funded by UrbanBuzz, Make Architects, DSP
Architecture, the UCL Bartlett Architecture Research
Fund and the UCL Graduate School
For example, one group within the school, lead by Stephen Gage
(Professor of Innovative Technology), is exploring ways in which
buildings might actually adapt physically according to the usage
patterns of its inhabitants, and so minimise energy use and losses.
Part of their exploration has been through a full-scale prototype
pavilion (ingeniously based on a standard shipping container unit)
which uses deployable external insulation to dramatically enhance the
environmental performance of windows, simply by closing them up
whenever people are not actually present in the internal space. The
thermal shutters are designed to encourage big windows back into
buildings, countering recent trends to reduce window size to prevent
heat loss.
But architecture is not just about technology, and we need social
propositions as to how architecture interacts with lifestyle and urban
design. Here the imaginative and creative architecture can help to
speculate about possible futures outside of some of the more usual
constraints of commercial architectural practice. For example, one of
our graduate teaching groups, Unit 12, led by Jonathan Hill
(Professor of Architecture & Visual Theory) and his colleagues
Matthew Butcher and Elizabeth Dow, explored the architectural and
urban design of the town of “Hubbert Curve” (named after
geoscientist M. King Hubbert who predicted that available fossil fuel
reserves would be dramatically reduced by 2050 and fully depleted by
2200).
“Town of Hubbert Curve/Levittown”, section through
hemp-farmer’s house, with ice room cooling system
– John Ashton, Diploma Unit 12, tutors Jonathan Hill,
Matthew Butcher and Elizabeth Dow
In this stimulating proposition, each student’s project has a
reciprocal relationship with at least three other projects in the town.
As they explain:
“Sustainable, the town trades and exchanges with its environment; one
expands and contracts, receives and donates, adapts and adjusts, in
response to the other. Self-sufficient, the town generates its own energy;
each building produces its own energy and creates an excess that serves the
general needs of the town. Discursive, the town encourages social and
political engagement, and the interaction of public and private lives.
Independent, the town learns from earlier centuries as well as those more
recent, inventing and adapting narratives, histories and myths that define
its character. Seasonal, the town is responsive to its climate and site,
creating conditions that are conducive to its survival and growth.”
Significantly, these kinds of architectural and urban proposition not
only suggest new technical and social ways of addressing
sustainability, but also ways in which issues of sustainability can enter
into architecture in more subtle ways, and particularly by creating
new agendas for architectural aesthetics and representation. In
projects such as Kyle Buchanan’s “Super-Sextant” (graduate teaching
group Unit 11, led by Laura Allen and Mark Smout), one sees a new
architecture of vision, a project that responds to the landscape, the
horizon and the tides of the River Thames – that is, an architecture
which both reflects and helps to engender a deeper and more varied
appreciation of our natural landscape.
“Super Sextant”, view of model from above
– Kyle Buchanan, Diploma Unit 11, tutors Laura Allen
and Mark Smout
And in the proposal by cj Lim (Professor of Architecture & Cultural
Design) for a new eco-city in GuangMing, one sees an even more
ambitious proposal. Shortlisted by the Chinese Government in
an international competition, this design creates a whole new
landscape typology, incorporating farming into the fabric of
the city – lush grazing and arable land are placed on the roofs of the
huge circular towers that make up the city. Additional land for crops
is available on a series of eighty vertical farms; 10m2 allotments are
cantilevered off a central spine and stacked one above the other like
the branches of a giant tree, and dispersed throughout the city.
Water also plays a significant part in the proposition,
as cj explains:
“Lakes and reservoirs are used to reinforce the hydrology and ecological
dynamics of the site. The increased expanse of water encourages
displacement cooling of the surrounding areas and freshwater
fish-farming. The lotus, a multi-use cooking plant, displays poetic beauty
in the lakes, providing contrast to the robust arable fields.”
So what do these highly varied design propositions tell us about
sustainability, architecture and cities? Above all, they demonstrate
that what we need in architecture is not the unfortunately
all-too-common simplistic approach to architectural sustainability –
emphasizing environmental performance in largely functional and
economic terms and/or reducing it to a set of aesthetic and cultural
clichés based around green roofs, wind turbines and open-toed
sandal-wearing vegetarians – but a whole variety of different kinds of
architecture and architectural education. Above all, architecture
Taken from the Summer 2009 edition of ‘palette’, UCL’s journal of sustainable cities
www.ucl.ac.uk/sustainable-cities
“Architecture is not just about technology, and we need
social propositions as to how architecture interacts with
lifestyle and urban design. Here the imaginative and
creative architecture can help to speculate about possible
futures outside of some of the more usual constraints
of commercial architectural practice”
Project for GuangMing eco-city, China
– Prof cj Lim with Fulcrum, Techniker,
Alan Baxter Associates and others
schools must continue to develop and explore their own ways of dealing
with sustainability, and the UCL Bartlett School of Architecture is
determined to pursue exactly this path.
Individual students, too, must be free to develop their individual
agendas and research, as befits graduate-level university study. It is
worth remembering that students’ general competence in matters
of sustainability and the environment is already guaranteed by the
regulatory prescription of architecture courses, and this leaves some
free to take on the sustainability agenda in much greater depth,
but also others free to head off in other directions of investigation
and speculation.
This raises the other subtext which often underlies calls for a greater
focus on sustainability, the suggestion – sometimes implicit, sometimes
explicit – that sustainability is the problem, the most important issue
with which architecture must now get to grips. Well, no. Without for
one minute wishing to decry the importance of sustainability, there are
at least three other areas of equal or perhaps greater significance,
as UCL’s Grand Challenges for research make clear: global health
(beyond malaria and HIV to all aspects of medical need across the
world), intercultural interaction (how societies, groups and individuals
understand, respect and live with each other) and human wellbeing
(all of the qualities of everyday life that make us truly alive, from
political rights to personal love, from enjoyment of the arts to
expressions of ideas). Whatever the exigencies and urgency of
sustainability, these other three agendas also require our architectural
attention, for without these qualities and standards of life then we
cease to be truly human, to be really global citizens.
What are we left with? Sustainability in architecture and architectural
education? Yes, of course. Is there more to be done? Yes, undoubtedly.
Is this the only thing facing architecture today, and which must be
focused on above all else? Clearly, no. Instead, we need that diversity
of approaches to architecture that, when vigorously and creatively
adopted, can serve both architecture and society as a whole so well.
A diversity of architecture schools (and other schools in the UK and
across the world are pursuing their own ways of tackling sustainability
in architecture and urbanism), a diversity of practices, a diversity of
architectures, a diversity of students. This is how architecture can best
continue to be at once imaginative, creative, thoughtful and truly
useful, and this is how, ultimately the real challenges facing us today –
including sustainability – can be best addressed.
Taken from the Summer 2009 edition of ‘palette’, UCL’s journal of sustainable cities
www.ucl.ac.uk/sustainable-cities
Profile / Professor Iain Borden
Educated at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne,
UCL, University of London and UCLA, Iain is an
architectural historian and urban commentator. His
wide-ranging historical and theoretical interests have
lead to publications on, among other subjects, critical
theory and architectural historical methodology, the
history of skateboarding as an urban practice,
boundaries and surveillance, Henri Lefebvre and
Georg Simmel, Renaissance urban space,
architectural modernism and modernity, contemporary
architectural practice and theory, film and
architecture, gender and architecture, body spaces
and the experience of space. His photographs have
been widely published both in his own publications
and those by other historians and architects. He is
currently working on a history of driving as a spatial
experience of cities and architecture.
