Elemental

On 27 April I attended the Sponge consultation event at RICS for the Consultation response to “Making better use of Energy Performance Certificates and data“.

The consultation is open until 25 May, so you still have time to submit responses. I won’t go over the consultation contents or comments as I think Brian Scannell at NES covers most of the same points we covered on the night.

If you have never made it along to a Sponge consultation event, I would recommend it. A casual affair, it usually starts with a brief overview of the consultation documents, followed by breaking into groups to discuss the topics which interest the participants the most. On this occasion, I was most interested in Chapter 6 which covered DEC’s and the questions of whether they should be extended to commercial property (our answer was: um, yes please!). I also acted as scribe and took notes on the discussion (which was wide ranging and didn’t necessarily stick to the question at hand). The answers then get collated into a response and fed back to the consultation. The response is not ‘representative’ of the views of the Sponge membership – our views are wide and varied given it is one of the few outlets for sustainably minded built environment professionals of any discipline or body to come together – we had architects, engineers, surveyors and entrpreneurs in the room. The response is purely a record of the opinions of those who were in the room on the night.

It’s a great way to meet new contacts, have a drink and a gossip and keep informed about consultations without having to read the whole thing. The next event is soon (London based, I’m sorry) and will be on “Consultation on a Planning Policy Statement: Planning for a Low Carbon Future in a Changing Climate“.

admin Events, Regulation consultation, sponge

I have an aversion to positive gender discrimination (see some of my my thoughts here in this early post which I can’t believe is almost 4 years ago). I’d like to think we (women) are equal. Sadly, I can still tell (recent) tales of principal female engineers being asked to go out and buy sandwiches (mistaken for administrative staff) and more worryingly interview questions which border on illegal (fishing for both existence and nonexistence of children). Sigh.

So in the spirit of Ada Lovelace Day I shall blog about my female tech hero. Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science.

She was an urbanist and economist – Jane Jacobs. Named as one of the Environment Agency’s top 100 environmentalists of all time her ideas on economics and urban development have been hugely influential on my own thinking. The following interview excerpt sums things up nicely:

Reason: What do you think you’ll be remembered for most? You were the one who stood up to the federal bulldozers and the urban renewal people and said they were destroying the lifeblood of these cities. Is that what it will be?

Jacobs: No. If I were to be remembered as a really important thinker of the century, the most important thing I’ve contributed is my discussion of what makes economic expansion happen. This is something that has puzzled people always. I think I’ve figured out what it is.

Expansion and development are two different things. Development is differentiation of what already existed. Practically every new thing that happens is a differentiation of a previous thing, from a new shoe sole to changes in legal codes. Expansion is an actual growth in size or volume of activity. That is a different thing.

I’ve gone at it two different ways. Way back when I wrote The Economy of Cities, I wrote about import replacing and how that expands, not just the economy of the place where it occurs, but economic life altogether. As a city replaces imports, it shifts its imports. It doesn’t import less. And yet it has everything it had before.

Reason: It’s not a zero-sum game. It’s a bigger, growing pie.

Jacobs: That’s the actual mechanism of it. The theory of it is what I explain in The Nature of Economies. I equate it to what happens with biomass, the sum total of all flora and fauna in an area. The energy, the material that’s involved in this, doesn’t just escape the community as an export. It continues being used in a community, just as in a rainforest the waste from certain organisms and various plants and animals gets used by other ones in the place.

— Jane Jacobs, City Views Urban studies legend Jane Jacobs on gentrification, the New Urbanism, and her legacy, Reason Magazine, June 2001, Interviewer: Bill Steigerwald

Rather than recommend Death and Life of Great American Cities (her most often cited book) I urge everyone to go out and read both of the books she mentions above (tricky to get hold off but worth tracking down). Sustainability and economics are inextricably linked and her prose is incredibly clear and succinct.

Jane Jacobs – my Ada Lovelace heroine for 2010. I hope she never had to buy the sandwiches…

admin Economics, Events ada lovelace, Jane Jacobs

I’m almost finished writing my final installment on BREEAM vs LEED, but I’ve run out of time to publish it this week.  In the meantime, you may be interested to know that CIBSE have a conference coming up on this very subject on 10th Feb 2010 in Balham. A snip at £225 for members.

