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The house of the future will have elements from the past to reduce ecological footprints: rainwater collection, home gardens, underground cellars to keep fruit and vegetables cool, local delivery services, improved opportunities for walking and cycling, and shared community facilities.
A new use for the Big Mac: comparing the cost of electricity in different countries. What I find interesting here is that Canada and South Africa are side by side, near the cheap end of the spectrum of electricity prices. Combine this with the two countries' passive approach to encouraging alternative energy technologies, and you have a recipe for continued reliance on traditional energy sources.
South Africa and Canada have something else in common. The South African government has been luring big industries to the Industrial Development Zone at Coega, and a big catch is Alcan, the Canadian aluminium company ranked number two in the world. Producing a million tons of aluminium a year requires lots of cheap power (1 355 megawatts), so Alcan and Eskom (SA's electricity producer) signed a 25-year agreement last November as part of the deal to locate Alcan at Coega.
Earthlife Africa have noted that this deal relies on selling South Africa's already cheap energy to Alcan at cost. Not only that, but the deal is subsidized by Eskom's plan to spend R6 billion on transmission lines to serve the smelter, and various other public investments in Coega. The primary motivation for Coega is job creation, and I am not knocking that. I'm just curious to know who is paying for all this cheap power, and what will happen to economic sectors that rely on it, when we have to start accounting for its true costs (environmental, social and economic).
From the San Francisco Chronicle:
This does not mean we shouldn't make low-carbon choices. It does mean that every decision involves a tradeoff. This applies not only to individual householders, but also to city planning processes. One reason why planning needs to be integrated across government departments (and various other stakeholders) is that sometimes, the best plan overall will require some aspects of the plan to be suboptimal.
For example, city planners may decide that they want to encourage high densities in residential areas in order to achieve economies of scale in the provision of bulk services (water, sewers, and so on) and to increase public transport ridership. But in some areas the targets may not be achievable because developers are not prepared to build to the target densities, or for some other reason. Then planners may need to work with lower densities, and focus instead on arranging the orientation of streets and buildings so that buildings can incorporate passive solar design and rooftop photovoltaic panels for micro generation of electricity - something that is harder to achieve in high-density areas.
This strategy would require, as a minimum, interaction between the spatial planners, urban designers, traffic engineers, land developers and the local power utility. If these players are working in isolation, as they so often are, then the strategy won't work. In planning a low-carbon world, as with so many other things, there is no universal strategy. There are, perhaps, general principles that can be used to guide decisions, but reaching appropriate decisions requires a coordinated approach.
Following South African legislation in 2003 forcing retailers to charge customers for using plastic bags at check-out counters, there was an immediate drop in their use. Customers have bought 9 million Pick 'n Pay Green Bags as a reusable alternative - that's one bag for every five people in the country, and doesn't include similar bags sold by Woolworths and other retailers. But use of plastic bags has been steadily increasing over the past four years. So where are all those Green Bags?
The Peabody Trust Beddington Zero Energy Development (BedZED) is one of very few housing developments that has implemented a comprehensive strategy to minimize the ecological impact in both construction and operation, with ongoing performance monitoring. BioRegional in London provides monitoring of actual costs related to space heating, water heating, water consumption, and electricity consumption, and compares this with the project targets and national averages. Even the community's vehicle mileage is recorded.
While I was living in Ontario a few years ago, the Province was developing a controversial plan to curb urban sprawl in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Last year they completed the Places to Grow plan, and recently it was recognised with the American Planning Association's Burnham Award. The plan identifies a number of urban centres that are to be revitalised with a greater mix of businesses, services and housing. There will be stronger public transport options and an emphasis on more liveable, intensified urban areas that will encourage more active lifestyles and reduced reliance on car-based travel.
The plan also sets targets for development densities within the existing urban areas of the GTA, with the intention of encouraging growth where existing infrastructure can support it. It's bold and far-reaching, and flies in the face of well-established development patterns. If you ask planners from the outlying municipalities of the GTA whether they think it will work, many would say no.
Groups like the Ontario Home Builders' Association claimed during the plan's consultation process that limiting growth areas would make housing less affordable by pushing up the cost of land. And developers in the outlying municipalities, like Pickering and Oshawa, said that there would be no market for new housing in those areas at the densities targeted in the plan. At the same time, environmental research organisations like the Pembina Institute felt that the controls over the urban boundary were too weak and that valuable agricultural land would be compromised.
The target densities are not actually any higher than those found in a lot of existing communities of Toronto, but the locations of proposed increases in density, and the perception of what this will do to local municipalities, have municipal politicians crying foul. They know that developers will keep on pushing the boundaries, quite literally, because they can. As Christopher Hume points out in the Toronto Star, the politicians are walking a fine line with this plan. Some of them are smart enough to know that business as usual is not a smart option, but if they resist development pressures too much, they'll be voted out.
Two mega-projects in planning stages. I've mentioned the Eco-City of Dongtan near Shanghai. Another exercise in zero-carbon, zero-waste city-building is the Masdar Initiative in Abu Dhabi. As with any attempt to significantly reduce carbon output, this one also places strong emphasis on transportation considerations:
With a maximum distance of 200m to the nearest transport link and amenities, the compact network of streets encourages walking and is complemented by a personalised rapid transport system. The shaded walkways and narrow streets will create a pedestrian-friendly environment in the context of Abu Dhabi’s extreme climate.
