Net-Positive Design and Sustainable Urban Development

Janis Birkeland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000754629
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Aménagement urbain et paysager

'Sustainable' urban planning, policy and design professes to solve sustainability problems, but often depletes and degrades ever more resources and ecosystems and concentrates wealth and concretize social disparities. Positive Development theory holds that development could create more net ecological and social gains than no construction at all. It explains how existing conceptual, physical and institutional structures are inherently biased against the preservation and expansion of social and natural life-support systems, and proposes explicit reforms to planning, design and decision making that would enable development to increase future options and social and natural life-support systems – in absolute terms.

Net-Positive Design and Sustainable Urban Development is aimed at students, academics, professionals and sustainability advocates who wonder why existing approaches have been ineffective. It explains how to reform the anti-ecological biases in our current frameworks of environmental governance, planning, decision making and design – and suggests how to make these changes. Cities can increase both the 'public estate' (reduce social stratification, inequity and other causes of conflict, increase environmental quality, wellbeing and access to basic needs, etc.); and the 'ecological base' (sequester more carbon and produce more energy than used during construction and operation, increase ecological space to support ecological carrying capacity, ecosystem functions and services, restore the bioregions and wilderness, etc.). No small task, this new book provides academic theory and professional tools for saving the planet, including a free computer app for net-positive design.

Part I

Design and Analysis

Synopsis of Part I

Essential design and decision-making principles and standards are still missing from all dimensions of sustainability theory and practice in urban design and architecture.

Many proponents of sustainability have argued that efficiency is not enough and that systems change is needed at all levels of society. However, it has largely been assumed that a change of values and public policy would trickle through the interstices of governance and urban planning would automatically transform the built environment. Yet urban theory and practice has not addressed the basic sustainability dilemmas. Omissions are found at all levels of urban planning: planning analyses, development controls, decision methods, design processes and building rating tools. This book explores each dimension and suggests means to make the transition to eco-positive cities.

To have socio-ecological gains without adverse economic impacts, urban planning, decision making and design need to be reconceptualized and restructured for net-positive outcomes.

The sustainability crisis is a whole-system problem, requiring the redesign of development, yet circuitous arguments over policy plans persist. This is partly because design has been marginalized in the culture. It is portrayed as a subset of decision making, concerned mainly with communication, but it is a different way of thinking. Both decision making (choosing solutions) and design (opportunity-creating) are necessary and, ideally, complementary. However, neither processes nor practices evolved with sustainability in mind. They need to be reconceived upon ethics-based and positive principles. This book therefore proposes a reconceptualization of both biophysical design (built structures) and institutional design (decision-making structures).

Part I concerns biophysical design concepts and processes, and proposes paradigm shifts:

• From negative/fatalistic mindsets that assume development must be ecologically terminal – to reconceiving development as a means to increase socio-ecological sustainability [Chapters 1–2].
• From closed/bounded system models – to open-system paradigms that enable design that externalizes public impacts and expands positive future options [Chapters 3–4].
• From efficient innovations that create more products and material flows – to structural and spatial design solutions that reduce inequities and increase public gains [Chapters 5–6].
• From analyses that share the same conceptual roots as neo-classical economics – to whole-system analyses that prioritize the correction of socio-ecological deficits [Chapters 7–8].

Part II concerns institutional or decision-making structures, and proposes paradigm shifts:

• From reductionist decision-making – to design-based ‘methods’ that can create synergies and multiply public benefits [Chapters 9–10].
• From numerical standards for green building assessment tools that only reduce the project’s damage – to design tools based on whole-system sustainability [Chapters 11–12].
• From either top-down or bottom-up but ineffective consultation processes – to new community-based collaborative processes for developing design criteria [Chapters 13–14].
• From ‘metrics’ that assess design outcomes relative to typical projects – to measurements that allow for net-positive impacts by using stationary benchmarks standards [Chapters 15–16].

The specific outcomes from a critical examination of sustainable planning and design methods are a community planning process, a design review process and a design tool (with a computer app).

Section A

Introduction to Positive Development

1 Overview of Net-Positive Development

1.1 Introduction

Given the massive environmental material and energy flows throughout the construction lifecycle, the re-design of urban environments is a prerequisite to genuine sustainability.

