socio-economic development through mobility

Qhubeka provides a useful case study in improving rural mobility where small-scale transport initiatives are crucial. This is a story that began with distributing bicycles to people who would otherwise walk long distances. But the lessons are about how to empower local communities.

South African company Axiz requires its employees to undertake 24 hours of community service every year. After starting to import California bikes to local communities, they found that there were a lot of challenges that needed to be overcome before the bikes could become a useful community tool. People who had never had access to bikes had to learn to ride and maintain them, and Qhubeka became a project not only to teach those skills, but also to instil in the community a sense of value that ensured that the bikes were not stolen.

The project eventually expanded to address other community issues such as financial management and the role of women in the community:

By focusing on the establishment of social infrastructure, Axiz, Qhubeka and its partners are contributing to the sustainable upliftment of communities through the transfer of skills, technology and education, which helps these communities to become productive members of society.

Some of the Qhubeka partners are also involved with bicycles in Namibia and Botswana.

planning and politics

The quote below illustates one tactic for dealing with the problem of politicians and developers striking deals that contravene planning policies. Los Angeles chief planner Gail Goldberg understands the importance of the less visible aspects of planning that pass under the radar of politicians, who are mainly interested in the high-profile mega-projects.

From the LA Times:

In February, Goldberg was in City Council chambers when billionaire Eli Broad declared that another mega-project, downtown's Grand Avenue plan, "changes the entire complexion of the center of the city." Goldberg wasn't called on to offer an opinion.

Shortly after the vote, Goldberg offered a tense smile when asked by a reporter if she was miffed about it. No, she said.

"In the best case, I look at it more closely and love it," she said. "But what if I don't love it? Then I create enemies and I don't think enough will be gained to make it worth it. I am willing to jump in and make a tough decision, but I don't want to win the battle and lose the war. I want to build relationships."

Goldberg believes there are ample development opportunities without having to rely on mega-projects. The key is to steer clear of neighborhoods that want to stay as they are and help communities that want her help — thereby creating examples the rest of the city can see.

Goldberg is talking about the issue of how to bring growth to a city that wants to grow, but the approach could be used on transport planning. Some transport mega-projects are useful, but many are driven by political ambition and don't form part of a cohesive planning framework. Where the most effective changes can be made is often in the institutional processes and structures that guide decision-making, and in operational aspects — things that politicians rarely concern themselves with.

An interesting article by Stephen Boshoff in the Cape Argus in April 2007 adds to the discussion about the need for integrated system-based planning that doesn't rely so much on big signature projects. Single projects, whether they be Cape Town's N2 gateway or the Gautrain or a World Cup stadium, cannot meet all needs. They become overburdened with expectations, and sometimes they fail and are abandoned, to be replaced by the Next Big Thing.

Boshoff argues:

To succeed, [a city's] strategy needs to recognise that any settlement has at least four different investment needs. It has to provide [for] the basic needs of citizens; it has to maintain its assets and functions; it has to provide for crisis and disaster and fix past mistakes; and it has to invest productively, making the city better for the future.

A successful strategy needs to mobilise external resources to create alternative funding streams, and be guided by leadership that is inspired and committed to sticking to the plan. It also needs to provide the right environment for public sector money to leverage private sector investment.

In an excellent interview in the Feb/April 2007 edition of Delivery magazine, Jeremy Cronin (Chairperson of Parliament's Portfolio Committee on Transport in South Africa) points out that government-subsidised recapitalisation of taxis, without changing their operating conditions, will result in the fancy new taxis ending up in the same condition as the old ones. Their business model is not strong enough to support good wages and well-maintained, insured vehicles — not to mention safe driving practices. He points out that within the stratified taxi industry there are some operators who do have healthy businesses, and they will recapitalise on their own.

There are challenges in changing the framework within which public transport operates, but many of them lie within the sphere of influence of municipal and provincial officicals, and don't face obstacles from national government or politicians. The long-awaited establishment of new transport authorities around South Africa, as mandated by legislation, is a case in point.