Hear from Chris Twinn (Arup), Alfonso Ponce-Alvarez, (Centre Scientifique et Technique du Bâtiment), Ivan Rodriguez (URS Corp), Esfandiar Burman (ARCADIS), Sean Lockie (Faithful+Gould), Steven Brindle (Waterman Energy & Environment Design), Vincent Murray (IES) and Angus McIntosh (Kings Sturge).

BREEAM and LEED are the two most widely recognised environmental assessment methodologies used in the construction industry today.   Whilst the thrust of the two are similar – i.e. conserving energy and reducing carbon emissions, generally it is not straightforward to compare the two. What might be applicable in one assessment method might not be relevant in another.

How can a project team determine under which methodology their project can achieve the best rating? This conference aims to give you the necessary background and help you make an informed decision about your project.

admin Accreditation, Events Add new tag, BREEAM, LEED

This announcement turned up in my inbox this morning. I’ve been involved on the periphery of Sponge and the entrepreneur event in January for a while now. Add to your calendars now!

Wednesday 9th December

As part of Building Magazine’s Sustainability Now event we are collaborating with them to run an online discussion on green entrepreneurs.

The recession has resulted in many talented people being out of work or feeling vulnerable, but has also increased the competitiveness between companies and the potential benefits of innovation. And the sustainability agenda still appears to be strong. We therefore intend to consider questions such as:

• Is the time right for a new breed of green entrepreneurs to rise out of the ashes of the recession?
• What qualities do you need for a sustainable start-up?
• Can successful entrepreneurs offer advice on how best to do it?

The on-line discussion will be on Wednesday 9th December between 15.00 and 16.00.

Discussion Chairman
Tom Randall, Sponge Director

Entrepreneur Panel

• Nanik Daswani, Co-founder of Eco Consulting building sustainability consultancy
• Helen Heathfield, founder of Julie’s Bicycle, helping the music industry cut its greenhouse gas emissions.
• Russell Smith, founder and Managing Director of Parity Projects eco-renovation company.

You can find out more about Sustainability Now, and register for free to take part in the discussion here

Follow-up Event in the New Year
We will be running an evening event in the new year in London to provide those interested in starting their own sustainability related organisation with the confidence and inspiration to make it a reality. We will let you the details as they develop.

admin Events entrepreneur, Sustainability

Last night I had the immense pleasure of catching Jaime Lerner at the RIBA Jarvis Hall in Portland Place, London. I had originally come across Lerner on TED, Chris Anderson*’s brainchild. If you aren’t already aware of TED, go check out the many and varied lectures and performances.

Lerner is an architect and urban planner by trade and was also the mayor of Curitiba, in Brazil. Curitiba is the capital of Paraná. Lerner was mayor three times (1971–75, 1979–84 and 1989–92). In 1994, Lerner was elected governor of Paraná, and was reelected in 1998 until 2002.

Watch the video below, from TED which gives a very potted version (16 minutes) of what we were treated to last night. Lerner also talked at University of Westminster on Monday and will again tonight at BFI.

Jaime Lerner: Sing a song of sustainable cities

Some background (from Wikipedia) which was not given last night. Sunand Prasad and Nicky Gavron seemed to expect everyone in the audience to know exactly who Lerner was, but a lot of this I wasn’t aware of:

As Mayor, Lerner employed unorthodox solutions to Curitiba’s geographic challenges. Like many cities, Curitiba is bordered by floodplain. While wealthier cities in the United States such as New Orleans and Sacramento, have chosen to build expensive, and expensive-to-maintain levee systems to build on floodplain. In contrast, Curitiba purchased the floodplain and made parks. The city now ranks among the world leaders in per-capita park area. Curitiba had the problem of its status as a third-world city, unable to afford the tractors and petroleum to mow these parks. The innovative response was “municipal sheep” who keep the parks’ vegetation under control and whose wool funds children’s programs.

