The Green City

Sustainable Homes, Sustainable Suburbs

Nicholas Low, Brendon Gleeson, Ray Green, Darko Radovic

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781136752995
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

A team of city-building professionals explain in straightforward terms how the idea of ecological sustainability can be embodied in the everyday life of homes, communities and cities to make a better future.The book considers - and answers - three questions: What does the global agenda of sustainable development mean for the urban spaces where most

Chapter 1

What does ‘Sustainability’ Mean for Cities?

‘Sustainability’ is the word of the moment. It’s everywhere – in the press, in government reports, on business websites, all over the internet. Adjectives proliferate: ecological, environmental, economic, social, cultural, political, architectural, urban, rural – whatever next? With all the variety of meanings splashing around, does sustainability mean much at all? Is it just another fashion of the intelligentsia, or merely a useful cover story for business as usual?

Sustainability does mean something both important and new.¹ It speaks of the greatest change in human thought and behaviour for 3000 years. It is fundamentally about the global environment. It is also about cities. A simple metaphor may be useful. Think of having a good soak in the bath. Before getting out and grabbing a towel, lie there a moment longer and pull out the plug. The water level immediately begins to drop. A colder perimeter creeps round your body. A little whirlpool or vortex forms above the plug hole. Now think of the bathwater as the environment. The city is the vortex created by swallowing up the environment – it is the energy, the water and the materials consumed by city dwellers. There are two ways of keeping water in the bath. Put the plug back in, or run the taps at the same rate as the water going down the waste pipe – or do some combination of the two: stem the flow, run the water. Maintaining the water level and keeping the water at a comfortable temperature is what ‘sustainability’ means in the world of this little metaphor.

What people have begun to appreciate over the last 20 or 30 years is that the environment is, like a bathtub, of limited capacity When humans were launched into space in the late 1960s, they – and then we were for the first time able to view the planet Earth as a blue globe, utterly bounded in extent, moving in the infinite and hostile darkness of space. The limits of the environment became immediately clear. Since then the image of Earth from space has become trivialised through overuse, but what that image told us is continuing to have a profound effect on human knowledge about the relationship between the human species and the planet.

For 3000 years, human knowledge in Europe was shaped by the project of understanding the natural world in order to consume it more effìciendy. In the last 100 years that project spread worldwide. The staggering success of the growth project is reflected in the exponential expansion of the world’s human population. The population is growing because more people are surviving, and for longer. Experts hope that improved survival chances will bring about a levelling of population growth in the poorer countries as it has in the rich ones; but even so the world’s population is expected to reach 10 billion within 50 years. The same ‘science’ that made growth possible is also telling us that consumption is already crashing up against environmental limits. Under present circumstances, the prosperity of the rich cannot be spread to the whole world’s population. It has been calculated, for example, that if all countries consumed as much energy per person as Britain does, the world would need seven extra planets.² Since Australians consume more than twice as much as the British, the corresponding figure for this country is 14 extra planets. The world has the span of just a single lifetime, 70 or 80 years, to turn human behaviour around from growth to sustainability before the planet’s population spirals back towards decline, ill health and shortened lives.

This change would not be a return to a simpler world, which some romantics might welcome, but rather a cataclysmic scenario marked by a sudden reversal in human health and massive disruptions to settled populations, cities and societies. The spectre of ‘environmental refugees’ – people forced to flee ecologically ravaged areas – has already been foreshadowed in Africa, where large numbers have been unsettled by local wars, desertification and the destruction of food-producing habitats. Translate these ‘regional’ disruptions to a global scale and we have an appalling outlook. This may not be a ‘doomsday’ prophecy – people are remarkably adaptive in the face of even the worst forms of change – but it signals a future which sees humanity, or major parts of it, forced back to raw survival and the constant threat of suffering. Is this where our economic progress is taking us? Or should we use the intellectual capacities and technologies that we have developed as a species over the past three millennia to secure a sustainable future? There is time, but not much.

We are today living through a crisis of knowledge: much of what we thought before about how to get along in our human societies, especially what we learned through the study of politics and economics, and even what we knew about how to do science itself, is now obsolete. One of the finest of Australian philosophers, Val Plumwood, calls this the ‘ecological crisis of reason’.³ For thousands of years the principal purpose of science was the mastery of nature. Now we find we are not masters but partners with nature – and junior partners at that – in a project of mutual survival.