With the right legislative, regulatory and planning framework it should be possible to create an environment that will support the emergence of businesses that not only are financially sustainable, but meet the needs of the traveling public.

slowing down

In Cape Town, it wouldn't have made a difference. But a hundred kilometres away a full moon is dominating the Swartland night. A cool breeze is caressing the vineyards as the dogs do their business before we turn in for the night. No street lights, no sounds of traffic. It's real, and it's refreshing. So you won't be seeing so many posts here over the next two weeks. I'll be back at full steam when I have recharged my hydrogen cells.

greening communities

Cape Town filmmakers Jacqueline van Meygaarden and Luke Younge walked away from the Commonwealth Vision Awards last week with the top prize for their 90-second South African film Free Energy. In an article in today's Cape Argus, the two explain that the film "touches on daily township life in South Africa and how solar energy could be utilised to uplift the poor in a sustainable way." The film was shot in Cape Town's Khayelitsha township.

how is your inner primate?

Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson started writing about climate change in his Mars books, and takes the topic further in his latest trilogy. In an interview with BLDGBLOG, he talks of how we - modern society - pursue activities that are intended to make our lives easier, or more interesting, or somehow better, and many of these things are harming us directly as individuals and also indirectly by altering our earthly habitat.

And there’s an addictive side to this. People try to do stupid technological replacements for natural primate actions, but it doesn’t quite give them the buzz that they hoped it would. Even though it looks quite magical, the sense of accomplishment is not there. So they do it again, hoping that the activity, like a drug, will somehow satisfy the urge that it’s supposedly meant to satisfy. But it doesn’t. So they do it more and more – and they fall down a rabbit hole, pursuing a destructive and high carbon-burn activity, when they could just go out for a walk, or plant a garden, or sit down at a table with a friend and drink some coffee and talk for an hour. All of these unboosted, straight-forward primate activities are actually intensely satisfying to the totality of the mind-body that we are.

So a little bit of analysis of what we are as primates – how we got here evolutionarily, and what can satisfy us in this world – would help us to imagine activities that are much lower impact on the planet and much more satisfying to the individual at the same time. In general, I’ve been thinking: let’s rate our technologies for how much they help us as primates, rather than how they can put us further into this dream of being powerful gods who stalk around on a planet that doesn’t really matter to us.

[...]

Sustainable development, as well: that’s a term that’s been contaminated. It doesn’t even mean sustainable anymore. It means: let us continue to do what we’re doing, but somehow get away with it. By some magic waving of the hands, or some techno silver bullet, suddenly we can make it all right to continue in all our current habits. And yet it’s not just that our habits are destructive, they’re not even satisfying to the people who get to play in them. So there’s a stupidity involved, at the cultural level.

competitive solar energy

Google pledged to develop renewable energy sources cheaper than coal. Now Nanosolar, whose backers include Google’s co-founders, say it is ready to produce the world’s lowest-cost solar panel, costing as little as 99 cents (US) per watt.

A year ago, Google announced it would derive 30% of the energy needs for its corporate head office from solar panels - which sounds great, but the huge investment in 1.6 megawatts of solar capacity also meant that California taxpayers would be forking out $4.5 million in subsidies to Google as part of the state's incentive programme. At the going subsidy of $2.80 per installed watt, the subsidy could have been saved by Google waiting a year for Nanosolar's relatively inexpensive panels. Solar prices will continue to fall as technology evolves and demand increases, so how long should I wait?

hope in America

One thing I have to say for the Americans: when the administration in Washington fails to show leadership, there are always individual states and cities that will step up to the plate. That doesn't make up for a poor showing on the international ballpark, but it does at least prepare the field so that when Washington eventually shows up, the country is ready to play ball.

On the challenges of peak oil, Portland, Oregon is first up. In May 2006, Portland City Council created a Peak Oil Task Force to develop recommendations on appropriate responses to uncertainties in the supply and affordability of oil. The Task Force's final report, titled Descending the Oil Peak: Navigating the Transition from Oil and Natural Gas, was issued in March 2007 and includes recommendations to reduce oil use and strengthen the community’s ability to respond to social and economic stress.

