COPing it in Debben 2011

Summer, Durban, 2011. It’s hot, muggy and very much not Cape Town, which seems to be struggling out of winter as though mired in treacle. The world’s climate negotiators have descended on the International Convention Centre with their entourages and the host of professionals, NGOs, corporates, government representatives and other climate trough-feeders in tow. The night before the conference, storms ravaged Durban with a number of casualties – a tragic (although timely) reminder of how our changing climate will change urban life, especially for the poor.


My reason for being here is the annual architectural side event organised by the South African Institute for Architects (SAIA) and the International Union of Architects (UIA) – Sustainability by Design: built environment strategies in response to climate change. I was one of the panelist for the interactive event attended by some 200 architects, providing some engineering perspectives on our urban response to climate change.

The broad context at this Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), appears to be one of slow movement on global climate funding, amid threats of Canadian withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol (to join their North American neighbours in the dirty energy business). This amid a widening trust-gap between major players, developed and developing nations and even within negotiating blocs. My expectations for the global negotiations are low – I don’t foresee binding agreements soon, but I do have hopes for individual sectors, cities and other governance forums for substantial action in the absence of global agreement. Going into COP17, it was imagined that this round of negotiations would see the world’s premier cities rising to the challenge to address climate change and Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions. I still have hopes of that.

So then, what role for the built environment - a sector which is responsible for at least 40% and perhaps as much as 60% of global GHG emissions?

Let me first frame the conference… In contrast with previous built environment conferences, this was not “talking heads” – experts lecturing an audience on their latest project or opinion - this conference was a conversation. This was primarily an architectural audience interacting with an inter-disciplinary panel, exploring climate scenarios in the built environment (with expertise ranging from food security to urban design to ‘integral coaching’ – a full list of panelists can be sourced here: http://uiasustainabilitybydesign.org/panelists.html).

Short inputs of 4 minutes each from this panel were interspersed with discussions in a 'fishbowl' format (where vacant seats on the panel are temporarily filled by audience members to explore ideas). Day one of the conference was an introduction to COP, followed by an exercise in scenarios relating to the rate of climate change and peak oil. It was an exploration of the capacity we have in the built environment to address climate and energy scenarios. The scenarios explored were those presented by Permaculture co-founder David Holmgren (http://www.futurescenarios.org/) in the face of 'energy descent' (as cheap, high intensity energy sources peak and plateau). It was an eye-opening exercise in trying to describe what a low-energy future might look like, and especially so in the face of climate uncertainty.

My journey through the conference started with speaking in the 'green tech' scenario session (one of Holmgren's scenarios, consisting of relatively benign climate change and slow energy descent). This is probably what most sustainability professionals consider the likely scenario. What I learned from trying to visualise a true energy descent scenario, was the impact on current decision-making in terms of function. Buildings that are able to function without active mechanical or electrical systems will be at an advantage in any energy descent scenario. Similarly, any urban system which does not build in resilience to a low-energy world runs a significant risk of redundancy within its lifetime. The time-scale of Holmgren's scenarios are 5-7 years for 'fast descent' and in the order of 35 years for 'slow descent'. The economic life of built environment systems is longer than both these periods, so low-energy design should become a primary decision-making point for current projects, as energy descent is a credible scenario for major systemic change within building life-spans.

The other scenarios ('brown tech', 'earth steward' and 'lifeboats') explored a range of possible futures, from primitivism through to mega-cities, each with their compelling and terrifying aspects. The strength of exploring these scenarios was not in their predictive capacity, but rather in the way they opened one's thinking to consider alternatives to the dominant story around energy availability. I think most delegates and panelists left the first day feeling deeply unsettled, questioning the potential within our industry to function in a low-energy and climatically unstable world.

The second day consisted of a series of workshops to explore our capacity within the built environment to respond to these scenarios at local, national and global levels; as well as understanding the gaps in our capacity to play a meaningful role in humanity's response to climate change. Afterwards, panelists and delegates engaged with the global, national and city-scale debates; framed a range of priorities; and brainstormed actions to move the built environment forward. There were elements of heated debate on the role of cities, and mega-cities in particular.

In contrast to day one, day two was more empowering - the full audience was engaged to explore potential responses, and here credit must be given to the facilitators. A group of nearly two hundred people combined through three workshop sessions to explore what climate change and energy descent would mean for  our industry, and what immediate steps we can take. Initial discussions identified 'elephants in the room' and brought out some key options, which were in turn whittled down through a vote to four strategies for action. The final session provided for the exploration of these core themes in terms of actions.

One of the real eye-openers for me was the use of 'back-casting' to explore potential solutions - starting from a future point of having successfully negotiated climate change, and then exploring what steps would have been critical in arriving there. 'Back-casting' is a tool I'm excited about exploring in design workshops in the future. The outcomes of these workshops were four focus areas on which the industry could take immediate action:

• Developing a strategic plan for the built environment in the face of climate change;
• Building trans-disciplinary capacity for engagement with national government on climate policy;
• Telling a compelling story relating to climate change in the built environment; and
• Fostering professional ties with education facilities to build climate sensitivity into built environment training.

I threw myself into the strategic response workshop, but found the discussion difficult, with many disparate perspectives struggling to hold a cohesive conversation around responses. High levels engagement, some of it passionate - but what emerged for me was incredibly fragmented. Despite this, the outcomes could be useful in the local context, with some potential actions from which to build urban resilience. 

In summary, the key points of the strategy are:

• Establishing urban design standards for resilience;
• Shifting our financial mindset to life-cycle costing;
• Supporting an inter-disciplinary forum for climate-related issues;
• Focusing on affordable and appropriate technology;
• Devising tax or rates incentives for addressing climate change on projects;
• Matching adaptation and mitigation action with real development needs;
• Decentralising urban infrastructure; and
• Retrofitting the urban environment.

