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Scrapping skyscrapers
Tall buildings being good for the environment may be all wrong
Chris Benjamin, The Coast (Halifax, Canada)
Here’s the theory: build up, way up, and pull the city inward towards such great heights. Thus, reduce sprawl, decrease commuting distances, bring things conveniently together, increase a sense of community, put an end to resource-eating pollution and welcome the death of the car culture.
Would that it were so simple.
This philosophy of building height is central to the HRM By Design exercise, an ongoing series of public consultations geared towards creating a “clear and compelling vision” for the regional centre of our mega-municipality.
… And that involves tall buildings, as high as 230 feet (20 storeys), lovingly erected in concentrated clusters. Most of these are to be located around the spot that will become formerly known as the Cogswell interchange.
According to the current thinking of professional planners, tall buildings are our only hope for disinheriting our cars and reuniting with our neighbours—up on the rooftop garden. Urban density also concentrates and thus limits our impact on the land, water and air.
Density is our hope for long-term survival. At least until peak oil.
The problem with these sky-scraping symbols of long-term sustainability, according to Larry Hughes of Dalhousie’s Energy Research Group, is “figuring out how to heat the damn things. If we assume the heat source will be oil,” he says, “it’s very short-sighted, naive to the extreme.”
Two-thirds of Nova Scotian homes are currently heated by oil, which is already getting harder to find, Hughes says. And there are few other viable options for heating sources in this province, all of which have serious shortcomings.
(10 April 2008)
Good to the last drop
Exhibit recalls architecture’s response to the 1973 oil crisis
Nancy Tousley, Calgary Herald
… Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani, who was oil minister of Saudi Arabia when OPEC shut off the oil supply and triggered the energy crisis of 1973, quickly got to the point in a television interview with the BBC.
“The era of a very cheap source of energy is gone,” Yamani said, “and this is a new era.”
The charming sheik’s alarming message, and the far-reaching implications of it, are at the heart of 1973: Sorry Out of Gas, an illuminating and perfectly timed exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. Its relevance is reflected every day in newspaper headlines.
… Curated by Mirko Zardini, the director of CCA, this thought-provoking show is the first to look at the ways in which architects, engineers, scientists and others in North America responded to the exigencies of the oil crisis 35 years ago.
… Now the oil supply is more depleted and some say it could literally dry up within as few as 32 years to become as extinct as the dinosaur.
“The ‘crisis’ we are facing in 2007 has all the features that emerged in 1973,” Zardini writes in the exhibition’s clear, concise, picture-filled catalogue, which begins most unusually with An Endangered Species, an illustrated tale by Harriet Russell, that explains the present crisis to children. “However,” Zardini adds, “today’s energy problem is accompanied by a heightened environmental crisis that is plain for all to see.”
1973: Sorry, Out of Gas is part of CCA’s contribution to the debate in contemporary architecture, which Zardini sees as being in a moment of transformation in which old ideas are no longer useful. “So the idea is, in a situation like this one, that CCA has a kind of responsibility to help to build a new platform for the discussion in the next 10 to 15 years,” the 55-year-old, Italian-born architect, writer and curator said in a telephone interview. “And this is what we are trying to do.”
(9 April 2008)
A continuation of the article is now online: Designs on the future (How a group of Calgarians helped pioneer green architecture).
Low-carbon living takes off in the US – cohousing
University College London (UCL)
Cohousing offers a low-carbon lifestyle, and developers are poised for a market that could soon burgeon in the US, according to a new study. Until now, cohousing has occupied a niche market in the US, but the paper by Dr Jo Williams at UCL (University College London) suggests the situation is changing. Cohousing not only helps to halve energy use, it offers health and social benefits for families and older people seeking secure and affordable homes.
Cohousing in the US typically comprises private living units (houses or flats) with shared spaces such as a gym, office space, workshops, laundry facilities and a cafe. Those living in cohousing consume nearly 60 per cent less energy in the home, and operate car-sharing and recycling schemes that greatly reduce the pollution from travel and landfill. Having facilities such as office space, workshops and gym within the community also reduces travel and associated emissions. Residents’ direct involvement in the management and maintenance of these communities has also led to the adoption of more energy-efficient systems and renewable sources of energy.
In a paper published in Futures Journal, Dr Jo Williams of the UCL Bartlett School of Planning says that until recently, cohousing has occupied a niche market in the US, largely because the development model adopted has been resident-led. The time, money and effort required to invest in such a project, along with the associated risks, has very much restricted market interest. It takes a minimum of five years to develop a cohousing project, the drop-out rate is high and projects can be expensive.
However, new development models have emerged in the US that reduce resident involvement, risk and cost – namely, partnership, speculative and retrofit models. Developers are beginning to finance and build cohousing both in partnership with prospective residents and speculatively. Residents are also forming their own cohousing communities in existing neighbourhoods, by taking down fences, creating communal facilities and taking on the responsibility for general management and maintenance.
Dr Jo Williams of the UCL Bartlett School of Planning says: “The emergence of new models of development has expanded the market for cohousing in the US, particularly in California, Massachusetts, Colorado and Washington DC. The number of households living in retrofit communities has tripled in the last 10 years and the number living in partnership projects has nearly quadrupled. The coverage and diversity of the market has also increased. Re-sale values for properties in cohousing communities are higher than the market average, suggesting they are now desirable places to live. Developers, architects and realtors have recognised the market potential for cohousing and are setting up support services.”
“With concerns about carbon emissions and energy savings, there has never been greater impetus for housing that offers low-carbon lifestyles. If the development models emerging in the US were adopted in the UK, the market for cohousing could be substantially expanded here. This could add to our options for shrinking our carbon footprint as well as meeting social needs, such as safe homes for an ageing population and local childcare facilities for parents who work.”
(8 April 2008)
Moments of Contingency (Kunstler and Homer-Dixon) (audio)
KMO, C-Realm Podcast
In this episode, KMO plays a talk that he recorded in Austin, Texas this past weekend. James Howard Kunstler addressed the Congress for the New Urbanism and emphasized the need for trains and sleazy waterfront flop houses for sailors. After that KMO plays a clip from a Thomas Homer-Dixon talk that amplifies a theme touched on in Jim Kunstler’s contribution and ends with a call to unspecified action.
(9 April 2008)