When Lerner became mayor, Curitiba had some barrios impossible to service by municipal waste removal. The “streets” were too narrow. Rather than abandon these people, or raze these slums, Lerner began a program that traded bags of groceries and transit passes for bags of trash. The slums got much cleaner…

Perhaps the crown jewel of Curitiba’s achievements is its Bus Rapid Transit system (called “Speedybus”). Originally, the city was given Federal money to build a subway (Curitiba is not a small town), but Lerner discovered that “heavy rail” like a subway costs ten times the amount for “light rail” (trolleys), which, in turn, costs ten times a bus system, even with dedicated bus ways. The “light rail” savings usually touted to sway municipal decision makers occur because even trolleys can have relatively fewer drivers than a 40 – 60 passenger bus. Lerner got Volvo to make 270 Swedish people accordion buses (300 Brazilians, says Lerner), so that the problem of a lower passenger number to driver ratio was no longer an issue. The City built attractive transit stops with the look and feel of train stations — and all the handicapped access equipment – inducing private firms to purchase and operate the buses. A hierarchy of buses of six sizes feed one other. The city controls the routes and fares, while the private companies hire drivers and maintain equipment.

Natural land-use patterns within the city of Curitiba support public transit systems. Buildings along the dedicated bus ways are up to six stories tall, gradually giving way, within a few blocks, to single story homes. This mix of densities ensures sufficient user population within walking distance of bus stops.

Lerner has a very broad, dare I say, holistic view of sustainable cities. Green buildings, recycling and transport are all individually important, but on their own, are not enough. That said, his talk focused very much on the transit system and also on the way he has since applied the principles to other cities. The fascinating thing about the transit sytem in Curitiba is that it isn’t subsidised at all – it pays for itself.

I found this quote via Green500 originally although the link seems broken now. The 75% of CO2 emissions was a number quoted by Lerner last night too:

Cities are an important battleground in the fight against the impacts of climate change. Worldwide they cover less than 1% of the Earth’s surface, but account for some 75% of CO2 emissions. London alone emits up to 44 million tonnes of CO2 a year.

One of the most striking points for me was the fact that he had the agency, as mayor, to introduce the changes he made, which must be a unique position of an architect/urban planner. He couldn’t wear both hats at the same time, but the experience in both fields rubbed off on each other.

A quote, which I think he uses in the TED video above,  is that to be creative, cut one zero from the budget. To be sustainable, cut two. With a vision or proposed solution, it is possible to create sustainable cities without necessarily spending a fortune.

Lerner has an infectious optimism when it comes to the future of cities. As a lover of cities myself, I was won over by his enthusiasm. The city is a much more effective scale for sustainability than individual buildings. As he said:

Cities are not the problem. Cities are the solution.

*It was only when I looked it up on Wikipedia I realised there were 2 Chris Anderson’s – I had assumed Wired/Long Tail Chris and TED Chris were the same person – they’re not! Ooops!

admin Events cities, Jaime Lerner, RIBA

An advantage to living in London during the week is the wealth of events, exhibitions and ‘do’s’ available to me, generally for free. Last week I took the opportunity to head to a very well attended event at Building Centre on Store St with standing room only.

The talk was on the Stadthaus, the tallest residential timber engineered building in the world.
It is, bizarrely, located at Murray Grove, in Shoreditch. KLH were the timber supplier, architects were Waugh Thistleton, and structural engineers were Techniker. Our speakers for the evening were Andrew Waugh (architect) and Matthew Linegaugh (structural engineer).

The 9 stories are positioned on the old footprint of a pub which used to be there. The building consists of 29 flats for Telford Homes, 10 affordable and 19 private. One interesting thing to note is that despite the affordable and private being within the same block, they each have their own entrance, bin stores, staircases etc! The adjacent properties were mainly high density LA housing.

At the time of construction, concrete and steel were very expensive and there was an incentive to build quick. The solution was to use cross laminated timber entirely (not even using a concrete core which would have lead to settling problems). This was a major change in the beam, column, slab mentality. The structure looks rather more like a deck of cards where every wall is a beam (diaphragm).

In addition to the speed of construction, the other main advantage was getting around the GLA‘s frustrating attitude to renewables. GLA proposed GSHP which would have required a basement plantroom. The team felt this was too costly, and also not in the real spirit of carbon reduction. They argued, successfully, that the timber construction had a much greater impact.