Immediate actions relating to this strategy are:

• Taking a report from the conference to all built environment institutes and convene a discussion between them (architectural, engineering, quantity surveying, urban design and building institutes) to address climate resilience.
• Making a bold call to the built environment to include adaptation and mitigation actions in their standards.
• Specifically approaching the Urban Design Institute of South Africa to prioritise climate change resilience in the urban design standards.
• SAIA requesting the assistance of the Institute for Quantity Surveyors in developing life-cycle costing standards and guidelines.

Actions from the other workshops included the drafting of a charter for addressing climate change through design in our built environment; and a wide range of education options for incorporating climate change awareness into training (including apprenticeships, professional development programs and leadership training). To me the charter is one of the most critical, and the one with potential to spark a global impact, however there is a long road ahead to gain wider support.

These actions appear credible to me, and the level of engagement was impressive for a conference where many delegates probably weren't expecting to work so hard. And for these reasons, the conference was a tremendous success. However, I left the final session with a deep sense of unease over the potential of the built environment to provide a sufficiently concise view of climate action that would be be useful in global negotiations. 'Fragmented' is the word that springs to mind again and again, and that within a gathering of people largely from within a single profession!

An element of real concern for me was the lack of an international perspective on climate action - as if the challenges at a national level were already too much to address suitably. In a previous post I have already explored the difficulty of looking at the built environment through just a mitigation lens, due to its complexity. This conference served to reinforce my view. We are dealing with such incredibly complex beasts in our urban spaces, that tell so many concurrent stories, that it might just not be possible to condense them into a single narrative and strategy.

I also believe that focusing on resilience and adaptation holds the most potential... and this can be addressed outside of any coherent international framework.

SAWomEng Leadership Series: Ethical Leadership in Engineering

SAWomEng is an organisation that supports and provides mentorship for women who are planning to study, are currently studying or have recently graduated engineering degrees - a cause that I have huge respect for. One of their initiatives is a leadership seminar series, with the current topic being Ethical Leadership in Engineering. Ethics, leadership and engineering are three concepts that I have grappled with - with mixed success - over my career to date, and it is heartening to see them addressed in a forum with the transformative potential of SAWomEng.

Sustainable design often gets lumped together with ethical engineering, and, while I see the connection to some degree, my expertise in design does not automatically translate into expertise in ethics. This lack of experience in the philosophy of ethics notwithstanding, I was invited to sit on the panel for the Durban and Cape Town legs of the seminar series. What an opportunity to challenge and be challenged on some of the most difficult decisions that face professionals in their careers!

Let me be clear here. I am not an expert on business ethics (or any other kind for that matter). I'm not really even an expert in engineering. And despite my career aspirations, it would be somewhat misleading to call me a "leader" either. But for all this, I'm still going to share my experience of the Durban workshop in the hope that it will raise awareness of some of the ethical challenges that face the current and future leaders of our profession.

So... Ethics. Leadership. Engineering.

I must start by stating that ethics is not a fuzzy, soft, do-goodie subject. It is a philosophical field of enquiry in its own right and there is an established academic and professional community who specialise in it. My first piece of advice for any leader in business is to invest in formal training in business ethics from people who really do understand the topic.

That being said, I'll add my own thoughts on some of the ethical challenges facing modern engineers, which might apply beyond the field too. There are so many areas in modern workplaces where one’s values are challenged. The purpose of this post is not to explore scenarios (which range from corporate governance to HR to whistle-blowing and more), but rather to show how the institutional structures which engineers depend on are not sufficient to navigate the areas where a sound understanding of ethics are needed.

At present, ethics in engineering is governed by professional codes of practice and references to national or international standards and norms. These codes of practice govern appropriate behaviour between professionals, and provide a sound basis for normal day-to-day work. One example of the type of guidance they give is appropriate circumstances under which a professional engineer can review and comment on the work of another professional engineer. While this is essential in governing work between peers, it doesn’t provide much in the way of guidance for difficult ethical decisions. When a colleague has been treated unfairly by management, the Engineering Council of South Africa’s (ECSA) code of conduct has little guidance on how to react.

Corporate governance guidelines are another set of rules by which people in business judge ethical behaviour. The growth of public companies required business leaders to be bound to certain levels of disclosure and behaviour as they were responsible for the investments of others. In South Africa, the King Reports are the benchmark for corporate governance and their focus is on integrated reporting and disclosure. These are important for investors and analysts, but again do not provide clear guidance on personal decision-making along ethical lines. It is possible to comply entirely with corporate governance requirements, and yet still act in an unethical manner.

A third often-referenced guide for ethical decision-making is the company “vision and values”. My employers have values of ‘sharing and supporting’, ‘pride and passion’, ‘trust’, ‘innovation’ and ‘sustainability’; which are typical of the sort of values espoused in corporate reports and are all good and well in their own right. However, they are also not especially useful as a reference point when faced with difficult decisions. What does “pride and passion” mean when dealing with a case of reporting internal corruption?

There are two specific areas where each of these guidelines falls short in my opinion:

·         The first is at a human level, looking at how disempowered people within an organisation are treated and standing up for them when they are at a disadvantage.

·         The second is looking at the world (as was highlighted by my co-panelist Dr Shamim Bodhanya), looking at how the business responds to social, environmental and gender justice issues.

  

On each, ethical leadership requires action on the basis of a set of values that go beyond the rules and regulations which govern current business behaviour. Broadly, my feeling on ethical decision-making is closely linked with one’s willingness to ‘speak the truth to power’ – a phrase that has come to define the current term of Thuli Madonsela as South Africa’s Public Protector.

Ethical leadership and decicion-making requires a personal set of boundaries for acceptable behaviour, and the courage to speak up when those boundaries are crossed. Most importantly, it requires those boundaries to be set up before an incident arises, as the pressures to conform when faced with difficult decisions are often large - and the consequences can be career-defining.

