What will the world’s cities be like in 20 years’ time, and what progress will they have made towards sustainability? Professor Steffen Lehmann, director of the Centre for Sustainable Design & Behaviour (sd+b) at the University of South Australia, provides insight into the urban future in this Eco-Business Q&A.
Eco-Business: What is the current state of urban development and what risks does it pose to the future of humanity and the environment?
Steffen Lehmann: The current state of urban development is rather depressing, because we are not moving ahead fast enough towards more environmentally sustainable urban development and reduction of consumption. In fact, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase to a new peak in 2011.
The most important question for us relates to consumption and rising greenhouse gas emissions: How much longer can we sustain this high-consumption lifestyle we are used to?
Some of the most important social challenges today are overcoming gender inequality and reducing the gap between the rich and the poor; both serious issues where most cities and policy-makers have not performed well. Another issue is housing affordability, especially for the elderly and young people. Unfortunately, there is frequently a lack of leadership, good urban governance and commitment. Instead we find a piecemeal approach to infrastructure planning and natural resource management, which is not integrated.
Technological and environmental challenges widely differ between developed and developing cities; the areas of highest relevance are usually traffic congestion, waste management, air pollution (especially in Chinese cities), water leakages in the system that waste precious drinking water and the increasing threat of urban heat stress or urban flooding. New technologies are essential, but technology alone will not be enough; they have to be put into a societal framework.
EB: Where are current consumption patterns taking us?
SL: To fully understand consumerism and the advertising paradigm ‘You are what you buy!’, it is necessary to first examine the global systems of production and consumption of manufactured goods and related material flows. Globally there are very unequal consumption patterns that have been out of balance for a long time. The wasteful consumption of high-consuming countries has become one of our most challenging problems. For instance, the United States, with just 5 per cent of the world’s population, consumes 30 per cent of the world’s resources and creates 30 per cent of the world’s waste. This means that a small slice of the world’s population consumes most of the resources and produces most of the greenhouse gas emissions.
Material resources that are depleting at such a rate that we are likely to face shortages in the foreseeable future include materials we currently dump in landfills, such as lead, copper, cadmium, wolfram or tungsten and zinc, just to name a few. Their availability is already becoming an issue, expressed in rising market prices.
In this context, plastic waste and toxic e-waste are another ticking time bomb. Why are electronics breaking so fast and why are they cheaper to replace than repair? Let us support a move towards more single-material, recyclable components in all industry sectors. In 1960, cultural critic and consumerism theorist Vance Packard published in his pioneering book The Waste Makers a critique of planned obsolescence. He also pointed out that consumers who learn that the manufacturer invested money to make the product obsolete faster might turn to a producer - if any exists - that offers a more durable alternative. The introduction of a carbon tax was the right thing to do; If carbon is a tradable commodity it encourages efficiency and creates the necessary funding for more research.
EB: What are leaders overlooking in the field of sustainable urban development?
SL: We must develop better ways in which architects and urban designers can help us transition towards a new kind of economy that confronts senseless consumerism and prioritises real wellbeing rather than simply economic growth.
This includes back to basics and passive low-tech strategies, such as shading and natural cross-ventilation.
For too long we have focussed on the most expensive ways of mitigating climate change, rather than the cheapest and most effective, imposing high costs for little gain. Unfortunately, solar power still adds little to our nation’s energy supplies and energy cannot yet easily be stored. Biomass has been mostly forgotten in the mix. Biomass from organics is a proven and widely available energy source and can be used for anaerobic digestion, generating reliably cheap energy; or for composting to create fertiliser to return nutrients to the soil.
We have also ignored the impact of our continued demand for goods made overseas using carbon-intensive processes, leading to an overall increase in global emissions. Another exciting field is the development of low carbon prefabricated construction systems using engineered timber panels, which leads to better urban infill developments.
To make more efficient buildings, cities, cars and planes will continue to be essential. In the next decade, energy storage systems and electric vehicles will make a real difference. Many questions about sustainable urban development or technologies are tackled if we move toward more compact cities with efficient public transport as the preferred model - instead of urban sprawl and car-dependent residents. From an economic point of view, it is better to invest in retrofitting buildings and in policies supporting more compact cities. People look now for quality of life such as found in more compact, older city quarters in Europe or Asia; such quarters are both denser and attractive, making them efficient, well-connected urban areas.
EB: You have recently become involved in a project to improve urban development in China, what does this project aim to achieve? And what is involved in achieving it?
