Sustainability is like Teenage Sex...

A recent tweet I saw made me laugh: "Sustainability is like teenage sex. Everyone says they're doing it. Most aren't. And those that are, are doing it badly." But then I stopped laughing and did a bit of introspection on the darker side of my industry.

Sure, most businesses who are reporting on sustainability metrics try to make themselves look better than they are. Disclosure is rewarded more than performance and many companies include 'sustainability' as a core value, with little executive buy-in or understanding of what it means.

However in many cases, corporate sustainability is far more insidious than securing bragging rights; it is often a front for the corporations whose very existence is founded on extracting value from human and natural systems to give their existence a green sheen. The green sheen of pond scum on a dead river perhaps?

The other morning I read the proud claims that the first McDonalds restaurant had been certified with a bespoke Green Star rating in Australia. That's right folks, McDonalds. And they led with the tag line "Would you like sustainability with that?"

So, by sponsoring a bespoke green building tool, installing some efficient building services, a company can effectively erase in the minds of its customers, the fact that it nearly single-handedly shifted an entire agricultural industry towards intensive, beef-led agri-business (ok, there were other big players, but please forgive me for being dramatic).

The fast food behemoth appears to imagine that targeting the 'Topsoil Preservation' credit on a restaurant could undo countless millions of tons of topsoil destroyed by extractive agriculture. It's as though they believe that by increasing the fresh air rates in their restaurant they would counter the atmospheric impact of cleared forests for beef production – the very lungs of our planet.

The ecological and health impacts of the corporation are so huge – the fast-food-fueled obesity epidemic afflicting western cultures among others – yet our attention is focused on the small steps in restaurant design that green buildings offer them.

It's a bit like mining houses claiming 'sustainability' credentials for their green buildings (e.g. The 6 star Rio Tinto Tower in Brisbane)... Does including recycled steel in your building say anything about the strip-mined forests of conflict-ridden West Papua?

Or banks - will the superior economic performance of green buildings fill the hole left in the actual savings of real people when the bubble finally bursts for good, and the house of cards comes crashing down?

For many corporates, it is not just a case of green-washing - making themselves appear greener than they are - but rather Orwellian doublespeak. Peace is war, truth is lies, 'green' fast food is healthy (in the words of my wife) and extractive mining is the panacea to the development of our communities.

And it is not that green buildings are bad, quite the opposite. The built environment is a huge contributor to humanity's resource consumption - and addressing their impact through design is critical.

I'm glad McDonalds built a green restaurant and that they pioneered the use of bespoke Green Star tools, I'm glad that Rio Tinto have helped increase demand for green buildings. But I cannot stomach the self-congratulatory attitude as though these decisions of theirs outweigh their deeper, darker impacts.

Missing Pieces of the Urban Puzzle

The start of 2012 in Cape Town has seen a huge focus on urban and design issues; Design Indaba, Future Cape Town, the Cape Town Partnership, Modila Trust, Portside, 22 on Bree, Convention Centre Phase II and the City of Cape Town tenders for urban renewal nodes in Kapteinsklip and Athlone Power Station have all raised the urban profile significantly (and politically).

As might be expected, urban design issues have played their role in this discourse - density, mobility, urban renewal etc; but from my perspective, there are some significant pieces of the puzzle missing in planning for future cities.

On the face of it, the new urbanists seem to have it all sorted out: go to war on urban sprawl, shopping malls and car-based transport... Densify, invest in functional public transport and cycle ways, commit to pedestrianised urban malls and build good public space.

The urban design community seem to be well across this in terms of the design interventions and priorities for new urban spaces. Development corridors, mixed use ratios, thresholds at which public transport becomes viable and amenities for urban living are all well covered and we see them coming out in some of the world's leading cities. Architects have even started talking about context at the urban scale, which is a sure indication, of changing attitudes...

But we have absolutely no clue of how to quantify in design terms, and therefore design for, two key elements of urban spaces:

1. Our infrastructure requirements are only considered in terms of peak demand - we have no culture of quantifying the resource consumption and waste stream implications of urban design decisions; and

2. Our understanding of critical mass and nature of green space required for effective ecosystem health, biodiversity and ecosystem services is woefully inadequate.

What this means is that in terms of the key environmental factors of sustainability, our urban designers are effectively flying blind. When faced with some of the excellent work on resilience coming out of Sweden like the Nine Planetary Boundaries concept, we don't have the design tools for quantifying our cities' performance in resource or ecological terms.

And so we revert back to the building scale, and limit our focus on sustainability to demand mitigation at the building level. And this is the place many of our leading urbanists are stuck.

One of the benefits of urban-scale ecology and resource intensity models are that they provide a tool for facilitating integrated urban design, much like the detailed building simulation tools of thermal and daylight modelling did for architects and building engineers. This then opens the door for the design of integrated, decentralised urban infrastructure, which in turn unlocks the potential for nested systems to optimise the use of waste streams. And therein lies one of the secrets to getting our cities functional at a resources level as well as at an interactive level.

Even those of us with a passion for cities must acknowledge that we don't have a clear picture of what our cities should look like in a severely resource-constrained world. Energy, food security, supply chain and water issues are typically put into the 'too hard' box because they rely on such far flung, complex systems for their integrity. Our only response seems to be 'reduce demand for resources', yet with no evidence for this actually happening.

The first step to building smart cities must be providing urban designers with the critical performance models that allow design to be directed by resource limitations as well as social outcomes. Once we understand city morphology in resource and ecological terms as well as urban terms, we will be a big step closer to the sustainable cities of our imagination.

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.