Brum reaches for the sky in the race for sustainability
Jun 3 2008 Agenda
Birmingham, which is hosting the world's first climate change festival, will pay a heavy price unless it becomes a sustainable city, says Martin Bell, director of campaigns at CABE.
A 29-metre high, nickel-coated pylon now stands outside the Council House. To mark the world's first climate change festival, hosted here in Birmingham, we have a shiny steel reminder of how we get our energy, in the month that petrol prices scaled new heights and 4.5 million found themselves living in fuel pov-erty. Testing times indeed.
Walking through Victoria Square, the pylon is dramatic and unsettling.
It's a familiar object out of context, something brutal made into something beautiful. Pylons are, of course, part of the way we do business. This is how we bring energy into our cities so that we can live comfortably with electricity on tap.
Pylons allow us to use energy without seeing the stark chimneys and cooling towers of the power station. And having this one thrust into the middle of Birmingham illustrates just how much the consequences of our choices are normally hidden from us.
It also brings home the reality of climate change. Part of the point of this festival is to make the issue visible and local. It challenges us to recognise that climate change isn't happening far from home and in the future. It's happening here and now. Which prompts a blunt and obvious question. What does tackling climate change mean for Britain's towns and cities?
Cities like Birmingham prosper when they become places where people chose to live and work. People value and expect freedom of choice. But dangerous climate change means that cities have to offer choice within environmental limits.
That has always been true. It's now imperative. This means we need to offer a way of life in Birmingham that does not destroy the planet, whether you live in the suburbs or the city centre.
In an era of carbon constraint, we are going to judge the people in charge of business and government differently. It is no longer enough to justify your performance solely on commercial grounds.
People expect to see delivery of a triple bottom line: economic prosperity, social responsibility and environmental stewardship. All three.
If this sounds tough, it's worth reflecting on the ever growing number of consumers in this country using their purchasing choices to reflect their concerns and beliefs.
Consumers are looking to business to take action on climate change. Seventy per cent agree that the Government has a mandate to lead on this issue, even if it means using the law to change people's behaviour.
And most people recognise the need for 'choice editing': specifically reducing consumer choice by refusing to offer unsustainable options.
The problem is that too few people in leadership positions seem to believe they have this mandate from consumers. It's as if they can't acknowledge the permission being given them by the market.
So where do we start if we want a sustainable city? The first step is understanding where we are now and defining a baseline. Every city and major business should have a clearly defined ecological and carbon footprints, publicly available, and set transparent targets for reducing water consumption, energy consumption and waste production. These targets need to be sufficient and realistic, recognising what's required to deliver them. They might either be targets you can control directly or ones you can only achieve by influencing suppliers or consumers to behave differently. But with climate change, just like any key measure of performance, sound data is essential.
We also need to understand that the solutions to climate change are different depending on whether you are concerned with individual buildings, working at aneighbourhood level, operating across the city itself, or in fact the wider sub-region. The key is knowing what are the priorities at the right scale. At the level of individual buildings, for instance, the big priority is making sure existing buildings require minimal heating and cooling and use water efficiently. Britain needs a massive national programme to incentivise private homeowners to make their homes more efficient. The obvious changes which are not happening: installing cavity wall and loft insulation and draught proofing.
Last year Germany introduced a national scheme to improve all pre-1984 buildings. So far we have the Code for Sustainable Homes.
This has been an inspired piece of legislation. And now we need the same scale of ambition for our existing building stock, supported by a much more favourable VAT regime for refurbishment works.
At aneighbourhood level, by contrast, a major priority will be district heating systems.
They've been used in Copenhagen for decades, and offer afar more efficient way to circulate excess warmth to where it's needed.
We've already installed broadband cables across the country for our entertainment, so retrofitting energy networks shouldn't be impossible.
And on large scale CHP, Birmingham is already at the head of the field.
Meantime, at the city scale, addressing climate change involves smart management of 'green infrastructure'. Our streets need to be able to absorb and store excess water; we need space for trees which provide shade and cooling, and designs which offer great social spaces for people.
This will require us in turn to value and maintain public assets such as parks and green spaces more precisely.
It may even involve setting a development framework which prioritises the provision of strategic open space for social and environmental reasons rather than routinely developing land for short term economic returns.
Look at global warming in these terms, and you see how many of the answers are found in the way we design and manage our built environment. Strategic urban design will not solve this on its own. But it's one of the biggest and best opportunities before us.
The other pre-eminent challenge, of course, is transport.
Tackling climate change requires an integrated urban transport strategy. It involves investing more in public transport.
It almost certainly means tackling car dependence through abundle of mutually supportive measures and communicating the need to reduce car use and the benefits of doing so - in terms of people's health and wellbeing, as well as reducing emissions.
Above all, we need to put the dignity back into public transport.
If we don't find ways to create a sustainable city, it's worth recognising there are costs attached.
The cost of congestion to employers in this country is estimated at £20 billion per year; interestingly, people who visit town centres by car spend on average only £64 per week, compared to the £91 spent by people who visit on foot.
If we needed financial incentives, they exist. Low carbon and climate resilient growth (the only kind of secure economic growth that's left) depends on markets being developed now for greener technologies.
Looking once more at that pylon in Victoria Square, it seems to reflect some basic truths about the way we live. We often behave as though we can consume without limits and outwit nature; or kid ourselves that providing we change the lightbulbs and recycle more, market forces will do the rest. In fact this pylon is a poke in the eye.
It says we need to act, and act fast. But there's also reasons to be optimistic. Cities that act now will become the most efficient, well-run and attractive to residents and investors alike. If we can create a sustainable city, it will be a more sociable, healthy and competitive place. In that sense, tackling climate change is about opportunity, not threat. CABE is the Commission for Architecture and Built Environment, the government's urban design champion.