This is not doomsday scaremongering, but a credible plan of action. Transition Town Stroud has prepared a headline summary of the report, highlighting both the possible effects of a post-peak scenario and recommended actions to mitigate the effects. None of the key actions are attempts to create alternatives to oil - it's all about appropriate multi-sector planning that reduces dependency on liquid fuels. One of the actions, perhaps in anticipation of negative side effects of the growing biofuels industry, is to "preserve farmland and expand local food production and processing".

While scratching around the online world of Oregon, I came across minutes of a meeting held earlier this month by the Post Carbon Eugene Outpost. (There are nearly 180 Post Carbon groups across the US and Canada - part of the Relocalisation Network, under the Post Carbon Institute.) I found these minutes interesting, not because I have any affinity for Eugene, which happens to be a small city located about 2 hours south of Portland, but because the meeting gives a taste of some of the concerns being expressed by ordinary American citizens about energy, the environment, local community and the economy - and planning responses to these issues.

Many of the issues raised in the meeting are understandably parochial and of little interest to outsiders looking in, but a couple of points caught my eye. One is that the group engages with the city's Sustainability Commission set up earlier this year, through their regular public forums, and at a previous forum the group has raised issues such as the nature of economic growth and whether the prevailing growth model is really sustainable. Subversive talk, that!

The other point of interest was reference to Portland "intersection repair", which is about "creating physical structures that contribute to building community, social cohesion and community interaction".

There is a fascinating blog post on this concept on The Next American City:

Since 1996, Portland’s City Repair has been transforming the nature of public space and the dialogue that surrounds it. A nonprofit organization dedicated to creating public gathering places with creativity, artistry, and compassion, City Repair is a catalyst for neighborhood-based interaction and transformation. Most of City Repair’s projects focus on what they call “Intersection Repair,” which turns intersections into public gathering places. Despite early opposition, the City of Portland has embraced the idea, and City Repair has become a model for citizen-driven neighborhood improvement.

Of interest to traffic engineers, transport planners and other planning professionals, the post mentions the challenge of "balancing the interests of bureaucrats and neighborhood residents." Traffic engineers are trained to move cars, and are inherently conservative when it comes to altering the design of road space with innovative projects aimed at building strong communities. But when Portland City Council not only allowed a mural to be painted on a road surface as part of an Intersection Repair project, but passed an ordinance which specifically permitted Intersection Repair projects, city transportation officials became more supportive, after initially refusing to contemplate the project.

The interaction of infrastructure and social activity is a serious concern here in South Africa, where community disintegration might be considered a national pandemic; I recently touched on the topic of infrastructure design as it relates to sustainability, here and here. It is heartening to know that a Post Carbon group on the other side of the world is grappling with the importance of social sustainability as a planning and design issue.

why the US did what it did at Bali

In a guest column on Grist, Professor Andrew Light provides the best analysis I have seen of why representatives of the Bush admimistration behaved the way they did at the Bali conference. We'll probably never really know for sure, but Professor Light provides several possible explanations. Considering it was all about setting the scene for the negotiations to come, rather than actually producing a binding protocol for post-2012 Kyoto, it seems bizarre that Washington should be so obstructionist.

What is heartening, though, is that despite the petty behaviour of US negotiators, the rest of the delegate countries were willing to leave a seat for the US at the negotiating table. Let's hope the next US president is as magnanimous.

South Africa helps save Bali declaration

It's over, and Bali negotiators are limping home after a gruelling two weeks. But they nearly didn't reach closure. In the early hours of Saturday, US representative Paula Dobriansky again blamed developing countries for not showing commitment to targets for themselves. This has been an issue for the US since the original Kyoto Protocol was agreed, and was the reason Washington refused to sign on in 2001; and it has been a sticking point throughout the Bali conference.

The EU was pushing hard to have developed countries adopt emissions targets in line with the IPCC summary report issued earlier this year, but eventually backed down in the face of objections from the US, Canada and Japan, who insisted that developing countries needed to show stronger commitment. In the final hours of the conference, India had requested a change in the wording of the final declaration that would place greater emphasis on the need for sustainable development in developing countries, and for technology transfer to assist developing countries to migrate towards lower emissions. The US rejected India's change.