When it comes to low-carbon planning at this scale, some practitioners are starting to think that it won't be good enough to be zero-carbon. If climate science suggests that we need to be carbon neutral globally, then it follows that some areas will need to be carbon negative to make up for areas that are carbon positive.
This is the thinking in Arup's work on Dongtan. It is easy to criticise China for continuing its expansion of coal-fired power plants to feed its hungry economy, but they know that planning for the 600 million new Chinese urban dwellers in the next 45 years requires energy, and lots of it. It's also easy to criticise the building of Dongtan on a greenfields site, but those 600 million have to go somewhere, and they sure as hell aren't going to fit into existing cities. (To put this number into perspective, it's more than the combined existing populations of the US, Canada, Australia, France, Scandinavia and the UK.)
To compensate, Arup is planning the city so that the carbon footprint of Dongtan's residents will be less than what is needed, on average, to maintain the earth's ecosystem in balance. The official target is to achieve a carbon neutral city, but Arup is fine-tuning its planning in the hope that Dongtan will be carbon negative.
An interesting article in the Encyclopedia of Earth (EoE) documents the activities of itinerant coal-sellers in eastern India who form a distribution network from mines to individual homes, shops and foodstalls. Incredibly, these sellers carry up to 200 kg on standard or modified bicycles. Some undertake two-day journeys of 60 km to reach their markets.
The coal is from shallow village-dug mines or abandoned mines, or scavenged from official mines: all illegal. Driven by desperation born of environmental degradation and extreme poverty, the cycle wallahs have found a gap in the transport market. Previously, coal was delivered by truck to village coal dumps, but as the middle class households moved to LPG and kerosene as fuel sources, trucks stopped delivering. Nationalisation of the coal industry pushed up prices, making illegal mining more profitable, and the coal cycle wallahs emerged.
Food labeling has increased in complexity as the nature of the ingredients has become more difficult to understand, and many people fear that we are losing control over what we are ingesting. When we could no longer pronounce the names of ingredients, we started insisting that all ingredients should be labeled; when we realized that some food can make us fat, we asked for calorie and protein content; when cereals stopped including anything nutritious, we needed to see added vitamins and minerals; when we were told that some fat was good and some was bad, we asked for labelling of transfats; when we found that a lot of our staples were genetically modified, we wanted to know which ones; as we became more aware of allergies, we asked for labeling of known allergens.
These things are all relatively easy to identify and label - although there is plenty of resistance in some quarters - but when it comes to environmental impact, a minefield has opened up as supermarkets start labeling the carbon impact of foods. If the carbon footprint of a grocery item could be definitively quantified as a broad indicator of potential environmental damage (mainly from energy consumed in its production and transportation) then it would help improve consumers' ability to manage their own carbon footprints. Increased awareness should help weed out high-carbon products and encourage consumption of locally produced goods. I'm just not sure how carbon footprints will be standardised in a way that fairly compares different goods from different countries, and is clear enough for the average consumer to understand.
But it gets even more complicated. Carbon is not the only measure of environmental impact. Another hidden impact is the embodied water in foods. Water is exported and imported in the sense that food grown in one country requires water for its growth, so the producing country is selling virtual water to the importing country. One of the big problems with this is that many food producing countries don't have water to spare, and many food importing countries are saving their own water at the expense of others.
Wikipeida goes into more detail on the impacts of embodied water, particularly as related to global trade, noting also that this issue doesn't apply only to food. Those jeans you're wearing represent 10,850 litres of embodied water. Waterwise estimates that of all the water used by the average Briton, 65% is embedded in food, 30% in industrial goods. Out of 3400 litres used by each person every day, only 150 comes from the tap.
I am in favour of finding some way of identifying the impacts of the way food and other goods are produced and transported, but it's going to take some time to figure out how. Embodied water and carbon are the two most all-encompassing measures of environmental impact, but there are others. And what about labour practices and other social impacts? The list goes on.
There are many good reasons for developing green roofs:
[An] important environmental benefit of green roof systems is their potential to moderate the urban heat island effect... The climactic benefits of green roof systems are not limited to temperature moderation. Urban plantings have also been shown to improve urban air quality, by trapping and absorbing nitrous oxides, volatile organic compounds, and airborne particulate matter.
And another reason, less often mentioned, is the potential for local food production:
The average American meal travels 1500 miles from field to table (Norberg-Hodge et al 2000), using 10 times more energy than the caloric value of the food itself (TFPC 1999). This represents an incredible environmental cost in fossil fuel emissions, pollution associated with extraction, and loss and division of natural habitat by asphalt, to name a few of the more direct costs... Rooftop agriculture is one way in which urban areas could attempt to be more balanced and sustainable in their resource consumption. It is possible to produce a variety of fruit, grain, and vegetable crops on rooftops, either in containers or as field crops (TFPC 1999).
Some roofs growing food across Canada: in Montreal, Toronto, Peterborough, Calgary, and Vancouver.
My previous post on urban farming.
And for all those stormwater managers out there, in 2004 Earth Pledge was commissioned by the New York City Water Board to develop a stormwater simulation model to measure stormwater retention and detention on a specific building or area, specifically to evaluate the impact of green roofs. Micro Model is applied to specific buildings; Macro Model is applied to an area encompassing a network of green roofs. They are now developing Stormwater Model 2.0 based on updated data.
