Making All Communities Sustainable No Other Choice Green Alliance - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Making All Communities Sustainable – No Other Choice

Green Alliance / Eden Project seminar: Sustainable Construction – are we closing the loop? Monday 30th January 2006, Eden Project Professor Anne Power, London School of Economics

Finite planet

• Total human dependence on nature’s

goods & services

• British Isles – crowded, overdeveloped,
• ld, rich, urban, unequal, atomised
• Satellite images of places are shocking
• Damage, deficits are dire

Buildings

• Homes, public facilities, enterprise,

commerce – 50% carbon

• Construction, use, transport, infrastructure
• Development impact – 80% land
• Buildings suck in resources, pollute, dump
• Space, land use, wider impacts
• Third most populated in world

Can’t just carry on

• Reaching limits of congestion
• Homes waste energy
• Exhausting key assets – land, water
• Damaging cohesion - unequal migration
• Destroys democracy - resource battles

Conundrum

• How to claw back damage?
• Work on existing buildings
• How to improve what we’ve got?
• Renew existing communities
• How to persuade people to love cities?
• Recycle, reuse, reshape, re-link

Density is key

• Too crowded too thin anorexic
• Density offers critical resource measures:

1900: 200 homes per hectare 23 35: 2005 1900: 1200 people per hectare 55 80: 2005

• Need 50 homes per hectare to support

reliable, regular bus etc

• Reuse settlements support community
• Shared space = shared resources
• Families versus isolated elderly

Earliest known city → Manchester

Coronation Street – the answer?

• Community nostalgia or density?
• Happiness or space?
• Social animals - ‘ant cities’
• Environmental gains?
• Sustainable communities?

Essential targets

• Recycle 90% buildings; 50% infrastructure
• Infill 90% new build
• Renovate all homes
• Halve water & waste through care,

recycling, reuse

• Ban all toxic materials – substitutes work
• 50 homes per hectare as minimum

How does Code measure up?

• Small, but significant step
• Identifies problem
• Too little, NOT too late
• Builders expect tough shifts
• Playing for time
• Gadgets are not buildings
• Gadgets need market incentives
• Ignores (so far) existing communities

Sustainable Communities

• 99% already exist
• Capacity in London
• Small sites within city
• Protect green belts, floodplains,

biodiversity

• Cohesion is critical
• Lower cost homes model Θ energy

prices

Affordable housing problem

• Land is finite/sea is ‘given’
• Smaller units
• More shared facilities
• Denser cities
• Better designed homes
• More mixed communities
• More organic growth
• Special needs need special help

Successful community magnets

• Family & elderly friendly
• Stability, known faces, community anchors
• Open, green, play spaces
• Supervision & maintenance & security
• Social events, community facilities
• ‘Comfortable & not alone’ i.e. home

Renewing urban communities

• Impact of renovation

– 1/10 energy; 1/4 price – Bicycles; Schools

• Impact of:

– Homes Zones – Sure Start

• ‘Heritage dividend’
• Trees, small gardens, pocket parks
• Windmills and micro-generators
• Upgrading is global lesson
• Low cost areas guarantee survival
• Fascinated by dynamism of cities

Is this a mad dream?

• Copenhagen
• Barcelona
• Roma
• Marseilles
• Portland
• Bogota
• Curitiba
• Planned or evolved?
• Big shifts start small