Iain is a frequent contributor to conferences and
exhibitions and has lectured widely around the world.
He is currently a member of the RIBA Education
Committee and of the Standing Conference of Heads
of Schools of Architecture. He serves on the Editorial
Board of the ‘Journal of Architecture’, and is a Visiting
Examiner at Central St Martins. He has made
frequent appearances on television and radio in the
UK and abroad, and is currently working on a
television documentary about skateboarding and
urban space.
He has a number of PhD students researching
historical and theoretical studies of architecture in the
USA, Indonesia, South Africa and Europe, and
dealing with such topics as representations of
landscape, race and politics, sexuality and space,
postcolonialism, wastelands, architectural modernism
and postmodernism, and 18th-century roads.
Contact
Professor Iain Borden
Professor of Architecture & Urban Culture
and Director
UCL Bartlett School of Architecture
Steering Committee Member
UCL Urban Laboratory
+44 (0)20 7679 4821
i.borden@ucl.ac.uk
perspective
Sarah Bell
Engineers’ identity crisis
Engineers build cities. More precisely, labourers and technicians,
employed by contractors working more or less within the
technical direction of engineers, build cities. The technical
authority and know-how of engineers is fundamental to the
creation and development of the modern city. Engineers have
been responsible for the provision of clean drinking water and
sanitation in cities, and as such argue to have delivered greater
benefits to the health of modern citizens than the medical
profession. Engineers are responsible for the aeroplanes,
televisions, mobile telephony and high-speed broadband that
underpin the global economy, which financiers and industrialists
lay claim to. Engineers keep the trains on the tracks, the cars
moving on the motorways, the buildings standing and the lights
on so that citizens can go about the everyday business and culture
of the modern metropolis. Conventionally, engineers are at once
humble servants to cultural, political and economic masters, and
quiet heroes making the good modern life possible.
As heroes, engineers claim credit for the great technological
advances of the modern city; as servants, they escape
accountability for its failures. The heroics of Joseph Bazalgette
and the engineers of the Metropolitan Board of Works
constructed the intercepting sewerage system and delivered
Victorian London from the perils of cholera and stench. The
failure to deliver improved sanitation to 52% of the world’s
population by 2005 is the responsibility of inept, inhumane and
Conversion of the old Arsenal Stadium,
London, into luxury apartments –
Dr Sarah Bell (UCL Civil, Environmental
& Geomatic Engineering)
corrupt politicians and economists. Cleaning city and household
air by replacing coal fires with gas and electric heating in millions
of homes was a major achievement of engineering innovation and
management. The continued growth in energy consumption
feeding ever more extravagant gadgets and expectations of
constant year-round indoor temperature, leading to higher
carbon emissions and global climate change, is down to wasteful
and ignorant consumers. Engineers claim to have the solutions,
or at least the capabilities to find the solutions to most of the
crises threatening the sustainability of the modern city (transport,
housing, energy, water, communications, public health), but are
driven by politics, economics and consumer expectations to
perpetuate unsustainable practices.
Engineers clearly have an important role to play in creating and
reconstructing sustainable cities. For this to occur, the profession,
including its academic constituents, must break through the lazy
identity crisis of unacknowledged heroics or powerless servitude.
At UCL, and elsewhere, new models of engineering research,
teaching and practice are emerging in response to the crises of
sustainable development and modern urban living. Central to
this programme is recognition that the gulf between science and
technology on the one hand and society and politics on the other,
which has characterised modern universities and professions, has
become a chasm from whence the greatest problems of our age
have erupted. Problems like climate change and the growing
Taken from the Summer 2009 edition of ‘palette’, UCL’s journal of sustainable cities
www.ucl.ac.uk/sustainable-cities
Thames Barrier, London – Dr Sarah Bell (UCL Civil,
Environmental & Geomatic Engineering)
“The gulf between science and technology on the
one hand and society and politics on the other,
which has characterised modern universities and
professions, has become a chasm from whence the
greatest problems of our age have erupted”
numbers of urban poor cannot be resolved by clear dissection
into technical or social elements to be carried away and solved in
the caves of our independent disciplines.
For engineers this requires a new humility regarding the power of
technical knowledge, and new skills in negotiating the political
and social complexity of the modern city. Some of this
knowledge comes from reconsidering historical contributions of
engineers to the development of cities, to recognise the complex
interactions between politics and technology that have shaped the
urban infrastructure and technologies we take for granted today.
Dialogue with urban theorists from across the intellectual chasm
is opening new understandings of the importance of
infrastructure and technology in the cultural, political and
everyday life of the modern city, in turn informing more sensitive
engineering design and practice. Philosophers prompt robust
confrontation about the nature and role of ethics in engineering
decision-making, ranging from technical competence in checking
calculations to working with corrupt regimes. Political and social
scientists provide new frameworks for engineering expertise to be
incorporated and challenged in participatory democratic
processes, opening up engineering expertise to more informed
public debate. Lone women engineers at professional dinner
tables are pointing out that the time has passed for celebrating
their presence and starting to worry that it might not be a
coincidence that their talented sisters are still not signing up.
Active engineers are pushing the boundaries of conventional
professional practice to bring their technical skills and knowledge
to bear on the social and ecological problems that trouble their
social consciences.
Modern cities, sustainable or otherwise, would not be possible
without engineering skills, knowledge and experience. Technical
competence and innovation remain the bedrock of the
profession, including research. However, the challenge of
building sustainable cities requires fundamentally understanding
the nature of engineering at its relationship to other parts of the
university, politics and society. As the saying goes, sustainability is
not rocket science, it’s much harder.
Taken from the Summer 2009 edition of ‘palette’, UCL’s journal of sustainable cities
www.ucl.ac.uk/sustainable-cities
Profile / Dr Sarah Bell
Sarah’s research interests lie in the relationships
between engineering, technology and society as they
impact on sustainability, particularly in relation to
urban water systems. In 2007, Sarah received the
ExxonMobil Excellence in Teaching Award from the
Royal Academy of Engineering. She works in
collaboration with partners including Thames Water,
Waterwise, the London Sustainability Exchange,
Arup and WWF.
Her current research projects include:
ıı‘Emerging Sustainability’, with collaborators from
six universities investigating sustainability in different
social, technological and ecological systems
ıı‘Critical Infrastructures’, applying metaphors from
the biological sciences to improve infrastructure
management, particularly in times of crisis such
as floods or terrorist attack
ıı‘Bridging the Gaps: Sustainable Urban Spaces’,
bringing together researchers from different
departments at UCL to address the challenge
of climate change in cities
ıı‘Engineering, Culture and Water’, working with
students in the UK, Peru, Australia and Mexico
to investigate the interactions between society,
technology, engineering and water.