The maths went something like this:

• Timber stored carbon 186 tonnes.
• Concrete 130 tonnes emitted.
• So saving is 300 tonnes saved.
• 10% reduction is equivalent to 210 years.

Amazingly, the GLA agreed.

Comparing the program to an equivalent concrete building: 47 week program vs 72 weeks. Concrete would have been 4 times heavier and dense resulting in a much greater use of resources. During the Q&A the question of thermal mass was picked up and the answer from KLH was that we don’t currently properly understand thermal mass of cross laminated but research is currently being done. POE is just about to commence – it will be interesting to see how it performs in practice.

Apart from the timber structure the rest of the build was remarkably conventional. Follow on trades didn’t come on site until timber was up – could have got even better time savings. Electricians loved it for first fix – a nail gun and a pair of stilts and the job was done in a fraction of the time compared to drilling into concrete. Heating was via a floating screed floor with uderfloor heating.

From the Wood Awards:

The facade was created by recording the changing light and shadows formed on the empty site by the surrounding buildings and trees; the pattern was captured through a sun-path animation. The resulting image was pixilated, picked up, stretched and wrapped around the building. The exterior cladding forming this pixilated image is made up of over 5,000 individual panels across the building in three shades: white, grey and black. The 1200×230mm panels are manufactured by Eternit and made up of 70% waste timber.

The building was pre-Code for Sustainable Homes, but being partially affordable housing was built under Ecohomes. It started at an ‘Excellent’ rating but  cost savings during design resulted in a ‘Very Good’ rating.

The build costs were thought to be approximately 10% less than the equivalent concrete structure, but much of that saving is related to time and labour rather than capital cost.

For further information a book is available: A Process Revealed / Auf dem Howlzweg:Stadthaus (which I resisted the urge to buy myself – but it’s a very handsome tome).

Whilst the engineering is undoubtedly a huge success, there were a couple of points which maybe let down the ‘social’ aspect of the project – namely the demise of a pub (which may well have been a den of iniquity, but I have a soft spot for pubs) and the separation of the affordable/private common areas. Both, no doubt, commercial decisions.  Apart from these minor niggles, a successful project.

admin Events GLA, London, Thermal mass, timber

Don’t forget that tomorrow is the conference Sustainability Now – a virtual event – no carbon footprint involved in your travel.  Look out for me and come and say hi…

admin Events conference, Events, sustainability now, virtual

Sometimes it’s good to get to events which don’t have a construction or buildings focus. Thanks to the magic of Twitter, I heard that Nick Stern (aka Professor Lord Stern of Brentwood) was presenting a public lecture about his new book at LSE on 21 April. I couldn’t pass on the opportunity to listen to a celebrated economist talk on 2 of my favourite topics after buildings – climate change and economics!

It’s been 2.5 years since the Stern review catapulted Nick into the public consciousness. Since leaving the government shortly afterwards he’s been keeping busy, proposing green new deal’s and writing “Blueprint for a Safer Planet“.

An mp3 of the event (76 mins) is available from the LSE website or the Guardian if you want to listen to the whole thing. Unfortunately the slides aren’t available. James Randerson has a slightly more coherent take on the event in the Guardian here. The FT also did a review of the book when it came out at the beginning of the month.

The need for addressing carbon was covered with a swift dash through the Hadley/IPCC climate data. I suspect most readers of this blog will know the headline figures, so I’ll not regurgitate here.

Three actions

1. Energy efficiency
2. Develop low carbon technologies and activities
3. Halt deforestation

He illustrated many of the cost issues with McKinsey’s now famous abatement curve (first published in January 2007, revised this year and available here – the full report is 190 pages).

How much will it cost? 1.95% of GDP (unless GDP drops). Stern admitted some flab in this number and cost is likely to drop with technological progress. Think of it as an insurance premium for a few decades. Drivers of growth over the next few years will be technological, towards a low carbon economy. Why not strive for zero growth now? He believes we need a growth story to deal with world poverty. We don’t need growth forever, afterall forever is a long time.