When asked about where to look for useful guidelines on ethical leadership, I was rather stumped. There is no universally accepted ‘rule book’ for ethics, and individual decisions are always going to be heavily influenced by the cultural context of the individuals involved.

My only advice is to spend time in quiet reflection on the type of person you want to be; for the faithful to use their faith as a guide; and for everyone to spend time in community – I believe that one's ethics are best understood as being developed in collaboration with/interactions with others. A simple test for ethical decision-making could be: “Would I want my grandmother/mother/spouse/friend to find out about this?” If the answer is no, then there’s your guide.

If you’re in Cape Town on Saturday the 19^th of November 2011, please come and join us at UCT for the final workshop – I would certainly value a lively discussion and debate on what ethical leadership in engineering means in South Africa at this time.

More details can be found here: http://www.sawomeng.org.za/events/sawomeng%40network+leadership+workshop.htm

Reflections on GBCSA 2011

Last week the Green Building Council of South Africa (GBCSA) hosted their 4th annual green building conference in Cape Town. I was fortunate to attend this year as both a delegate and a speaker, presenting a case study on the Wangari Maathai Institute for Peace and Environmental Studies. I have been rather sceptical of green building councils in previous posts, but I have nothing but praise for this year's conference.

The speakers invited presented a much bolder vision of urban sustainability than in past years, and there appeared to be less kow-towing to large corporate interests than I have come to expect from these member based organisations - even the conference dinner was more understated (although no less fun) than usual.

Not to gush too much; there were some important lessons for our local GBC at this year's conference that they would do well to heed if they are to remain relevant and truly lead SA along a sustainable urban path. With reference to specific speakers that really grabbed my attention, I'll unpack some of these challenges in this post.

Up first was Canuck, Seattle resident and CEO of the Cascadia Green Building Council Jason McLennan; the inspiration behind the Living Building Challenge (LBC) - https://ilbi.org/lbc. Jason presented a vision for how buildings could be - entirely self-sufficient, benign, beautiful and centres of social justice. And all this with just 20 requirements for documentation. These requirements are exceptional, and require dedicated design, construction and operation to achieve, but are relatively easy to demonstrate once achieved.

Green Star, the green building rating tool administered by the GBCSA, is currently facing a huge challenge relating to how the submissions are put together. Right now the tool is documentation heavy and design light; with hundreds of documents for each of the ‘design’ and ‘as-built’ ratings and thousands of pages in each submission while not really pushing design teams to change the fundamentals of building design. The Living Building Challenge on the other hand is design heavy and documentation light - something that the GBCSA could learn a lot from.

Jason indicated a willingness to partner with the GBCSA in advancing the Living Building Challenge in South Africa, and I would like to see them use it as a model to re-imagine Green Star as well. In Australia there is huge concern over the path Green Star has taken with respect to documentation; there is no need for South Africa to walk that same road. Green Star v2 has an opportunity to be a simpler, more challenging and broader animal than Green Star v1 and not just a remixed version of the same.

At the other end of the two days, Paul Downton closed the conference with a vision of eco-cities founded on community. The importance of community, and its nature as an emergent property of well-designed cities (i.e. one cannot design good community, but rather provide spaces within which it can flourish) was a theme that recurred in many speakers' presentations and both fishbowl events I attended. Paul's talk of ‘urban fractals’ - the housing of all city functions within each neighbourhood – really resonated with me. It articulated the vision for decentralised cities that has informed most of my blogs, but far more succinctly.

Furthermore, his experience in Adelaide of founding and delivering sustainable community-scale projects was refreshing. The key message I took from his talk was the need to break from conventional financing for sustainable neighbourhoods - community requires multi-functional finance that has close ties with its people.

The future plans of the GBCSA include a focus on community and social justice. The challenge is to do this in a way which reflects how community works, not how it facilitates corporate interests. One of the core purposes of Green Star is its role in delivering recognition to commercial projects, typically financed through conventional mechanisms. Based on Paul's vision and experience of eco-cities this will not do the job for successful communities.

Vivian Loftness spoke eloquently about many aspects of sustainable design: the impact of indoor environmental quality on building occupants; energy benefits of passive design and true triple-bottom-line accounting. However the thing that stood out for me was the strong research backing to each of her claims. Each phenomenon had academic rigour backing it up; an indication of the critical role research plays in collaboration with sustainable design.

Thus far, South Africa’s academic community has been largely disconnected from the property industry and sustainable design community. The presence of Anton Cartwright (UCT) and Andrew Thatcher (Wits University) at this year’s conference indicates the start of a process to engage with universities, but the research backing for sustainable design remains thin.

The GBCSA have indicated that building better links with universities is a goal. The rigour behind Vivian’s presentation should be sufficient inspiration to accelerate this process. It has a crucial role to play in both providing convincing research about the value of sustainable design as well as educating the up-and-coming professionals, developers and financiers for our future cities.

Perhaps it is giving away my love of Australia, but David Waldren’s presentation to open the second day of the conference was one of my favourites. I’m sure his message of “six star and no less” from the perspective of Grocon was welcomed by the GBCSA, although at odds with the speed of Green Star uptake by local developers. Of particular inspiration was the face of aboriginal leader William Barak on Melbourne’s skyline. Where are South Africa’s leaders, where the developers willing to put a line in the sand for reconciliation and peace?

Many speakers noted the importance of ‘leap-frogging’ – Africa taking a global lead and learning from the mistakes of more established markets. Both David and Jason spoke movingly of the need for the built environment to go further, higher, faster than ever before and not stopping to consolidate, but always to be climbing to the next level.

For me, one of David’s key messages was for the development industry not to rest on its laurels. A stream of 4-star buildings will not be ‘future-proof’ and will therefore not be good enough. Aiming higher and further is the only thing that makes development sense for Grocon, and in a market changing as fast as ours, it should be a lesson for South Africa’s developers.

His was a call and a challenge to our development community: stand up; lead; go further; or get left behind.