Contact
Dr Sarah Bell
MSc Programme Director
(Environmental Systems Engineering) and Lecturer
UCL Civil, Environmental & Geomatic Engineering
Co-Director (Water Initiative)
UCL Environment Institute
Steering Committee Member
UCL Urban Laboratory
Programme Team Member
Bridging the Gaps
+44 (0)20 7679 7874
s.bell@ucl.ac.uk
perspective
Tadj Oreszczyn
Our innate ability
to think of new
ways to use energy
Twenty-five years ago I became aware of the
possible energy crisis and, as an environmentally
responsible physicist, I decided to purse a career
in energy efficiency and renewable energy
rather than the then better paid normal career
in nuclear physics.
always easier and cheaper to model than measure. Buildings were
always complex to monitor, unlike many other products like
cars etc. Buildings are one-offs, occupants behaved strangely, and the
variations in climate from year to year made comparisons difficult.
The combination of convenience and the low cost of modelling
have given a false sense of reliance on modelling to predict real
energy use, “in theory, theory and practice are the same, but in
practice they are not.”
The problem by physics standards was simple; modelling energy flows
in the Newtonian range of buildings was far simpler than nuclear
physics. However the potential goals were even bigger, cheaper and
more environmentally benign than nuclear. Solar energy offered the
potential to produce in a year ten times more energy than our
combined fossil fuel and uranium reserves and, since only 20 to 30%
of the primary energy in the fossil fuels we burnt resulted in real
useful energy, there was lots of potential from energy efficiency.
Then, as now, there was interest in integrating solar energy in the
building design. However, active solar systems were then, as now,
expensive. In 1982 I can remember attending a conference on the
economics of solar energy where the papers tried to present economic
arguments demonstrating how solar was cost effective – usually by the
judicious use of appropriate discount or fuel inflation rates (ISES
1982). At the end of a conference somebody asked how many of the
delegates (energy researchers) had solar systems on their buildings.
The answer was less than 1%. If the researchers could not persuade
themselves it was cost effective then how were they going to persuade
anybody else?
As a physicist I set about modelling and testing the efficiency of
buildings. Computers and software developments meant that it was
The Forth Railway Bridge
Research in the UK then shifted more to the use of passive (“free”)
solar energy; this involved the direct capture of solar energy within
the building to offset the space heating energy consumption by the
use of larger than normal south facing windows. In the UK a passive
solar programme was funded which looked at both new build and
refurbishment, which had a larger potential market than new build
(DTI 1999). The domestic conservatory was one of the technologies
researched. Theoretical models showed that a conservatory could
reduce a dwellings energy consumption by 5% (1,000 kWh/year)
through capturing the sun’s energy (the greenhouse effect) and
transferring some of this energy into the dwelling through the fabric
and pre-heating some of the air entering that was needed to
adequately ventilate the dwelling. The conservatory was identified as
one of the main passive solar retrofit options in northern climates
(NBA Tectonics 1992).
In 1990 I supervised a masters student at the UCL Bartlett who
investigated how people used conservatories (Chu 1990). She found
that out of the 10 she visited 9 were heated. Heating a glass box is not
very energy efficient, and since 50,000 conservatories were being built
every year the potential energy use of conservatories was therefore
high. As a result of this study detailed energy use questions were
added to a self-completed postal questionnaire sent to 5,000
conservatory owners (Oreszczyn 1993). This contained over 100
questions about the construction, orientation and use of the
conservatory. Amazingly the reply rate was over 37%, very high for a
self-completed postal questionnaire, which probably said more about
the owners of conservatories than any of the answers they gave. Two
thirds stated they heated their conservatory directly, whereas a further
24% heated them indirectly through leaving the doors open between
the heated house and conservatory or had no doors separating the
conservatory from the house. This energy use was not controlled by
the Building Regulations as the assumption was that conservatories
were used as a buffer space in spring and autumn when they were
unheated, and the rest of the year they were uninhabited. Yet the
survey showed that the use of conservatories was radically different
Taken from the Summer 2009 edition of ‘palette’, UCL’s journal of sustainable cities
www.ucl.ac.uk/sustainable-cities
Xscape, Milton Keynes
from this traditional use – 70% used all year around, two thirds
occupied the conservatory after dark often to watch TV when there is
little or no passive solar gain. Add a conservatory to a modern house
and if you heat the conservatory to the same standard as the house
you can almost double the space heating of the house. This is because
although the external area of a conservatory may be one tenth the
surface area of the house the heat loss through one square meter of
conservatory glazing (even if it is double glazed) is ten times greater
than through one square meter of a modern dwelling wall.
For the above reasons the government’s building regulations
department became very interested in how they could control energy
use in conservatories. Banning conservatories was not an option since
the questionnaire showed that occupants loved the spaces they created
– it was the second most used and liked room in the dwelling.
Interestingly occupants loved the environment created by
conservatories. However a building scientist analysing a conservatory
theoretically would say it has a very poor environment – poor
acoustics, high levels of glare and thermal discomfort from the cold
glazing. Since banning was not an option the challenge was then
how to make conservatories more energy efficient. Theoretically
double-glazing should reduce the fabric heat loss by almost half and
so this was the first mechanism examined for building control. The
responses from the questionnaire, however, showed that double glazed
conservatories used twice the energy that single glazed conservatories
did! This was completely contradictory to what the energy models
Taken from the Summer 2009 edition of ‘palette’, UCL’s journal of sustainable cities
www.ucl.ac.uk/sustainable-cities
that are currently being used to design energy-efficient buildings
would have predicted. To identify why this was the case required
no more than a trip to the local garden centre (where most
conservatories are sold) and a discussion with the sale staff who,
for example, would ask:
“What type of conservatory were you looking for sir? Were you intending
to use it all year around? In which case we would recommend double
glazing ideally with a low emissivity coating.”
Old leaky single glazed conservatories require a very large heater to
maintain an air temperature of 20°C in the winter, which would blow
the fuses of the house and still not maintain comfortable conditions.
However, it is just possible to maintain comfort in a double glazed
conservatory, although with a significant energy penalty. Therefore,
the occupants were taking the energy efficient improvements to
enable them to change the use of the conservatory from a buffer
space, i.e. occasionally used, to instead use it like a conventional fully
habitable room. Whereas the theoretical computer models, although
accurately modelling the physics, were giving the incorrect answer
because they assume occupant behaviour is independent of changes to
the efficiency of a building. Interestingly, not only is heating
conservatories becoming popular, so is air-conditioning, with many
air-conditioning units marketed as ideal for conservatories and one
DIY store has given away free air-conditioning units with every
conservatory sold!
The example of the domestic conservatory, where energy efficiency
encourages energy use, could be seen as a rather odd case. I would
argue not – the non-domestic equivalent of the conservatory is the
atrium. Again, many in the UK were originally designed to be used as
passive un-conditioned spaces which reduced buildings energy
consumption by bringing daylight into the core of the building. Most
are, however, high energy consuming spaces, fully air conditioned and
often electrically lit. Glazed walkways also often become fully
conditioned. This should not be a surprise to us as previous
investigations into domestic energy use have shown that a significant
proportion of energy efficient improvements are taken as
improvements in comfort. Over the last 30 years the efficiency of the
domestic stock in England has improved by 30%, yet during that
period, despite warmer winters, primary energy use increased by
27%, mostly as a result of increased heating levels, stock and
appliance use (Shorrock & Utley 2003).
References
1. Chu, W. L. (1990). The Energy Duality of Conservatories. Dissertation
submitted in part fulfilment for an MSc in Environmental Design &
Engineering, UCL.