Cities Consume the Environment

Enough has been spoken and written about the environmental crisis. This book rejects the politics of doom – the ‘do nothing because nothing helps’ outlook – and charts the way to a brighter, sustainable future for our cities. Nevertheless, in this opening chapter we must speak about the environmental crisis in terms of the two most serious threats that confront the world today: the threat to the atmosphere, and the threat to the biosphere. We will then move on quickly to the core of our argument, which is about what we who live in cities can do about these threats. Frightening though these threats are, there is no cause for despair, because the solutions are known and clearly understood. They are also fundamentally urban. They start from where we Australians mostly live: in cities and suburbs.

One feature of urban society is the extreme separation of everyday life from the natural world on which human life depends. Most people know what chicken fillets look and taste like. Also, hens clucking and pecking about the farmyard are engaging creatures familiar to us from children’s stories or even first-hand experience. What people know almost nothing about, and probably resist thinking about, is how vast numbers of hens become chicken fillets. Even less is known about the effects on the natural world of that process of mass production. The same applies to almost all food. Today consumers are being asked to take on trust genetically modified food whose long-term impact is completely unknown.⁴

What applies to food applies to just about every item we use in our everyday life. The word processor I am using to write this chapter is the end result of a long chain of production. Every part of the computer originates in nature and will eventually return as waste. But of the effects of this chain of production and waste on the natural world I have little knowledge. As we approach the limits of what the Earth’s environment can provide, we must allow technology to move forward only with great caution.⁵

The symptoms of environmental damage appear far and wide – in the paddocks and fields, the mountains and deserts, the oceans and forests, and the plains, rivers, lakes and glaciers of this extensive planet. So it is easy to assume that the environmental problem is ‘out there’. Environmental problems are rarely experienced – or at least not fully – by the people who cause them, as economist Michael Jacobs points out.⁶ This remoteness is emphasised by the frontline troops of the city-based green movements who take their protest to the endangered forests and the high seas, bringing with them the attention of the worlďs media. But the production processes that cause the damage in remote places would not exist without cities in which to consume the end products. Urban industries draw in environmental ‘raw’ materials and spew out waste.⁷ Japanese whale meat ends up on city tables. Rainforest timber adorns city boardrooms and urban boardwalks. Consumption is certainly only part of the problem – production is the other part – but consumption is crucial. It’s also easier to tackle the environmental problem at the urban consumption end.⁸

The globalisation of production now puts even greater distance between the people who consume and the land and sea that ultimately produce. In Australia, the vegetables on supermarket shelves may come from Brazil, the canned tuna from Thailand, the timber from Malaysia, and most manufactured goods from China. The most voracious consumers on the planet live in cities and work in office jobs processing clean information. Unlike the situation in the early industrial cities, the factories (and associated pollution) may be thousands of miles away from the consumers of their products. We may live in the virtual ‘information society’ but we can’t eat information. Everything the virtual society depends on for survival comes from and returns to the real environment.

Most people on the planet now live in cities remote from agriculture and the extractive industries that feed the factories that, in turn, feed the homes and offices. Many more will do so in future. Cities are the way that human societies have found convenient to create the division of labour necessary to produce goods and services for human consumption. City dwellers do a multitude of different jobs, and in cities all these different jobs are co-ordinated to make up a vast collective effort – it’s rather like a human anthill. Cities themselves are beginning to connect to other cities across the globe in networked systems, creating an urban universe that seems totally separated from nature, or at least oblivious to its dependence on nature. Modern cities are wonderfully efficient machines for consuming nature, and many people owe their lives to this consumption machine. The problem today, though, is that efficient consumption of nature is no longer what is most needed; sustainable consumption is what is needed. Unless cities themselves become focused on and designed for sustainable consumption, environmental damage will multiply. The cities will be the last to know, and by that time it will be too late.

What does it mean to ‘consume’ the environment? Obviously the global environment is much more complex than water in a bathtub. But there are significant parallels. There is a ‘tap’ for stored sources of energy. The sun provides a constant energy flow to the Earth and that energy is stored in solid forms of carbon through plant growth. Fossil fuels are huge stores of organic material deposited in the rocks at times of extreme global warming. The last two epochs of algal deposition that eventually turned into oil occurred about 90 and 145 million years ago.⁹ Fossil fuels are easily converted to heat (as in the hot water tank for the bath), but using up fossil fuels is like drawing hot water for the bath without reheating the water in the tank.