These four international speakers gave us a brief gaze into a crystal ball – showing how things have progressed in developed markets and highlighting opportunities for us to learn and lead. They have provided inspiration and a sound warning for the complacent.

The local and African content at the conference was also excellent: Eric Noir blew us away with the innovation and tech (both active and passive) of the Vodafone Innovation Centre; Andrew Thatcher gave us an insight into post-occupancy evaluations; and leaders in our development community (Old Mutual and Growthpoint) opened themselves to public discussion of how they are dealing with new sustainability trends.

The GBCSA. Built environment professionals (like me) and our development industry have a mammoth task to begin to answer some of the questions posed by the speakers at this year’s conference. For what it’s worth, I would summarise these as:

1.    Re-imagine Green Star for V2.0 – take the work done by the Living Building Challenge and Green Star Communities in Australia and produce a leading tool to help build sustainable cities.

2.    Investigate more than “Rands and Sense” – invest in understanding other methods for quantifying value, for communities and ecological systems.

3.    Build strong relationships with our universities; both to build our research understanding and to improve curricula for our future built environment professionals and developers.

4.    Work with our developers to realise that four star isn’t far enough, and work to make Green Star “design heavy” and “documentation light” so that we see world leading buildings become our norm.

TIA - a blank canvas for Green Buildings 2.0

A commonly heard muttering across the continent is “TIA” – This Is Africa ­– summing up the chaos, the mystery, the hope and the potential of the dark continent. In construction circles, this can refer to informal timber scaffolding, unreliable infrastructure or the laid back project meetings. Historically always stated in a negative sense, it has the potential to be a motto for a continent with the opportunity to re-imagine sustainable urban spaces.

Two of the themes which dominate African cities are the rise of commercial real estate investment and the massive rate of urbanization, estimated to triple over the next four years according to the UNHabitat 2010 State of the African City report. This convergence of huge urbanisation and investment combined with the pressures of climate change and the increasing global clout of developing nations (with South Africa the newest addition to the BRIC group of countries) puts Africa in a position to lead a new paradigm of urban thinking.
Further to the technical innovation and design opportunities, African cities are faced with the social justice challenges of poverty alleviation, health, food security and education. These put a different spin on “sustainability” in an urban context, requiring buildings, neighbourhoods and cities to address basic social services as well as the resource efficiency which has founded the modern green building movement.

In short African cities have an opportunity to get urban sustainability right at a whole new level, with less already invested in the status quo than most developed world urban centres.
However, for all this opportunity, the design and construction community remains conservative and relatively unaware of green buildings or broader sustainability initiatives. The thirst for development of any kind has pushed thoughts of longer term impacts into the background and many African cities are indeed the “wild west” of the construction world.

So, African cities… worlds of opportunity to get urban sustainability right, but without a framework to do so. And into this space arrived the Australian Green Star rating tool; adopted and amended by the Green Building Council of South Africa, it has been applied in Ghana and potentially Kenya.  Current discussions indicate that it may become the tool of choice for green building certifications in Africa.

Green Star –  a first world tool, well suited to addressing discrete environmental impacts and building occupant health but not designed to go broader or deeper in a developing city context. How will Green Star fare on this continent of Nelson Mandela and Charles Taylor; Wangari Maathai and Muamar Gadaffi; Desmond Tutu and Robert Mugabe – the best and the worst that humanity has to offer?

Thus far, Green Star has fared well in the corporate real estate world in South Africa. It has been broadly adopted to benchmark bank headquarters and high profile commercial developments nationally.

Retail, Multi-Unit Residential and Public Buildings tools have been added to the original Office offering, and have been welcomed by the market. An operational tool is being discussed and there is talk of moving into the arena of social responsibility. Tenants are starting to recognise the benefits and a Green Lease Toolkit is  under development.

The learning curve for local professionals has been steep, with documentation requirements far tougher than perhaps originally expected, but all buildings targeting certification have achieved it so far.

The GBCSA has hosted three hugely successful conferences, with a fourth underway this week. Four star ratings have dominated, with just one five star rating, although a project targeting six stars is under assessment, so innovation is also starting to take root. All told, by the standards of our current systems, it has been a resounding success.

However the question of addressing broader sustainability is yet to be answered. The tool is already quite unwieldy and the thought of adding more detail is unthinkable at this stage… How then to move beyond mere mitigation of impacts and towards restorative buildings which redefine urban sustainability?

Perhaps it is time for Green Buildings 2.0, and perhaps Africa is the place to make it happen. The next generation of Green Building tools have an opportunity to move away from the tick-box approach to environmental impact and look to a broader systems-thinking methodology which has the potential to be a new framework for sustainable cities. And in so doing, open up the potential to address social justice and governance as well as resource efficiency. A rating system that rewards buildings for mitigating environmental impacts as well as contributing clean energy, social services and public amenity.

The relatively blank canvas of Africa’s cities provides an ideal environment to test new thinking in urban sustainability, and I can only hope that green building councils around the world will be open to this opportunity and courageously embrace it. Africa’s cities need a new generation of green buildings; buildings that respond to a vision for sustainable development that is underpinned by equitable resource use, as well as governance and peace.

As published on teh Fifth Estate: http://www.thefifthestate.com.au/archives/29008

Green Buildings 2.0

The green building movement has been shaping our built environment for a decade and a half, and there can be no doubt that it has been a commercial and marketing success. Recent reports from Australia indicate property value premiums of as much as 12% and rental premium of 5% for Green Star certified buildings in Australia. This is consistent with much of the research emerging from the USA over the last decade.

However the commercial success of Green Star must beg the question on its environmental performance: if we filled our cities with Green Star or LEED certified buildings, would we be a significant step closer to addressing the major sustainable development challenges that face our country, our continent and our planet? A list which includes, but is not limited to poverty alleviation, health, education, social justice, ecological health, food security and climate change adaptation. And I'm afraid that at this point, the answer to that question must be no.