Global Deal reports that the eleventh-hour obstruction by the US was met by strong opposition:

Japan speaks next, giving the United States some kind of fuzzy support. But South Africa issues a ferocious and articulate denunciation of the American position. Developing countries have gone much further than they needed to. It's the United States that has failed to take on strong commitments.

According to Wired, South Africa was followed by the Papua New Guinea delegate:

"We seek your leadership," Kevin Conrad told the Americans. "But if for some reason you are not willing to lead, leave it to the rest of us. Please get out of the way."

After a bleak few moments, the US backed down and expressed a desire for a shared vision and a Bali roadmap. According to Global Deal, Dobriansky says "In a spirit of co-operation and responding directly to the words of South Africa, she is prepared to withdraw her objections and go with the consensus position." South Africa welcomed this new US position, and "the delegate 'interprets' the text that applies to developing countries and shows that it can be interpreted as meeting the needs of the poorest people."

A few minutes later, agreement was reached on a Bali declaration, but it was clear that many issues have been left for the negotiations that will continue from here. Bangladesh expressed a view that seems to be felt by a number of the poorest developing countries: that treating the G77 countries (the negotiating block of 155 developing countries) as equals unfairly discriminates against the poorer ones.

If this emerges as a significant split, it may make things tougher for South Africa, as one of the stronger G77 countries with high levels of carbon emissions. I suggested on Friday that targets should recognise historic advantage gained through carbon-intensive industrialisation. This approach benefits South Africa in relation to the developed world, but places a greater burden on South Africa in comparison to poorer countries.

The hard work is only just beginning.

[Update on 19 December: Here is the text of the Bali Declaration signed by 200 scientists on 6 December. Try as I might, I can't find the text of the final agreement reached on 15 December. Here is the unedited Bali Action Plan (the five-page document that all the fuss was about). Here is the Conference President's closing statement.]

Bali-hoo on day 12

It had to happen. The left hook I mentioned yesterday. We just didn't know where it would come from, although many would have guessed it would be the US. And they'd be right. Global Deal reports:

But the Americans have just dropped something of a bombshell. An hour or so ago, they read out new text to a meeting of ministers that are looking to push through a new agreement. A copy has just reached me here in the lobby outside.

The core of the US proposal is that developed and developing countries should be treated in the same way, with countries taking on targets according to "their level of economic development and significance" or some similar formulation.

Blogger David Steven suggests this is not just an amendment to text that negotiators had been working on in the early hours of Friday morning, but a completely new proposal, designed to provoke. The question is, why? Bali COP 13 is now in its final hours, and the answer may only become clear once everyone's gone home and the dust has settled.

What I'm wondering is whether it will really make much difference to the Americans, if they do pass the Climate Security Act. The Act is a protectionist measure that essentially hedges Washington's bets. If developing countries don't adopt carbon emissions targets, the Act will give America the means to block trade from those countries.

There's more than one way to slice the carbon cake, and more than one way to set targets. New Zealand is sensibly approaching their goal of becoming a carbon neutral country by slicing the cake into economic sectors. Bite-sized chunks, as it were, to make it easier to monitor progress and make adjustments along the way. There is no reason to be concerned about countries adopting such a practical approach, but what of the bumbling countries like Canada, or the fast-developing ones like China?

If internationally agreed targets for both developed and developing countries are going to be based on levels of economic development, as the US is suggesting, one way to be truly equitable would be to consider not only current emission levels but also the historic emissions from past economic activity. Just as an assessment of the sustainability of a new building considers the embodied energy in the materials used to construct it, or product labelling might include the carbon emissions from its manufacture (as the US Climate Security Act is proposing), so too entire economies have a level of "embodied carbon" that needs to be considered.

All the steel, concrete and other materials used to build the American Dream represent vast amounts of carbon emissions over centuries. To ignore that historic impact in setting emissions targets would be to severely disadvantage developing countries. This is not to say that they should be allowed to develop as irresponsibly as the more developed countries did; they can grow using leapfrog technologies that have lower ecological impacts. I am just suggesting that it would be grossly unjust to consider only current emissions in the targets.

Of course the US would not like this approach, because it would place a greater responsibility for climate change mitigation on their shoulders, but I think it's time the developing world stood up to Washington's bullying tactics.