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Is this the greenest city in the world?
Andrew Purvis, The Observer,
Eco housing, car-free streets and socially conscious neighbours have made the German city of Freiburg a shining example of sustainability. But this brave utopian vision of clean living has its fair share of dirty linen.
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It is 6C outside, and a dusting of snow can be seen on the Schauinsland – the low hill overlooking Freiburg, where the good burghers of the southwest German city take their children hiking. In Meinhard Hansen’s apartment, however, it is perpetual summer; the sun streams in through tall, south-facing windows and a gauge on the wall reads ’24C’. Next to it, the words ‘Heizung 0’ appear in a small glass window. ‘Heating, zero,’ Meinhard translates. ‘In fact, we haven’t switched the heating on for weeks.’
While a typical home in Germany (or Britain, for that matter) squanders 220 kilowatt hours of energy a year for each square metre of floor space, this one wastes 15kWh/m2 a year. ‘My mother-in-law has an old house in the country,’ says Meinhard, ‘and she uses 6,000 litres of oil a year to heat it. We use 150 litres.’
… The impossible dream was a ‘passive house’ where no active system is needed to maintain a comfortable temperature. Super-insulated with foam and lagging up to 30cm thick, the flat is triple-glazed and externally sealed. Fresh air enters at ceiling level and is sucked out through a funnel on one wall.
… It is part of Freiburg’s unrelenting quest to be one of the greenest cities in the world, helped by the (uncomfortable) fact that it was flattened by Allied bombers in the Second World War and rebuilt on enlightened, energy-saving principles. Now, as Gordon Brown announces plans to build 10 new eco towns in Britain – in places such as Oakington in Cambridgeshire, and Long Marston, near Stratford-upon-Avon – perhaps it is time to learn from the city we destroyed.
‘We always compete against Munster as the most ecological town,’ says Claudia Duppe, a lecturer and resident of Freiburg’s Rieselfeld quarter, ‘whether it is the length of the cycle paths, the number of people cycling to work, or the amount of solar panels on the roofs.’ Over a glass of local wine, she tells me about her life. As well as living in a passive house, she cycles everywhere (‘the cycle routes are brilliant’) or takes the tram – a cheap, fast mode of transport that makes car ownership unnecessary.
… In his offices at the Technisches Rathaus, a sprawling prefab complex on the other side of town, Wulf Daseking, Freiburg’s chief planner, agrees that Rieselfeld is ugly. ‘It was the first projest, the first test,’ he says, tapping the side of his nose with a finger. What he means is that Rieselfeld was the first new area built from scratch after his appointment in 1984. The other was Vauban, the radical car-free quarter carved from an old French army base in 1998 – a shrine to colourful Le Corbusier-style architecture and sustainable living.
Before seeing Vauban, I want to know how Freiburg was created from the ashes of a medieval city levelled during the Second World War. ‘The main employer here is the university,’ Daseking explains, ‘so these are brainy people – and when they say something, they mean it.
… With nuclear power off the agenda, Freiburg found itself with a problem: a finite amount of electricity, but a growing population. The only solution, the government said, was for the people to come up with an energy-saving plan to conserve existing resources. In the mid-Eighties, when Daseking arrived, the same spirit of public consultation was applied to the planning of Rieselfeld. First on the wish list was a tramline extension, built before residents arrived so they would not have to buy a car. Next came the idea of small plots with a high population density (the group ownership model) so people could afford to buy flats. Because the newcomers were families, ‘a garden was essential for every four or five plots,’ says Daseking – hence the abundance of play parks.
(23 March 2008)
Thom Yorke questions the Mayor of London about his radical eco vision for the capital
Lucy Siegle, The Observer
…Come 1 May, when Londoners choose, ostensibly between Livingstone and Boris Johnson, many of them will vote on environmental issues. Then there’s the fact that how London acts – how it treats sustainability issues, the Olympics, Heathrow expansion and climate change – will set a template for the rest of the country. This is no longer an easy subject. Out of all the clashes between Ken and Boris and the two other lead figures, Brian Paddick and Sian Berry (the Green party candidate), the environmental hustings have been among the most illuminating.
… As soon as humanly possible and conversationally decent, Ken mentions the Congestion Charge. It is widely chalked up as a success in and out of London; other UK cities are rumoured to be introducing a copycat version, credited with avoiding gridlock in the capital that many thought was inevitable. As Ken says, ‘Traffic has been contained in the centre, it hasn’t gone up in almost two-thirds of the boroughs in London over the last seven or eight years. It’s still bad but it’s stopped rising.’
… Ken Livingstone: It’s so bad, what we face, that we’ve just got to do everything that we can.
Thom Yorke: So squaring up to climate change, it’s a moral duty on your part?
KL: Moral isn’t the right term. We face a huge catastrophic climate change. We’re close to the tipping point. Stern says four to two years. I met Dr Pauchari [chair of the IPCC, the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change, and recipient of last year’s Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore], when I was in India, and he thinks we’re now past the tipping point and you’ve got to come up with technologies that will mitigate the effects. If that’s true, sometime over the next 10 years we’ll have to rejig the whole of the economy, like we did in the Second World War.
TY: But how does that tally with the City itself? In the context of economic growth, for instance, I would imagine there is some level of resistance to these proposals from the City?
KL: Well, no. It’s quite interesting, most of big business realise they’ve all got to change because they realise what’s coming. Small business doesn’t – they don’t have the researchers to figure it out. But big, mega-business, they’ve got 20-year strategies.
… The [UK Labour] government fears that tackling climate change is going to cost people more, or impact on their quality of life. What we’re saying is this isn’t a worse quality of life, you just have to live your life differently.
… TY: But the government … are talking in terms of nuclear. Does locally generated energy change the whole structure of the grid?
KL: We don’t want the normal grid. We want to get everybody off grid. It doesn’t matter if it’s nuclear or gas, 65 per cent of energy is wasted in the cooling system. If we have locally done energy it’s 15 per cent. So immediately, if we could wave a magic wand and all of Britain’s energy was coming from local sources you’d reduce your fossil-fuel consumption by 50 per cent. Just being efficient.
TY: Yet we’re going the opposite way.
KL: Well, they are, of course. I don’t know what it is about them and nuclear power.
… TY: It all goes back to the point at which we began this interview; talking about when you make these moves – are they popular?
KL: Well, there is no point coming into politics if you wait for people to say, “This is popular” and say, “Well, I do it for you.” The only reason to come into politics is to say, “This is where the world needs to be, follow me.” Politics is a platform and you use it to educate. I think she was completely mad, but Thatcher never for a moment stopped educating. What she came out with was complete rubbish, but she used the position to ram home all these awful little middle England reactionary views, and never stopped. She always said it’s a battle of ideas every minute of the day. She said, “This is what I want to do, now find me a way of presenting it, so we carry the public with us.” That’s the approach here. I get out of bed in the morning and think we can make a difference.
(23 March 2008)
Thom Yorke is frontman with the group Radiohead. Summary article of the interview.
Kunstler on Parking Garages
KunstlerCast #4 via Global Public Media
In this episode of Kunstlercast, a listener from Columbus, Ohio shares the bad news about two proposed downtown parking garages. Even though James Howard Kunstler thinks the happy motoring scene in America is on the way out, he explains how to design a better parking garage with first-floor retail, a central lightwell and taller ceilings. The Europeans have a better solution, though: the car club.
( www.kunstlercast.com/ )
(6 March 2008)