The framing question for modern green buildings has been "how can we reward the design and construction of buildings that have a smaller impact on the natural environment?" This question has led us down the current path of green building rating tools such as LEED and Green Star; tools which have started with a broad assessment of the environmental impacts of buildings and then rewarded discrete improvements in efficiency and process. This has allowed relatively straightforward decision-making around "green" initiatives, but has not been able to reward the resilience of complex systems that do not fit the mould of individual credits.

The question of simply reducing impact is not sufficient to deliver the sustainable cities on which our continued prosperity depends. Modern green buildings have typically improved their resource efficiency, resulting in lower stresses on city infrastructure, but without making significant contributions to sustainable cities. No longer is it sufficient to design buildings which look inward and seek to be "less bad" (as Cradle to Cradle author Bill McDonough has termed them). Rather we need to reframe our approach and ask: What kind of buildings do our future cities need? I believe this question could frame the development of Green Buildings 2.0.

Without the context of functional cities (ecologically, socially and economically), modern green buildings are unlikely to deliver the sustainable urban spaces that we pictured when first imagining green buildings. Similarly, if we rely on precinct tools which ask the same questions as building tools, just at a bigger scale, we will never see our existing cities transformed. We must accept that our cities are primarily made up of privately held plots and buildings, each separate, yet with a profound effect on the common urban landscape and functionality. We cannot look at buildings with impermeable boundaries any more, we must consider the spaces in between. To see our picture made real, we need to reward buildings for providing the spaces and services that our cities need beyond their immediate boundaries.

Primarily, we need buildings that are multifunctional. They must meet their primary function of providing places to work, trade, live and play. However, further to that our buildings must have secondary roles of providing decentralised services to our cities (water, power and waste services); and tertiary functions relating to the creation of excellent public space, enhanced opportunities for education and fostering of urban ecosystems.

On the topic of resource efficiency, it is not sufficient for buildings to simply reduce resource intensity or tie into existing green infrastructure. We should reward buildings that provide basic services (clean energy, waste treatment, clean water, nutrition) to their neighbourhoods, cities or villages. We must have tools for rewarding restorative buildings, and stop rewarding variations on the status quo.

Buildings that are premised purely on economic return in the private sector are typically poor at creating exceptional urban spaces. We must reward buildings that provide public services to their communities. These could include health services through the integration of clinics with retail, public amenities and education through both the construction and operation processes. Buildings should empower women in their function through the provision of child-care facilities and minorities in their expression of culture. When we recognise leadership in the development of our urban spaces, these are some of the things we could consider...

It is insufficient for buildings to act simply as investments for large funds, premised on the current global financial indicators. Buildings are too big a part of our lives to only provide prosperity to a single sector. We should reward "green" buildings that are economically functional across a range of city sectors, considering job creation, poverty alleviation and micro-business.

Finally, buildings that are only functional are not sufficient for our cities. We must reward buildings that are a delight for residents and visitors alike. We must reward decision-making that is based on the place-making potential of our buildings, and not just their revenue-generating potential.

So, how to move forward... Are our existing tools too far gone, requiring an alternative; a green building revolution? Or can we take our existing tools and re-imagine them to be more relevant to sustainable cities - a green building evolution? Being of Darwinian persuasion, I feel that evolution is the most appropriate way to go. It would allow us to stand on the shoulders of giants (for in their time, our present tools were indeed giants to an industry without even a starting point for sustainable development) while maintaining the industry legitimacy of the current establishment.

I intend to explore how this might work in more detail in future posts, but my framework that could allow us to both simplify and broaden building assessments follows.

1. Start with the status quo - categories of environmental impact (energy, water, construction management, materials, emissions, transport, IEQ, land use) as these remain key areas for contribution instead of simple mitigation.

2. Add to them key missing links, including, but not limited to:

•   Biodiversity and eco-system services

•   Public amenity

•   Broad economic activity

•   Planning

•   Heritage

•   Social services

3. Instead of looking down and in, look up and out. Instead of devolving into credits, describe broad performance criteria which will enable sustainable cities. Create benchmarks of contribution to the city, not benchmarks of reduced impact on the environment.

One of the cornerstones of such a strategy is to move away from rewarding specific initiatives and instead reward the broad contribution to our cities. A good starting point for the style and format would be the Living Building Challenge (LBC 2.0) by the Cascadia GBC; however the content would be informed more by sustainable urban design and broad systems thinking than living within the natural footprint of the building.

My hope is that we can move away from line by line checklists, which are only able to reward incremental improvements in the efficiency of our buildings; and towards a system able to reward design which is cognisant of- and makes a contribution to- the real, complex, messy systems which are our cities.

For only once they are able bridge the areas between our buildings, will green certification tools be much use in delivering sustainable cities of the future. 

Adaptation: a path to reduced carbon emissions

The two key themes for the COP negotiations (of which number 17 is soon to commence in South Africa) are securing international agreement and commitment on the mitigation of climate change through reduced GHG emissions and adaptation to the inevitable effects of the currently locked-in temperature rise.

To date much of the focus within the built environment has been for the mitigation potential of green buildings. It has formed the basis of the NABERS rating system in Australia and is the rack on which Green Star largely hangs its hat. However the complex nature of the built environment does not match the certainty of emissions reduction required by current international and national policy instruments such as the clean develoment mechanism (CDM). The complexity of the built environment is largely why CDM has not been widely adopted in financing energy efficiency in the built environment.

It is important here to note that complex systems are different from complicated systems. Complex systems display a degree of chaotic behaviour, where the multiple cross-linked relationships mean that small changes can produce large and unexpected effects. Complicated, but simple systems often have many interconnected steps, but the relationship of input and output is well understood and predictable (such as the accelerator on a motor car).