2. DEFRA (2004). Energy Efficiency: The Government’s Plan for Action.
Presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State for the Department
of Environment, Food & Rural Affairs by Command of Her Majesty,
April 2004.
3. DTI (1999). ‘In Business: Passive Solar Design – Promoting Take Up’.
New REVIEW 39, February 1999. http://www.dti.gov.uk/NewReview/
“Double glazed conservatories used twice the energy
that single glazed conservatories did! This was
completely contradictory to what the energy models
that are currently being used to design energy
efficient buildings would have predicted”
nr39/html/in_business.html.
4. ISES (1982). ‘Developing the market in solar energy thermal systems:
obstacles and incentives’. UK International Solar Energy Society
Conference UK ISES C31, London, 1982.
5. NBA Tectonics (1992). Evaluation of passive solar potential
multi-residential dwellings and retrofit measures. Report to the Energy
Technology Support Unit.
6. Oreszczyn, T. (1993). The Energy Duality of Conservatory Use,
It is possible to give a range of examples of our almost innate ability
to think of new uses of energy, often facilitated by improvements in
energy efficiency. While new low energy compact fluorescents lights
have become more popular, using one fifth of the energy, we have
increased the number of lamps in each room, often extending our
lighting to outside and around the garden. Not only is energy
efficiency possibly stimulating this growth in energy use but so may
the supply of renewable energy. Probably the greatest use of
photovoltaics (PV) in the UK is in non-mains connected garden
lighting, a completely new use of energy in the UK.
Not satisfied with heating indoors we are often heating the outdoors
with patio heaters – direct global warming! Of course when it gets
really hot outside, would it not be nice to go skiing? In Milton
Keynes, where I live, the newest and largest building in the city centre
is Xscape, which houses a 170 metre ski slope with 1,500 tonnes of
artificially generated snow. The slope is kept at a constant –2°C all
year around, even when it is 30°C outside. It is only possible to do
this because of energy efficient innovations. We have energy efficient
air-conditioning and have developed high performance insulation to
cover the building with. However, the building has resulted in
considerable additional energy use. I learnt to snowboard there, and
so compared the energy used to learn in Milton Keynes against flying
to the Alps. They were comparable; however, like most other people
who learnt at Milton Keynes all this has done is fuel my desire to go
to the Alps and ski on bigger runs, so now I both practice in Milton
Keynes and have ski holidays in the Alps! There are plans to build
many more new indoor ski resorts in the UK over the next few years.
In the UK one of the things we did to celebrate the millennium was
to light the Forth Railway Bridge. This is now claimed to be one of
the largest man made objects that can be seen from outer space at
night-time. Again we could do this because of the energy efficient
lighting technology we now have. However, it does use energy
equivalent to 100 dwellings – although on a minute by minute basis
it costs no more than using a mobile phone at peak rate. With energy
so cheap we will continue to find new ways of using it.
In the UK the government is being very proactive in tackling climate
change. It is committed to trying to reduce by its carbon emissions by
60% by 2050 (DEFRA 2004). This is a very ambitious target. Half of
this planned reduction in carbon emissions is due to be achieved by
energy efficiency, the other half coming from renewables. It is hard to
see how efficiency alone will achieve this as there is very little
evidence that efficiency, although good for many other reasons, can
deliver absolute reductions in primary energy consumption or carbon
emissions. As a scientist it has taken me over thirty years to appreciate
that the problem is bigger than physics and is one that requires a
socio-technical, multi-disciplinary approach.
Proceedings of the 3rd European Conference on Architecture: Solar
Energy in Architecture and Planning, Florence, Italy, 17–21 May.
7. Shorrock, L. D. and J. I. Utley (2003). Domestic energy fact file 2003.
Housing Centre, BRE, Garston, Watford, UK, WD25 9XX.
Profile / Professor Tadj Oreszczyn
From 1992–1999 Tadj was Director of the Energy
Design Advice Scheme (EDAS) Regional office based
at the UCL Bartlett School. EDAS was a DTI- and
DETR-funded initiative, which provided free energy
advice to building professionals during the design and
refurbishment of buildings. The scheme advised on
more than 1,200 building projects and identified more
than £17 million per year in energy savings.
His current research interests include energy
efficiency, indoor air quality, light and lighting,
building-related health problems and the internal
environment within historic buildings.
Previously, Tadj worked as a Senior Energy
Consultant for Energy Conscious Design and as a
Higher Scientific Officer for the National Institute for
Agricultural Engineering. His first degree was in
applied physics from Brunel University and his PhD
in solar energy was from the Open University.
Contact
Professor Tadj Oreszczyn
Professor of Engineering & the Environment and Head
UCL Bartlett School of Graduate Studies
Director
Environmental Design & Engineering
UCL Bartlett School
Academic Advisory Committee Member
UCL Centre for Sustainable Heritage
+44 (0)20 7679 5906
t.oreszczyn@ucl.ac.uk
Taken from the Summer 2009 edition of ‘palette’, UCL’s journal of sustainable cities
www.ucl.ac.uk/sustainable-cities
perspective
Adriana Allen
Sustainable cities
or sustainable
urbanisation?
Rapid urbanisation is arguably the most complex
and important socio-economic phenomenon of the
20th and 21st centuries. Generally understood as a
shift from a predominantly rural to a predominantly
urban society, it also represents major and
irreversible changes in production and consumption
and the way people interact with nature. It is
therefore somehow surprising that, within the
international debate, it is only recently that cities
and the urbanisation process started to be looked
at through a ‘sustainability’ lens.
The notion that cities play a key role in ‘sustainable development’
– whatever the definition adopted – only started to become
popularised and mainstreamed into policy making and planning
since the early 1990s. But as it often happens when a new perspective
rapidly gains momentum and widespread adherence, the apparent
consensus on the urgent need to promote sustainable cities has been
underlined by significant differences with regards to the questions of
what urban sustainability means, why and how to promote it and for
whose benefit. Furthermore, is it all just about the greening of the
built environment and urban form?
It is now widely acknowledged that the impact of urbanisation will
continue to bring about major global and local changes well into
the current century, as many countries in the developing world are
presently in, or about to enter, the high-growth and rapid-transition
phase of the urbanisation process. A total net addition of 2.2 billion
people to the 2000 world population is forecasted by 2030 and it is
expected that most of this additional population will be absorbed
by the cities and towns of low-income countries, likely to rise from
1.9 billion in 2000 to 3.9 billion in 2030. By contrast, very small
changes are predicted in the urban population of high-income
countries, expected to increase from 0.9 billion in 2000 to
1 billion in 2030 1.
Despite the fact that demographic forecastings should be taken with
caution due to the inconsistent definitions of ‘urban’ and ‘rural’
adopted by different nations across the world, they are powerful
in revealing the magnitude and scale of the urbanisation process.
However, a closer look not just at the scale but at the nature of
contemporary trends reveals that these do not simply imply that most
of the world population will be living in cities but that urbanisation
does and will continue to have a significant impact on the global
carrying capacity of the earth and to affect the way in which rural and
urban households and individuals straddle between the ‘urban’ and
the ‘rural’ 2. The latter is important because decisions about health,
fertility, migration, production, natural resources use and so on are
increasingly affected by the diffusion power of the urbanisation
process, not just spatially but through the global economy,
informational spill-overs and social networks 3.