Cities could become catalysts for social, ecological and economic sustainability. However, to do so, they must increase the natural and social life-support systems and expand future options.¹ So-called ‘sustainable’ development is not yet sustainable. It transfers and concentrates wealth, reduces cultural/biological diversity, does irreversible ecological damage and impedes adaptability. In addition to curtailing the means of human survival and wellbeing, contemporary cities and buildings lock in negative pathways that eliminate future sustainable public choices.² Further, they have huge opportunity costs,³ because they divert land, money, effort, time and resources away from creating environments that proactively increase sustainability and public benefits.

Most urban development outcomes were shaped by concepts and methods that evolved within an anthropocentric and exploitative ethic called the Dominant Paradigm (DP).

The planning and design of the built environment mirrors post-enlightenment worldviews that saw nature as a threat – if not antithetical to genuine human progress. It was assumed that development must have adverse environmental impacts, so sustainable design only aimed to mitigate negatives and increase positives relative to the norm. Sustainability is therefore still often described as a ‘balance’ between conservation and development.⁴ Hence, environmental management/planning tools have evolved largely for deciding how/where to balance trade-offs.⁵ The fallacy of the middle, the sweet spot between good and bad, still predominates urban design and architecture practice. This means doing less harm.

Frameworks of sustainable governance, planning and design should aim to improve urban/regional social conditions and increase the natural environment relative to pre-industrial/pre-urban conditions.

Sustainable design was always ‘positive’ in intentions, though not in outcomes. It has aimed to ‘restore the environment, regenerate the community and revitalize the economy’.⁶ Designers have long realized that sustainable design can pay for itself, be profitable, and stimulate socio-economic development.⁷ However, the aim has only been to leave the environment ‘better than before construction’ or to regenerate remnant natural landscapes.⁸ Even if the earth’s original environment were restored, however, nature could not support the current needs/demands of ‘modern’ society. To counteract the depletion/degradation of ecosystems, communities and resources, therefore, our institutional and physical infrastructure must be entirely reconceived.

Despite the massive cumulative and irreversible impacts involved in construction, development could increase positive social and ecological conditions in absolute terms (i.e. globally).

Over recent decades, there have been steady improvements and innovations in resource efficiency, upcycling and innovation.⁹ Nevertheless, land use patterns, building design and construction practices still embed ecologically harmful lifestyles and land uses in urban development. Even if population, consumption, pollution and fossil fuels declined rapidly, current development standards and practices would not halt climate change and regenerate nature. For example, ‘zero-energy’ buildings sound optimal,¹⁰ but these seldom count the ‘embodied’ resources lost during resource extraction/manufacturing, let alone cumulative losses of biodiversity. Even ecological compensation or offsetting schemes cause net ecosystem/biodiversity losses. Nevertheless, as argued herein, net-positive development is now possible.

Positive Development (PD) posits that built structures and spaces, despite many unavoidable impacts during their construction, can become net contributors to biophysical sustainability.

Simply adding more green design criteria and indicators to urban design, planning and architecture conventions has little effect. While these are important components of sustainable development, they do not contribute public and ecological gains in excess of their negative impacts – let alone increase the positive ecological footprint of nature.¹¹ This is because sustainable development, despite claims, still largely ignores basic sustainability issues, such as ecology, equity, poverty or resource security. In order to shift the trajectory of development from negative to net positive, PD proposes different physical, intellectual and institutional structures.¹² These are derived from ethics-based principles and net-positive standards.

PD refers to basic prerequisites of sustainability – physical/institutional structures that expand positive future options by increasing the ecological base and public estate.

As sustainable urban design gradually became professionalized, the design professions did not really change their underlying philosophies, frameworks or methods. Although sustainability initially meant making everything better, it came to mean reducing harm through efficiency, recycling and closing resource loops. These cannot protect biological and cultural diversity, reverse the pyramidal transfer of resources/wealth, increase adaptability to unpredictable change or convert cities from sterile machines to fertile gardens. Design cannot change economic systems, but it can reduce the impacts of disparities, by providing universal, direct access to basic needs, life quality and security,¹³ and increasing public social spaces, or ‘the commons’.¹⁴

A positive, open-system lens reveals alternatives to the negative DP intellectual and institutional constructs that underlie the planning and design of urban environments.

The general approach in sustainability fields has been to improve the same (failed) frameworks and processes. In contrast, PD aims to reconstruct...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Boxes
• Preface
• Overview
• PART I: Design and Analysis: Synopsis of Part I
• PART II: Decision Making and Assessment: Synopsis of Part II
• Index