One of the requirements for rewarding mitigation actions is that the potential emissions reduction must be verified before finance can be made available. This direct link of investment to predicted emissions reduction works well for straightforward (simple) industrial processes and renewable energy generation, but has proved a poor fit for investment in alternative urban systems. It is also clear that industrial and RE processes are primarily related to energy production/consumption (which is core to broad emissions reduction globally), but not to less tangible effects like place-making, livability, social cohesion or relationships which should be priorities in our built environment.

With advanced modelling systems, we have developed our ability to design buildings for a pre-determined level of energy consumption, given certain restrictions on tenant behaviour. This has driven a wave of lobbying to provide climate finance to the built environment for mitigation. However this call has largely been unsuccessful. The design solutions we are coming up with are seldom a step change from the status quo, and our predicted emissions reductions are still too reliant unreliable factors. These advanced tools have allowed us to deal with some of the complexities of climate, but not of human behavior and not to the degree required by international mitigation agreements.

That being said, there is broad agreement that the built environment has a large role to play in driving emissions reduction. The key challenge is how to provide incentives for more climate-effective design in the face on complex urban systems.

One option is to recognise that the design responses to climate change adaptation have potential to reward initiatives for their resilience. Resilience is a characteristic of complex systems and thus does not have tightly defined parameters in the sense that mitigation does. The emerging thinking on decentralised systems is also pointing towards resilience as having a large mitigation potential, as well as allowing our cities to adapt to a changing cimate.

When considering adaptation, it is far less important to verify emissions reduction than to demonstrate system resilience under a range of potential scenarios. Designing for adaptation will necessarily take a wide range of factors into account; energy security, water scarcity, food security, waste stream utilisation, social fabric, civil society and ecological system health among others. It shouldn't surprise us that in addressing adaptation, we start to look to the very systems that are emerging at the cutting edge of broad sustainability.

Furthermore, through current funding instruments such as the Least Developed Nations Fund, Climate Adaptation Fund and much of the bilateral funding available to African nations, we may have a direct source of international preferential finance for broad sustainability on the basis of adaptation.

The secret to successful mitigation action in the developing world built environment, as well as a renewed focus on much broader sustainability might well require the prioritising of design for adaptation to climate change. And a renewed focus on adaptation may well be the secret to unlocking climate finance in the built environment.

In light of this opportunity, I believe there are some key questions which need consideration, and I would welcome input from any readers:

•  What are the characteristics of resilient systems in the built environment?

•  What are the key urban systems at risk due to climate change?

•  Which urban systems are intrinsic to adaptation, but also have mitigation potential?

•  What are the key weak points of current city morphology in terms of climate resilience?

Tribute

This last weekend the world lost a visionary leader, sustainability guru and an incredible woman. I have no doubt that the tributes to Wangari Maathai will be numerous, heartfelt and from far greater people than I. But still, I want to offer up my voice and my thanks to an astounding woman.

Since the end of last year, I have had the great fortune of assisting with the sustainability-related design elements of the Wangari Maathai Institute for Peace and Environmental Studies at the University of Nairobi. The project is still in its earliest stages, but at the kick-off meeting I had the privilege of working through our approach to sustainability with Wangari herself.

The intent of the project is to institutionalise the work of Professor Maathai and the Green Belt Movement (GBM) in an experiential learning environment; allowing those with more conventional development training to engage with the on-the-ground reality of sustainable development. The effect the project has had on me is to bring a new perspective to design, born of the real-life impact of her work for the GBM. For those who are not familiar with the GBM, please go and read about it (and then support them any way you can); tackling conservation, gender empowerment, rural development and food security through as simple an action as planting trees is a work of inspired genius.

My standard (and now tired) joke when speaking in public is to stand up as if at an AA meeting and claim “My name is Richard, and I am an engineer”. A corny joke for sure, but I think there is a kernel of truth in there – our approach to engineering design (as explored in previous posts) is not unlike the behaviour of an addict; addicted to manipulating nature, addicted to cheap energy, addicted to building up our own egos through ever grander monuments to consumerism. And even from within the field of sustainable design, the pursuit of ego is seldom far from the surface and never more so than in the field of green building design.

But seeing the honesty and humility of the GBM first hand and the actual results of her legacy was a humbling experience for me. Her description of resource efficiency, peace and governance as the legs upon which sustainable development must stand, made my own opinions on sustainability seem trite and skin deep and engagement with her ideas changed my approach to design. It challenged me to address less tangible concepts such as peace and governance from a design perspective.

This project led me to engage seriously with questions of eco-feminism, permaculture and broader peace studies from the perspective of an engineer. My inspiration from her work was not so much to open my eyes to new design, but rather to open my ears to the much wider discourse that exists on the margins of sustainability. And through that, to see my own field as though in focus for the first time.

There are moments in life when one’s perspective shifts fundamentally. Something changes the terrain and things aren’t the same afterwards. In terms of my understanding of sustainability in the deeper sense of the word, being exposed to Wangari Maathai was one of those moments.

So my deepest condolences to her family and her country and my heartfelt thanks for the chance of a lifetime to work with such a woman.

On the Topic of Avoided Power Stations

In sustainable design circles, we have become hugely focused on energy efficiency and renewable energy generation as the panacea to our climate change woes. And while there is huge merit in this, it doesn't tell the whole story. Here in sunny SA, the degree to which we are either locked into a high-carbon future or not depends hugely on how many new coal-fired power stations we build. Once built, these huge (4.8GW) power stations will operate at a relatively constant level, with variance in the national demand being taken up by more flexible generation (such as gas turbines or hydro, which are also typically lower in carbon emissions). Carbon emissions from electricity in SA come in of power stations, not kWh.

The current integrated resources plan provides the planned mix of energy in SA for the next 20-40 years. Right now that mix includes the construction of Medupi and Kusile power stations (as well as an increase in our nuclear power provision with its associated issues). From a carbon reduction point of view, we have missed the boat on Medupi - it is nearly complete and commissioning will begin in 2012. However, we still have an opportunity to address Kusile, and in terms of our long term carbon mitigation, avoiding the construction of Kusile must be the highest priority for any party claiming to strive for a low-carbon future.