Indeed, it is increasingly accepted that in many regions of the
developing world, including its largest countries, the boundaries
between urban and rural are getting blurred. Even if the focus has
Taken from the Summer 2009 edition of ‘palette’, UCL’s journal of sustainable cities
www.ucl.ac.uk/sustainable-cities
shifted over time from a spatial definition (assuming a central urban
point surrounded by a de-densifying periphery) to a more functional
and relational focus on diverse flows between the rural and urban
sectors, recent developments both in theory and in real world
contexts – such as space–time compression and globalisation –
point to the need of a reassessment of the changing nature of the
rural-urban divide and of the contemporary urbanisation process 4.
The emerging landscapes in terms of human settlements challenge
conventional definitions and perceptions of the city and the
countryside with regards to their location, physical structure,
functional relation, institutional context and cultural outlook.
For instance, the concept of the ‘informational city’ 5 suggests that,
in the context of globalisation, information technology constitutes
the most strategic commodity, dividing wealth between and within
cities into the ‘information rich’ and the ‘information poor’. This has
often been understood as the general blurring of frontiers, not only
between the rural and the urban, but between the so-called First and
Third Worlds. However, it should not be assumed that urbanisation
runs always vis a vis an even integration of ‘all’ cities and ‘all’ urban
dwellers into the world economy, neither that this increasingly
urban-based world economy can be easily ‘tamed’ to redistribute
wealth and to reduce the ever expanding ‘ecological footprint’ that
supports it 6.
As global trade has vastly expanded throughout the 20th century,
cities have become less reliant upon their hinterland for sustenance
and are increasingly importing not only their consumer goods, but
also food, energy, water and building materials from distant sources.
At the same time, wastes produced in urban areas are increasingly
been exported to distant regions. This means that very often the
origin of food and energy and the destination of wastes is invisible to
urban dwellers, creating dependencies that might not be ecologically
or geopolitically stable, secure or indeed, sustainable 7. The problem
is that the limits imposed by the expansion of the urban ecological
footprint do not become evident until they are translated into local
impacts, such as higher food or energy prices, frequent floods or the
increment of environment-related diseases such as skin cancer.
A comparison of the urban ecological footprint of cities in developing
and developed countries reveals that, in overall terms, the former rely
more heavily on their own hinterlands than do cities in the developed
world, as the latter tend to draw on distant ‘elsewheres’ to satisfy their
Social
Sustainability
Economic
Sustainability
Political Sustainability
URBAN
SUSTAINABILITY
Political Sustainability
Ecological
Sustainability
Physical
Sustainability
Urban – regional ecological capacity
“The apparent consensus on the urgent
need to promote sustainable cities has been
underlined by significant differences with
regards to the questions of what urban
sustainability means, why and how to
promote it and for whose benefit”
The Five Dimensions of Urban Sustainability, from Allen, Adriana (2001) ‘Urban
Sustainability under Threat: The Restructuring of the Fishing Industry in Mar del
Plata, Argentina’, ‘Development in Practice’, vol. 11, Nos. 2&3, pp.152–173
demands in terms of food, energy and so on, thus increasingly
bypassing their hinterland and resulting in missed opportunities for
reciprocal rural–urban linkages within the same area and/or region.
However, the picture is not that simple. When taking a more
disaggregated look at the ecological footprint of different income
groups within fast growing cities in the developing world, significant
differences emerge between the wealthy and the poor, revealing a
consistent link between income and the demands individuals place
on the environment, as regards both their consumption of renewable
and non-renewable resources and their patterns of waste production.
This implies that the challenge of urban sustainability cannot be
addressed without an examination of wider relationships between
urban areas and their hinterlands or ‘bio-regions’, nor without
unpacking the inequality that unfortunately prevails in the
contemporary urbanisation process, where conditions of hyper
and sub-consumption coexist neck-to-neck 8.
Indeed, rapid urban change is likely to occur in the world’s poorest
countries, those least equipped with the means to invest in basic
urban infrastructure – water, sanitation, tenured housing – and least
able to provide vital economic opportunities for urban residents to
live in conditions above the poverty line. In this context, the urban
poor face great exposure to biological and physical threats and also
more restrictions in their access to protective services and
infrastructures. Thus, the contemporary process of urbanisation in
the developing world is characterised not just by a shift in the locus
of poverty – from rural to urban – but more significantly
compounded with the ‘urbanisation of poverty and social exclusion’
that derive from socio-economic, gender and ethnic inequalities.
The above discussion implies that the contemporary process of
urbanisation is underlined not simply by rural–urban migration and
a rural–urban poverty shift (at least in population percentages) but
by a significant transformation of the linkages between the global
and the local, the urban and the rural, the rich and the poor, and
above all, the systemic conditions that threat the very possibility
of a sustainable future 9.
Since popularised by the Brundtland Report, sustainable development
has been described as the intersection between social, environmental
and economic goals. Sustainability has performed more of a balancing
act than promoting any real change of direction to development. The
most pressing problem with this model is that it offers relatively little
understanding of the inherent trade-offs found in the simultaneous
pursuit of these goals. Coupled with this, the picture it provides is
too abstract to appreciate how sustainable development unfolds at the
urban level, but also to acknowledge the political dimension of the
process. By definition, cities are not sustainable, urban dwellers and
economic activities inevitably depend on environmental resources and
services from outside their built-up area. So what does urban
sustainability mean and how can the effects of urbanisation and
urban development on sustainable development be appraised?
The answer to these questions requires a more encompassing vision
of the concept, one that adequately defines the goals and means of the
process. Quite rightly, the environmental, economic and social goals
still apply. However, in an increasingly urbanised world, the built
environment or ‘second nature’ needs to be recognised as a central
component to the liveability of the earth. Furthermore, the search
for more sustainable forms of urbanisation depends on political and
institutional decisions promoting the competition or cooperation
of different agents with one another. Thus, it could be argued that to
assess whether any given practice, policy or trend is moving towards
or against urban sustainability it is necessary to consider the
relationships among the five dimensions outlined below.
Economic sustainability is understood as the capacity and ability
of a practice to be able to put local/regional resources to productive
use for the long-term benefit of the community, without damaging or
depleting the natural resource base on which it depends and without
increasing the city’s ecological footprint. This implies taking into
consideration the full impact of the production cycle.
Social sustainability refers to the fairness, inclusiveness and cultural
adequacy of an intervention to promote equal rights over the natural,
physical and economic capital that supports the livelihoods and lives
of local communities, with particular emphasis on the poor and
traditionally marginalised groups. Cultural adequacy means, in this
context, the extent to which a practice respects cultural heritage and
cultural diversity.
Ecological sustainability pertains to the impact of urban production
and consumption on the integrity and health of the city region and
global carrying capacity. This demands the long term consideration
of the relation between the state and dynamics of environmental
resources and services and the demands exerted over them.
Taken from the Summer 2009 edition of ‘palette’, UCL’s journal of sustainable cities
www.ucl.ac.uk/sustainable-cities
The sustainability of the built environment concerns the capacity
of an intervention to enhance the liveability of buildings and urban
infrastructures for ‘all’ city dwellers without damaging or disrupting the
urban region environment. It also includes a concern for the efficiency
of the built environment to support the local economy.