SL: I am the founding director of the new China-Australia Centre for Sustainable Urban Development at the University of South Australia, which conducts application-focussed research for the Chinese government and municipalities. Looking at sustainable consumption, we realise that different professions – for instance, architects, designers and urban planners – face different challenges. This is the case in China as well as the rest of the world.
There are key questions for architects surrounding sustainability of building materials and selection of building systems that go beyond durability, including taking life cycle analysis and supply chain into account. They must specify the most appropriate materials for a project: the least polluting, most easily recyclable, most energy efficient - with the least embodied energy - and from sustainable sources.
Australia, China and other countries in the Asia-Pacific region have far to go to catch up with resource recovery, recycling and end-of-life policies in other countries; Japan, Germany, Austria and the US state of California have been early embracers and are now ahead in policy and implementation. We need to go beyond cash-back schemes on bottles and other narrow pragmatics, and instead look holistically at the flow and use of materials. Just think of the immense opportunities for improving efficiency and re-use in the construction sector. South Australia’s container recycling scheme was a success story, but has been around since 1977 and is reaching its limit. South Australia banned plastic shopping bags in 2009 to eliminate single-use bags from the waste stream; however, this has not stopped them being dumped in public places, parks and beaches.
The question is: Can we achieve zero waste through behaviour change in the area of recycling alone? Our research in the sd+b Centre reveals that recycling alone is simply not enough. The focus needs to be on avoiding waste creation in the first place and re-thinking the way we design and construct products and buildings to facilitate re-use and disassembly at their end of life. This change of focus makes the concept of ‘zero waste’ both powerful and controversial. From a purely economic point of view, producing waste is unproductive. But reversing the existing, wasteful (GDP-driven) business system and manufacturing practices is not a fast, easy or cheap process. If we can begin at the beginning, and design waste out of the picture, we can recover not only the final product, but also the energy, materials and time embodied in the product or building.
EB: Given that China is the top CO2 emitter in the world in relation to total emissions, can sustainable urban development help to lower China’s carbon emissions? How?
SL: Of course, China is a particularly interesting case, redefining the notion of ‘urbanisation’. In the future, the US will finally cease to be dependent upon Middle East oil due to new sources of cheap natural gas from shale, while China is likely to see its dependence on Middle Eastern fossil fuel grow.
China’s rise is changing the world and has become the defining feature of the 21st century, with profound implications for people everywhere.
In terms of our limited resources, we have been too wasteful for too long, dumping precious resources in landfills or flushing nutrients into the ocean. We have to recognise that waste is first and foremost a precious ‘misallocated resource’. Since the Industrial Revolution and Fordism we have imposed a linear process, from extraction, to production of manufactured items, to distribution, to consumption, to disposal and waste. In Designing for Zero Waste I argued that ‘it is time to facilitate re-use, repair and waste reduction by a fundamental rethinking of how we design, manufacture and use products and buildings’.
Today, ‘zero waste’ is the most discussed concept for municipal solid waste management systems. Transferred into urban development, ‘zero waste city’ describes a concept that advocates looking at the broader system and lifestyles in which resources are used and wasted, challenging short replacement cycles and materialistic values. This means maintaining existing structures and buildings for retrofitting and adaptive re-use, rather than demolition.
Our project in China is such a highly innovative case, introducing prefabricated lightweight micro-architecture using engineered timber for infill prototypes, turning buildings and districts into carbon sinks. Working towards ‘zero waste’ has become a worldwide movement that changes the way we will in future design, construct, operate, maintain, disassemble and recycle products, buildings and cities. Simply put, ‘zero waste’ means no unnecessary and unwanted waste from a product or process – at any stage of its life cycle. Decisions in the design phase of a product or building determine the quality of the product, its recyclability and the length of its life span. The ‘zero waste’ ethos is a big call, radical in its ramifications, and it requires more than a top-down, government-imposed approach. To be successful, zero waste needs to be embraced and implemented by citizens and community groups, business and industry.
EB: Finally, in general, what do you envision for urban development in the next 20 years?
SL: The goal must be less waste of resources, producing goods and food locally, avoiding transportation and packaging and creating local jobs and empowering local communities. We must also make buildings that last longer and are flexible in that they are designed to be adaptable to other uses in the future, with components that can be repaired, re-used and recycled. But there is also a great need for interdisciplinary research into achieving behaviour change, waste avoidance and better industrial and architectural design. With our work we want to inform behaviour change that supports the uptake of new technologies and to provide evidence to help governments formulate policy and frameworks. Our vision at the University of South Australia is to develop a national centre of excellence for training, education and research into the zero waste principles and practices we need for a sustainable future.
To check out Prof Lehmann’s projects visit: www.slab.com.au/