The economic growth model currently pursued requires new generation capacity to come online faster than currently planned, so the political pressure to get large generation projects across the line is huge. The IRP includes an allowance for renewable energy, and one option appears to be an increase in the RE allocation. However the current debacle on the renewable energy feed-in tariff (REFIT) is likely to slow that process quite significantly.

So one of the only ways Kusile can be avoided in the time frames which are a reality, and our low-carbon path can be secured is if our urban spaces become significant decentralised generators of low-carbon or renewable electricity; not just for their own operations, but as distributed power networks able to power our cities. We need restorative buildings which will be both sources of wealth and sources of clean energy.

Our modern approach to rewarding sustainable design in the built environment is on a project by project basis. Boundaries of influence are drawn around each site and projects are rewarded on that basis. This can exclude restorative buildings as they seldom fit the neat boxes of project boundaries which would be a great shame.

The Secret of Villages

One of the sustainability axioms that I don't believe has been thoroughly unpacked is the question of densification. In every conversation about sustainable cities, the need to densify our cities is an early point of discussion. On the surface it seems to have merit but there are some fundamental concerns with a vision of densification as the silver bullet. And especially so in Africa.

The stat that is often trotted out to support densification is that people living in Manhattan have a lower carbon footprint than those living in Brooklyn. The high rentals lead to smaller dwellings and the good public transport, proximity to work and play and exorbitant cost of parking all play a role in reducing transport emissions. However, this highlights my first concern - that dense urban settlements are typically compared to urban sprawl. Because this supposes a false polarity - we are not faced with just two options. Human settlements have come in a variety of sizes and shapes and some have been more functional than others. We could be interrogating the strengths and weaknesses of many more models than just the dominant two in our search for solution to how we structure our cities.

It also supposes that carbon intensity is the only measure of environmental impact - another common position, if not an accurate one. Some of the critical sustainability considerations in modern cities relate to ecological function within cities - forests, parks, green belts and rivers connected to each other and the wider surrounding areas.

With respect to resource efficiency, there are many arguments for densification: smaller properties and shorter commutes being chief amongst them. However as a whole, they fly in the face of one key principle: denser urban spaces result in concentrated environmental impacts, and nowhere in my engineering career have I come across a point load that has a lower impact than a distributed load.

The environmental footprint of dense spaces extends far beyond their physical boundaries, and the feedback loops from these much wider systems being impacted are often difficult to isolate and pick up. It is said that the environmental footprint of London is larger than the whole United Kingdom. In a globalised world, such astounding concentrations of consumption are possible. But they mean that often the externalities associated with consumption are experienced by faceless, nameless communities in far-off places the residents will never see. Until we have an agreed, and accurate mechanism for assessing the true costs of dense urban spaces on those natural and societal systems that support them, to claim the resource-efficiency of densified areas is shortsighted.

Another concern I have with the Manhattan-Brooklyn comparison is how idealised the comparison is. But most dense urban spaces are not Manhattan; Central Park is often absent from urban densification models. And not many people want to live in the cities of Judge Dredd without a blade of grass or green leaf for miles regardless of how modern, hip or cool it may be shown to be in the adverts.

The urban dream is great at building self-esteem through achievement; the shiny apartment, new tv, smart car, access to the newest, coolest restaurants and bars. But it is only through deep human interaction, not just the transient collitions at the coffee shop, that our sense of community and attendant empathy is realised . While these things are not exclusive to less dense areas, they seem to me to be far more prevalent in neighbourhoods than apartment blocks. Density works best when one's raison d'etre is work and the trappings of wealth but when the rest of real life rears it's head, suddenly that shiny apartment isn't quite so appealing.

However the productivity of cities is evident. So how do we get the benefits of high-intensity interaction that comes with densification (and has driven successful cities) without compromising livability, ecology and resource efficiency. How do we have resist both the temptation of high density high impact centres and that of McMansions and strip malls? Well, I think a part of the answer might lie in one form of urban settlement that predates most others: the village.

Villages are remarkable from a sustainability perspective. They are typically quite self-sufficient; i.e. their ecological footprint does not extend too far beyond the boundaries of the community. Approaching cities and urban density as groups of villages side-by-side might offer us some potential to address densification in a manner that results in neither urban sprawl or packed apartment buildings.

The advances of telecoms tech have allowed us to work in a more distributed manner, so moving people to a central location can be mitigated. Satellite centres could replace the modern CBD and be linked together primarily by public transport and rely on pedestrian movement within their "villages". Many decentralized infrastructure approaches would be optimal in a village context as opposed to our current city thinking; including distributed electrical and thermal energy distribution and village scale water management (with nutrient recovery and water re-use).

And while it would be terribly naive to believe that villages would cure all society's ills, at least at a social level they may realise greater participation of business with that messy, frustrating and absolutely essential mish-mash called community. And participation of civil society and community in the function of business is one of the massive missing elements of current cities on the front of sustainability.

And so why is this so particularly relevant in Africa? Well, firstly, Africa is one of the regions where mega-cities are becoming dominant; Cairo, Lagos and Johannesburg; immense cities which pull people from vast areas into tightly packed centres, cities often typified by huge disparities between rich and poor and often surrounded and permeated by slums. Secondly, Africa is culturally still much closer to village living than many more developed regions. The potential to unlock the benefits of smaller scale design in the context of cities is still very much an option here. And finally, because the face of Africa's cities are still to be shaped. The opportunities for re-imagining planning, infrastructure, transport, communications and our preconceptions of success are abundant here precisely because we are less developed. And this opportunity for applying new thinking to cities might just give Africa the edge as we move into a resource-constrained future.

Musings on Design

When we come across the term "design", the first things that spring to mind are often fashion, the "egg chair" or those really strange looking lamps that my best man has in his apartment; mostly beautiful items to fill our houses or clothe ourselves. Occasionally concept cars will occur to us and once in a while beautiful buildings. But seldom gears, ductwork, concrete slabs or steel beams. Yet it is these behind-the-scenes elements of engineering design underpin our experience of the world - every day, in every way.