Last, but not least, political sustainability is concerned with the quality
of governance systems guiding the relationship and actions of different
actors among the previous four dimensions. Thereby, it implies the
democratisation and participation of local civil society in all areas
of decision-making.
The diagram (page 3.19) shows in a simplified manner the relationship
between the five dimensions outlined above. The outer circle represents
the ecological capacity of any given urban region and acts as a relative
measure to assess whether changes or interventions in each of the five
dimensions are moving towards or against sustainability. The corners
of the square base or pyramid within the circle represent the economic,
social, ecological and built environment dimensions, whilst the political
dimension articulates them. If the four dimensions of the pyramid are
seen as pulling against each other, attempting individually to break out
of the circle itself, the political dimension can then be seen as the
regulating mechanism ensuring that they remain within the boundary
of sustainability.
This wider view of urban sustainability calls for re-embedding our
understanding of cities and their multiple and diverse impacts on
society and the environment within the contemporary process of
urbanisation. This is because cities cannot be expected to become
‘islands of reform’ in isolation from the wider global political economy
in which they are produced. Thus, the question of how to promote
sustainable cities and indeed sustainable urbanisation cannot be
dissociated from the uneven geographies of development 10 produced
by the globalisation process and the way this changes the relationships
between people, environment and places, both through time and space.
References
1. United Nations (2000) World Urbanisation Prospects 1999 Revision.
www.un.org/esa/population/publications/wup1999/WUP99CH3.pdf
2. Montgomery, Mark; Richard Stren; Barley Cohen and Holly E Reed (eds)
(2004) ‘Cities Transformed. Demographic Change and Its Implications in the
Developing World’, Earthscan, London.
3. Allen, Adriana; Pascale Hofmann and Hannah Griffiths (2007) ‘Report on Rural
– Urban Linkages for Poverty Reduction’. Elaborated for the State of the
World’s Cities Report 2008: ‘Creating Harmonious Cities’, UCL Development
Planning Unit, London.
4. Lynch, Kenneth (2005) ‘Rural-Urban Interaction in the Developing World’,
Routledge, London.
5. Castells, Manuel (1989) ‘The Informational City: Information Technology,
Economic Restructuring and the Urban-Regional Process’, Basil Blackwell,
Oxford.
6. Developed to measure the ecological impact of cities, ‘ecological foot-printing’
describes the area required to grow food and draw other natural resources and
environmental services consumed by a city, including the absorption of carbon
to compensate for its fossil fuel emissions.
7. Rees, W (1992) ‘Ecological footprints and carrying capacity: what urban
economics leaves out’, ‘Environment and Urbanization’, 4(2), 121–130.
8. McGrahanan, Gordon and David Satterthwaite (2000) ‘Environmental health or
ecological sustainability? Reconciling the brown and green agendas in urban
development’, in Cedric Pugh (ed) ‘Sustainable Cities in Developing Countries’,
Earthscan, London, 73–90.
9. Allen, Adriana and Nicholas You (2002) ‘Sustainable Urbanisation: Bridging the
Green and Brown Agendas’, UCL Development Planning Unit in collaboration
with DFID and UN-Habitat, London.
10. Potter, R; T Binns, J Elliott and D Smith (2004) ‘Geographies of Development’,
Pearson, Harlow. Second edition.
Taken from the Summer 2009 edition of ‘palette’, UCL’s journal of sustainable cities
www.ucl.ac.uk/sustainable-cities
Profile / Adriana Allen
Adriana has almost 20 years of experience of
teaching, research and consultancy in urban and
regional environmental planning and management
(EPM), institutional development and capacity
building for sustainable development. She has
done extensive work in participatory EPM, Local
Agenda 21, sustainability indicators and tools, and
decentralised cooperation in urban and regional
EPM. Her research interests focus on urban–rural
links, environmental governance, and urban and
regional political ecology studies.
Since her graduation as an urban planner, she
has worked for several national and international
organisations, including the Department for
International Development, the Food & Agriculture
Organisation, Plan Construction et Architecture du
Ministere de l’Equipement (France), IberoAmerican
Cooperation Institute (Spain), European
Commission and in-country including Argentina,
Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Egypt,
India, Kenya, Mexico, Spain, Tanzania, Uruguay and
the Netherlands. She is a Visiting Professor at
various universities in Latin America and the beacon
coordinator for IV World Water Forum cross-cutting
perspective dealing with institutional development
and political processes.
Adriana’s recent research and consultancy
projects include:
ııMexico, India, Tanzania, Egypt and Venezuela –
water management governance in the
peri-urban interface
ııIndia – policy adviser on the implementation of
participatory action plans in peri-urban villages
of Hubli-Dharwad
ııconsultant on evaluation of three-year research
project by the International Institute for Environment
and Development, ‘Promoting sustainable
development in Africa: Making the links
between policy and action’.
Contact
Adriana Allen
Course Co-Director and Senior Lecturer
UCL MSc in Environment & Sustainable
Development
Research Programme Director
UCL Development Planning Unit
Steering Committee Member
UCL Urban Laboratory
+44 (0)20 7679 5805
a.allen@ucl.ac.uk
perspective
Caren Levy
Urbanisation without
social justice is not
sustainable
Currently in Mumbai, India, 56% of the urban
population live in informal settlements without
secure tenure, with poor access to water and
sanitation as well as other basic services. Despite
some variation, this situation of inequality is the
reality of large proportions of urban residents in the
mega cities and fast growing medium sized cities
of the global South. The scale of the poverty and
inequality that this represents has to be understood
against the backdrop of the scale of urbanisation,
“…arguably the most complex and important
socio-economic phenomenon of the 20th century”
(Allen and You, 2002:3). The impact of this trend
reached a key moment in 2008, when the world’s
urban population exceeded the global rural
population for the first time.
distribution justly arrived at…” in his landmark contribution in
the 1970s captures the essence. Addressing social justice is not only
concerned with changing patterns of inequality but also the
institutional structures that produce them. Similarly in her seminal
contribution in the early 1990s, Iris Marion Young also argues for
a notion of social justice that is wider than distribution. While
recognising the importance of the distribution of material goods,
particularly in the context of poverty, she also argues for an
institutional dimension, which incorporates a concern for political
processes and participation in the decision making which produce
and reproduce these material relations.
In the contemporary global context, a concern for material
inequalities so evidently captured in the challenge of the ‘brown’
agenda, and the political debates and decisions in the institutional
processes permeating both the ‘brown’ and ‘green’ agendas, need
to be taken a step further. The impact of neo-liberal thinking,
and its translation into structural adjustment policies, promoted
internationally by the International Monetary Fund, the
World Bank and ultimately in various forms by most multi- and
bi-lateral aid organisations, has changed the organisational
landscape in most countries.
The emergence of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)
points to the international recognition that these kind of disparities
are not acceptable, whatever the debates about the formulation,
measurement and ultimate impact of the MDGs. Indeed, at least
in the terms of the UN Millennium Declaration, 2000, the origins
of the MDGs, and the human rights conventions of the UN, these
disparities reflect a denial of socio-economic and political rights.
As the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, 2008 is also a significant year for a rights-based
focus on these disparities.
In the sustainability debates, these disparities reflect the rights and
demands in environmental terms of the so-called ‘brown’ agenda.