More importantly, the environment provides services. The service the bathwater provides is keeping us warm and comfortable while we wash our bodies, or just relax. One of the services the environment provides is a stable climate in which to live and work. When the bathwater is dirty it is discharged into a waste pipe, and where it goes after that most people don’t think about. But there is no convenient waste pipe to outer space for polluted air – it just stays in the atmosphere until it is broken down (over millennia) by natural processes. The atmosphere therefore provides the service of a waste dump, or ‘sink’, for pollution.

What is the relationship between the environment, society and the economy?¹⁰ A student in Nick Low’s 2003 graduate class at the University of Melbourne, David Mitchell, pointed out that the ‘economy’ is the term that describes the dominant way in which society, any society, interacts with the natural environment. In our obsession with ‘the market’, which describes human-to-human interactions, we have forgotten that the most fundamental fact of all real economic systems is human exploitation of the environment. Mitchell was absolutely right.

The implications of this insight are as obvious as they are momentous. First, if human behaviour is despoiling the environment, it is the economy that has to change, because the economy is the sum total of all interactions with the environment. Of course people interact with the environment in ways other than economic, just as they interact with each other in ways other than economic. But material support for human life comes from the environment. And this life support is provided collectively by the set of real relationships called ‘the economy’.¹¹ Unfortunately, our material relationships with the environment have now developed into a threat – both to the environment and to all those who depend upon it. The threat takes two main forms.

The Threat to the Atmosphere

The political world has, since the 1980s, been worrying about the impact on the Earth’s climate of ‘greenhouse gases’ released into the atmosphere through human activity. With the support of many national governments, the United Nations (UN) has put an enormous scientific effort into understanding this impact. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to bring together the world’s leading specialist climatologists to investigate and report authoritatively on what was happening. The IPCC’s first report, in 1990, suggested (cautiously) that a generalised global warming, though with highly variable local impacts, was probably occurring. Every IPCC report since, using new and better data, has confirmed those findings.

The evidence for climate change has thus become steadily firmer. Its impact already seems manifest in Australia, where citizens witness and experience with mounting concern the increased frequency of drought and extreme heat. The cities cannot escape this judgment of nature, and most of our capitals now seem to be moving to permanent water restrictions and a generally heightened ‘water insecurity’. For instance, water expert Professor John Langford says that ‘Perth in Western Australia, located on the margins between a large dry region and the wetter southwest corner of the state, is particularly sensitive to climate change. Perth has experienced a decline in average rainfall of 15 per cent over the past 35 years compared to the previous 70 years, resulting in a 50 per cent reduction in average stream flow into Perth’s water storages’ (John Langford, personal communication).

Many urban Australians may already believe that ‘the weather is changing’; scientists, in contrast, are cautious people and not inclined to follow or reflect conventional wisdom. They deal in observed phenomena and the theories, built into mathematical models of processes, that tell us why the phenomena are happening. The core of the IPCC work is directed towards finding out whether or not the records of temperature observations confirm that global warming is occurring, and whether or not observations of the Earth’s atmosphere correspond with what the models predict.

Now any scientific endeavour is attended by uncertainty It is well known that the Earth has warmed and cooled naturally at intervals over its lifespan of billions of years. What is new and dangerous about the current phenomenon is the extraordinary speed with which the new warming seems to be happening. Over a million years, or even perhaps 10 000 years, the Earth’s inhabitants – plants and animals (including humans) – stand a chance of adapting to the changing climatic conditions. Though we humans are very adaptable creatures and can live in very hot or very cold climates, we are still dependent for food on the adaptability of the plants and animals in the ecosystems that support human life. There is little chance of adaptation if the change takes place over a few hundred years or less.¹² The Earth’s biosphere will itself adapt, by simply shrugging off the cause of global warming: humans. For us global warming means much more than a change in the weather. Failure to adapt our economy to reduce global warming will bring death and misery on a scale never seen before in human history. The scale of death will enormously exceed the plagues of the Middle Ages and the persecutions and wars of the 20th century. Every single one of us on this planet should be frightened by this prospect.

Reliable surface temperature records have only been kept since about 1860; satellite observations of the upper atmosphere for little more than a decade. The warming signal from the atmosphere has only become noticeable in the last century, with an upturn from about 1915...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Authors
• Acknowledgments
• ‘Thoughts in a Garden’
• Chapter 1: What does ‘Sustainability’ Mean for Cities?
• Chapter 2: Sustainable Homes and Suburbs
• Chapter 3: Nature in the City
• Chapter 4: Sustainable Workplaces
• Chapter 5: Sustainable Transport
• Chapter 6: Making the Green City
• Chapter 7: Green-Shaded Cities
• Notes and references
• Index