As it turns out, Stern’s views on CCS were fairly prescient, given the post-budget announcement that potentially all new coal power stations will have to have CCS. Stern asserted that CCS was fundamental, as we need to know quickly if can we do it in (i.e. in the next 10 years). 50% of the world’s electricity is currently coal fired. If not we move to plan B, which will be much more expensive. Developed countries have to take the lead on this to ensure China, India and other developing countries do not have any excuse not to follow it.

Some more in the press re:CCS since I went to the event – according to The Week (can’t find a direct link to the article) coal still provides a third of the UK’s electricity. Proportions abroad are much higher: 50% in the US, 70% in India and 80% in China. Ed Milliband’s requirement for CCS on new UK coal stations only covers 25% of their emissions, rising to 100% in 2025.

In the Q&A, we discussed political will. Stern made the very good point that if we want things to change, it is quite within our own remit to lobby politicians and businesses for the change – they are humans after all, and ought to listen to reason.

admin Book Review, Economics, Events CCS, Climate Change, coal, Economics, LSE, Nick Stern

Phil Clark, Building magazine’s editor-in-chief of digital communities, (loving that job title!) has kindly asked me to be a sustainability champion at Building magazine’s Sustainability Now – a virtual event taking place 13 and 14 May. I’m not quite sure what this entails – I hoping for virtual champagne in the VIP lounge.

I took part last year but didn’t blog the event (seem to remember it was in the first or second week of July). There was some great conversations in the lounge (Phil blogged about it here). Given the liveliness of last year, perhaps champions will be virtual bouncers, throwing out trolls and watching out for flaming? Anyway, I’m looking forward to participating and have added a button at the side and above which should send you through to registration.

Content promises to include discussions on issues such as Passiv design, the zero carbon definition and the CRC.

Sign up now before you forget, and I’ll remind you all closer to the time too…

admin Events conference, event, sustainability now, virtual

So the fuzzy image to the left is from left to right: James Lovelock (89), Micheal Meacher (69) and Crispin Tickell (78), with the chairman whose name I didn’t catch.

I had the opportunity to see these three wise men speak at a Nature magazine sponsored talk at Kings Place, London on 9 March 2009.

The title of the talk was “What price biodiversity” but given the current economic climate, a lot of the talk was given over to the mess we have got ourselves in. In fact, the similarity between economic models and climate models was noted by Lovelock.

The average age of the speakers was almost 79 and at this stage in their careers, they weren’t pussy footing around and were ready to speak their mind!

I took copious notes from the debate, some of which I’ll give below. I’ve tried to attribute the quotes and thoughts to the correct party – apologies if I got any of it wrong:

Lovelock

Ecosystems are not here to service us humans. This attitude is comparable to slavery and just as reprehensible.

Biodiversity is not comprehensible to the man on the street.

Oil will run out in 40 years and this will have an impact on agriculture, leading to mass extinction (on this point the whole panel agreed!)

Tickell

3 factors for change are required:

• leadership from above
• pressure from below
• benign catastrophe

By benign catastrophe, he meant something which visibly and attributably goes wrong.

Mentioned alternate means of measuring wealth eg: instead of GDP, use HDI (Human Development Index). Alerted us to Sarkozy’s challenge to Stiglitz and Sen to come up with a quality of life indicator for France – more on that can be found at NYT here.

Believes population growth is a cultural behaviour rather than an ‘instinct’ and hence can be reprogrammed.

Meacher

Noted that the neo-liberal market view is breaking down and the new world economic order is an enormous opportunity.

Again, he noted the need for some kind of national or international disaster to act as a catalyst for change. The current economic crisis of this magnitude is an opportunity.

The debate was also held on Second Life (which I must admit, I haven’t taken to at all – mainly due to my continuing peripetetic life, flitting between PC’s, laptops and locations). Some more coherent notes are available here from Cian O’Donovan who I’ve just started stalking on twitter.

The take home message from the evening was that we’ve sat around talking about this for far too long. Time is running out and mass extinction of the human race (or at least western civilisation as we know it) is very much on the cards.

admin Events biodiversity, Crispin Tickell, debate, Economics, James Lovelock, Kings Place, mass extinction, Michael Meacher, Nature, population