At university, my degree - mechanical engineering - included a core major of mechanical design; gears and the like. In many ways it was a very dry (and extremely technical) subject. No left-of-field characters, no champagne and to be honest, not much beauty. Having worked in a consulting engineering environment for a number of years now, I have seen the same trends professionally. Other design professionals are passionate, "creative" types, but many (not all) engineers seem to be turning the handle on a design sausage machine - producing technical systems that meet the clients requirements at the lowest cost, but seldom anything more. Further to this, many are stuck reproducing designs that have been done before, without questioning alternative paths.

I can hear the screams now: "but meeting the clients brief at the lowest cost is precisely what being a professional engineer means!!!". Well, I challenge that - as professionals we must meet our clients brief, we must do it responsibly in terms of cost (it's not our money after all); but we must also add to the world - beauty, heart, functionality - helping our clients to a new brief if necessary.

This blog is about how that lack of spark in engineering design is because we only get taught the last step: the design process, but never the preceding two: purpose and function.

But back to design.

The technical design process is the sausage machine; a set of rules and thinking patterns that match theory to a particular problem. It's a powerful machine and is why engineers are often referred to as problem solvers. It goes something like this:

Step 1: briefing - establish/clarify/inform the design brief

Step 2: concept design - identify and screen a range of early design concepts

Step 3: design development - refine the design concept selected during the concept design stage and establish the operating parameters

Step 4: detailed design - refine the design details and produce drawings for manufacture

Once this process has been undertaken a number of times for the same type of system, the early stages can be neglected as the experienced engineer already knows the answer, so all that remains is the detailed design - matching the already-decided design response to the local situation. Only very occasionally do the assumptions that inform the brief at the outset get challenged or revisited. And that is my main challenge with how we're taught the design process- all the effort goes into getting the details right, but so little goes into challenging the underlying inputs into the design process. Fortunately, the sustainable design evolution (we're still far too mainstream to consider ourselves revolutionary) is one process which is starting to question those underlying assumptions. And the first of those is unpacking the function we're striving for through design.

Function.

The first insight I had into the importance of function was a course I did on Biomimicry in September 2010. At the heart of the biomimetic design process is identifying function. This skill is something drilled into zoologists from very early in their careers, and was even drilled into me in high school biology classes: when studying an organism, it looks the way it does because it does a certain thing. Form fits function. If you want to interrogate the form, then you must understand the function.

The Biomimicry Guild have produced a taxonomy of functions to guide the process of design by Biomimicry. This is an excellent tool for beginning to look at any design problems from a functional perspective; some specific functions from the taxonomy are:

- to attach permanently,

- to protect from thermal shock,

- to capture energy.

The full list is far more comprehensive and forms the basis for the brilliant online resource www.asknature.org. Similar briefs in a conventional engineering approach would be to require the use of a particular glue or rivets (instead of the function of attaching something permanently); insulation (instead of protecting from thermal shock) or a solar PV system (instead of capturing energy). We have become so bound by the precedent of our professions, that many engineers have lost the ability to identify function in the first place. A common design brief in my field where function is often ignored, is the design an air-conditioning system instead of a system to maintain occupant comfort, or a system to provide fresh air to occupants.

Another reason why identifying function is important is that multi-functional systems are becoming increasingly important in sustainable design. It is no longer good enough for a water treatment system to simply reduce the impact of effluent that is expelled. To work in the cities of the future, it must now provide a source of energy, a source of fertilizer, a source of recycled water and become a node of biodiversity. We cannot hope to get multi-functional design right until we are well practiced in the art of identifying function.

Function must come before design. If design answers the how? then function must answer the what?. But there is something that must come before function. And that is the why? The purpose for which we are designing.

Purpose.

Again quoting a man who has given me a glimpse of the way forward for my profession - Bill Reed at the Green Building Council of South Africa conference 2010: "All systems have a purpose". When you look at a bicycle, it is clear what the purpose is; the purpose informs the function and the function informs the design.

Unfortunately, most of the modern commercial building projects that shape our cities are founded on the purpose of financial return. The purpose of the building is to generate revenue for the listed funds which invest in them. Not to foster innovation or build a functioning city; but to make money. Whereas in most of the truly inspirational buildings of our time the purpose was broader - to set a benchmark, to be a landmark, to build trust in institutions or to heal a nation. In comparison, the purpose of making money seems an awfully shallow one on which to base the cities in which we live, work and play.

And so, I believe we need to start championing a new purpose. A purpose that comes more from the heart and less from the pocket. A purpose that might allow us to actually create true value and prosperity, not just for the rich. While the generation of wealth won't ever come of the agenda, we must start designing our buildings with the purpose of healing our communities and regenerating the natural systems which keep us alive.

If developers and financiers are too locked into their status quo to see the need for this, then it is our responsibility as professionals to begin to do it anyway. We can start with the purpose of our business - is it to simply create shareholder value, or can we aim a little higher. Do we exist to add value to communities to end poverty? We can challenge the purpose of our projects, or at least approach them with (true) purpose. We can stop seeing the complexities of community and ecology as in convenient extras to report on at year-end and start to build them into the very fabric of what we do.

Ultimately, the purpose of our businesses, our buildings, our cities, our communities and our own role is of a metaphysical nature. The big question of why we are here. Far be it from me to answer that - there are far better qualified people to do so than I - but I do tend to agree with Bill's answer to the question: our purpose is to love. And how do we, as engineers, love? Well, in the immortal words of Theodore Roosevelt; "do what you can, with what you have, where you are".

We can impact the technical systems of the world’s cities such that they do not entrench the status quo of exploitation, inequality and environmental degradation. We can do it with our skills, our training, our systems and the influence that comes from being professionals.