To-date this agenda has been the focus of a range of practitioners,
activists and academics addressing the planning and governance
challenges of urban development. They include concerns for unequal
access to suitable land, poor access to services like water and
sanitation, waste disposal and the unequal incidence of pollution.
By contrast, the so-called ‘green’ agenda has primarily been the remit
of environmentalists and ecologists concerned with global warming,
bio-diversity and other long term issues affecting the ecological
sustainability of the earth and of future generations. The relationship
between the ‘brown’ agenda and the ‘green’ agenda finds its primary
expression in the global environmental impacts of the unequal
processes of consumption and production in different parts of the
world. The current challenges of climate change have linked these
agendas, often dramatically in images of flooding and high levels of
pollution in urban areas in countries like Bangladesh and Mexico.
La Paz, Bolivia
The inequalities reflected at the core of the ‘brown’ agenda and its
intersection with the ‘green’ agenda make social justice a key principle
in any notion of sustainable urbanisation. How can social justice be
defined and made operational in policy making and planning in the
context of sustainable urbanisation? David Harvey’s phrase “…a just
Taken from the Summer 2009 edition of ‘palette’, UCL’s journal of sustainable cities
www.ucl.ac.uk/sustainable-cities
“Identifying the room for manoeuvre through the
powerful interests of the state, international agencies
and the private sector, while maintaining authentic
connection to the aspirations and needs of poor women,
men, girls and boys in all their diversity, remains the
foremost challenge of any progressive development
agenda, locally and internationally”
The delivery of material goods like housing, transportation, water
and sanitation, and other services, once the remit of the state, now
involves private sector and civil society actors in different roles and
relationships. This poses a range of challenges with which citizens and
governments alike are currently struggling.
These actors come into governance relations in cities on the basis of
very different operational principles. Despite the impact of structural
adjustment in the form of privatisation of ‘public’ services,
deregulation and the reduction of the state, most governments have
maintained, often in the face of fierce political debate, a redistributive
principle of operation. This is driven ultimately by the need to
maintain stability. A social justice prism leads us to question in whose
interests this redistribution takes place, but the redistributive principle
of state intervention, with all its imperfections, remains. Clearly the
private sector enters the governance arena pursuing profit
maximisation, while organised civil society operates on the principle
of mutuality or reciprocity. Building a consensus among these actors,
for example, around the delivery of water and sanitation for the urban
poor in cities of the global South, is an ongoing political challenge.
Not only are the principles of operation of these actors different, but
their relationship to the arena of governance is different, particularly
around notions of political accountability. Taking up the example of
water again, the privatisation of water provision has turned ‘citizens’
into ‘clients’, making ability to pay rather than need the basic criteria
for service provision. For poor urban residents of Dar Es Salaam,
Manila, La Paz and other cities of the global South, the recognition of
the rights of poor urban women and men is an ongoing struggle in
the first place. The shift to private sector provision of water has
often resulted in disconnection from formal water systems.
Recourse to accountable decision making structures for these urban
citizens is often tenuous or non-existent, made more complex by the
multi-national character of most water companies. For poor urban
citizens this has left despair, innovative but often ‘illegal’ alternatives,
and/or protest in different forms as the only possible response.
Reacting to the previous failure of the state to provide secure tenure,
housing and basic service, and the current exclusion of many residents
from private sector provision of services, organised civil society has
taken up the challenge in different ways. While some activist groups
have remained in the realm of protest and the demand for the
recognition of the rights of the poor, other civil society organisations
have taken on the delivery of material goods. The latter are built on
community processes but, given the challenge of the scale of urban
poverty, necessarily involve constructive engagement with the local
and/or central state. For example, in Mumbai, India, the Alliance is a
civil society coalition lobbying, negotiating and working with local
and national state structures to deliver housing, water and sanitation
to the poor. These are not always harmonious and easy relations, and
are constantly under review by civil society organisations that are
concerned with co-option and control by interests outside those of
the poor constituencies they represent. The blanket criticism of these
groups by authors like Davis (2007) as part of the ‘soft imperialism’ of
the World Bank and other leading organisations implementing the
neo-liberal agenda, needs closer scrutiny.
Taken from the Summer 2009 edition of ‘palette’, UCL’s journal of sustainable cities
www.ucl.ac.uk/sustainable-cities
Identifying the room for manoeuvre through the powerful interests of
the state, international agencies and the private sector, while
maintaining authentic connection to the aspirations and needs of
poor women, men, girls and boys in all their diversity, remains the
foremost challenge of any progressive development agenda, locally
and internationally. The policy and planning challenges this creates
for promoting social justice in sustainable urbanisation are
formidable. Haughton (1999) also reminds us that in linking the
discussions of justice and sustainability, we are not only addressing
questions of equal access to decision making structures and their
expression in spatial and geographic distribution of material goods in
the current generation. We are also concerned with intergenerational
equality in these relations, so that, in the sentiments of Brundtland,
future generations are not compromised by the development
demands of the current generation.
Academia has an important role to play in this multiple and
formidable challenge. In the sciences, the social sciences and
the arts, the formation of a next generation that is more engaged
with sustainability in the everyday practices of their lives is crucial.
The interaction of academia with the ‘applied’ dimensions of these
challenges is similarly critical. In partnership with government and
civil society organisations, learning from innovatory experience,
advancing knowledge and its application in the interests of all,
is a key basis for the hope of a sustainable urbanisation which has
social justice at its core.
References
Allen, A. and You, N. (2002) ‘Sustainable Urbanisation:
Bridging the Green and Brown Agenda’, UN-HABITAT/DFID/DPU
Davis, M. (2007) ‘Planet of Slums’, London & New York: Verso
Harvey, D. (1973) ‘Social Justice and the City’, London: Edward Arnold
Haughton, G. (1999) ‘Environmental Justice and the Sustainable City’
in D.Satterthwaite (ed) ‘Sustainable Cities’, London: Earthscan
Young, I.M. (1990) ‘Justice and the Politics of Difference’,
Princeton: Princeton University Press
Profile Caren Levy
Caren is a development planner specialising in
planning methodology, gender policy and planning,
environmental policy, and training and organisational
development, and previously was a consultant
working in transport planning, environmental policy
and research into communities. She delivers training
and advisory services in gender policy and planning
both in London and abroad for international
organisations, including ODA, SIDA, NORAD, IMO,
EU and IBIS, and in-country, including Sri Lanka,
Egypt, Namibia, Mozambique, Peru and Brazil.
Contact
Caren Levy
Director
UCL Development Planning Unit
Course Co-Director
UCL MSc Urban Development Planning
+44 (0)20 7679 1111
c.levy@ucl.ac.uk
perspective
Michael Batty
How big can a city get ?
Cities usually begin to grow around some central
point which acts as a market for the exchange of
goods. The Roman agora is the classic example
and most cities still show a residual structure which
mirrors this historical pattern. Even the car-based
cities of the American South West such as Phoenix
have a core or city centre that reflects
the original source of settlement.
When cities expand through population growth, individuals attempt
to get as much space as possible around themselves while remaining
as close as possible to other people in the city. This tension between
the demand for space, which makes itself felt in lower densities, and
the need for proximity to others, which is both a social and economic
need, depends intrinsically on the wealth of the population and the
level of available technology. The medieval town was limited in size
by the how far one could walk to the rest of the town while the early
industrial city was constrained by daily commuting using the steam
train and tram.
The contemporary city of course is limited by how far one can
travel by car. Cities become bigger as people trade-off space for
time and diversify their work patterns through the working day
and week, while new technologies, which enable high buildings
to be constructed, expand city size in the vertical dimension.
The skyscraper only became possible after elevator technologies were
invented and with new construction technologies and materials,
the maximum height of a building has grown ever higher. Somewhat
serendipitously the architect Frank Lloyd Wright proposed a scheme
for a mile-high building, the Illinois Sky-City, in the 1950s, but only
now have technologies reached the point where anything approaching
this is possible. The Burj Tower which is under construction in Dubai
will be half a mile high when it is finished.
The debate about sustainability of cities is critically woven into this
question of size. Urban sprawl, the term now used for cities that grow
due to dependence on the car, allow populations to purchase land
for living at very low densities far away from city cores while still
remaining ‘connected’. Such suburbs are often assumed to be
unsustainable due to much higher energy use for transport and
for heating and cooling such low density structures. If people travel
less using less energy and live at higher densities, then it is argued,
by some, that cities will be more compact, hence more sustainable
in that their carbon footprints will be lower. In a world of
rising temperatures and sea levels, and of rapidly diminishing
non-renewable fuel sources, the idea of such compact cities appears
attractive. However this argument is never straightforward and might
even be flawed. Notwithstanding the fact that individuals want to
maximise their use of space – lower densities – while remaining
attached to the city which is only possible through sprawl, then the
amount of energy saved by moving to a more compact form is rather
uncertain. It might appear that using less fuel through travel would
reduce energy use, but the added congestion and heat posed by
crowding could well offset this gain. Moreover, high densities are not
Low density living:
urban sprawl in Phoenix, Arizona
“Our understanding of the way we use energy
in cities is so rudimentary that most of the
potential solutions to building more sustainable
cities remain at the level of speculation”
necessarily compatible with ecological stability in cities and it is not
clear that high buildings which are part of the drive for compactness
are more energy efficient than lower rise structures. In fact as a
building gets larger, it is more difficult to resource through natural
lighting and direct energy. The problem is that our measurement of
relevant energy use is extremely crude while the multiplier effects of
energy flow through the urban economy and population are almost
impossible to gauge. In short, our understanding of the way we use
energy in cities is so rudimentary that most of the potential solutions
to building more sustainable cities remain at the level of speculation.
There is little doubt that if we were to reduce travel and house people
in residential areas of higher density constructed of materials that
were more energy efficient and if people could be convinced to use
less energy, then cities would become more sustainable. We would
simply use less energy. But the possibilities of doing this are difficult.
Purchasing and using more space which means living at lower
densities is largely a function of income in that the greater disposable
wealth, the more likely that the individual would live at lower
densities. This is compounded by the fact that lower densities can
only be sustained by greater expenditures on travel which means more
fuel use and this too depends on higher incomes. The much greater
carbon footprint of the USA in per capita terms is largely due to two
things – greater real incomes and much more available space for living
than in Western Europe and other parts of the world. In fact, the rate
of change in per capita energy use in the USA is less than in other
parts of the world which is reflected in more stringent emissions
standards on car pollution and a greater tendency to domestic
recycling and related measures.
Moreover technological change could well lead to solutions to the
problem of movement in cities which could overturn arguments to
reduce conventional energy use by raising densities and pricing out
the car. The argument that resource conservation and use might be
Taken from the Summer 2009 edition of ‘palette’, UCL’s journal of sustainable cities
www.ucl.ac.uk/sustainable-cities
High density living:
The half mile high Burj Tower in Dubai
affected by the invention of cleaner and more efficient technologies
that process energy more efficiently is an equally difficult one to
think through. Already there are quite dramatic increases in efficiency
which show every sign of outpacing price rises in non-renewable
fuels. The prospect too of substituting information for energy in
terms of patterns of travel and other forms of communication is also
changing the way people are interacting in cities with much clearer
divisions and specialisation of transactions that require face to face
versus more remote forms of contact. The prospect of very large
cities, where physical movement is not the predominant form of
interaction, still appears something of a semi-fiction and ideas about
the electronic cottage and the paper-less office have not come to pass,
at least not yet.
The question of course remains: how big can a city get? It appears
that as we get richer and as our technologies relating to movement
get more efficient and we are able to travel longer distances, cities can
get bigger, but they are still limited by the capacity to travel during
the working day. However if the working day itself is thrown into
question and we begin to organise ourselves more flexibly in terms
of the use of our time, then this will force up the limits on city size.
It is well known that by the end of this century the proportion of the
world’s population living in cities will have increased from 45% now
to some 80%. The world’s biggest city at any point in the last 100
years has grown inexorably: in 1900 it was London with 6.4 million;
in 1950 it was New York with 12.4 million; in 2000 it was Tokyo
with 34.1 million and the forecasts for the next 100 years show that
the cities of the developing world will overtake those of the
developed. New technologies will determine how big cities can grow
as well as how high they will grow in terms of skyscrapers. In 1900,
the highest building in the world was in Philadelphia some 167
metres in height; in 1950, it was 381 metres in New York City; and
in 2000, it was 452 metres in Kuala Lumpur. The trade-off between
space developed, energy used, and the amount of travel required to
enable effective and workable communications will determine both
the desirability and sustainability of cities. These questions of course
are changing as we get better methods of measurement and as we
understand the ways in which energy and information underpin the
functioning of the modern city. In tackling the problem of the
sustainable city, it is essential to measure the size of cities much more
effectively and to trace the pathways of energy demand and supply
in ways that enable us to get a much clearer view of how we can
trade-off space/density for communications. This is the challenge
that we urgently need to address, for only then we will get some
sense of how big our cities are, how big they can get, and more
importantly how big they should be.
Profile / Professor Michael Batty
Michael’s research is in the development of
computer-based technologies, specifically graphics-based
and mathematical models for cities, and he has worked
recently on applications of fractal geometry and cellular
automata to urban structure.
He was previously Director of the NSF National Center for
Geographic Information & Analysis in the State University
of New York at Buffalo (1990–1995) and was Professor
and Head of the Department of City & Regional Planning
in the University of Wales at Cardiff (1979–1990).
Michael has been a member of the Computer Board for
British Universities and Research Councils (1988–1990),
Chairman (1980–1982) and Vice-Chairman (1982–1984)
of the Economic & Social Research Council Environment
& Planning Committee, and a member of the Science
& Engineering Research Council Transport Committee
(1982–1985). He is currently Chairman of the
ESRC–JISC Census Advisory Committee and a
member of the Advisory Panel on Public Sector
Information (HMSO/Cabinet Office). He was
a member of the RAE 2008 Geography Panel.
He is the editor of the ‘Environment and Planning B’
and was awarded the CBE for services to geography
in the 2004 Birthday Honours List.
Contact
Professor Michael Batty
Bartlett Professor of Planning
UCL Bartlett School of Planning
Director
UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis
+44 (0)20 7679 1781
m.batty@ucl.ac.uk
Taken from the Summer 2009 edition of ‘palette’, UCL’s journal of sustainable cities
www.ucl.ac.uk/sustainable-cities