|
Many times I have been
asked: Does your firm, ArchPlan, do “Green Architecture”? And
usually I answer: yes, we are specializing in urban repair -- and
that is green in and of itself, greener than all solar panels, straw
bales and bamboo floors put together.
This postulation
probably needs a bit of explanation. Why is it green to recycle a
rowhouse in Sandtown or design apartments in a former factory on
Greenmount Avenue?
Isn’t it
quintessentially green to flee into the hills north of Berkeley or
into the mountains of Vermont, grow organic veggies and follow Frank
Lloyd Wright’s vision of a decentralized rural idyll with no cities
or towns but houses, factories and schools integrated with the land?
I
have dubbed my little talk tonight
“Why Sustainable
City is not an Oxymoron”
and want to speak about
the two faces of the City:
The City as the vortex
of unsustainable production and consumption, and the City as an
enduring, lasting and efficient synergistic center, a beacon of hope
for the future.
“A
town, such as London, where a man may wander for hours without
reaching the beginning of the end, without meeting the slightest
hint that there is open country within reach, is a strange thing.
This colossal centralization, this heaping together of two and a
half millions of human beings at one point, has multiplied the power
of this two and a half millions a hundredfold; has raised London to
the commercial capital of the world.
What is true of
London, is of all great towns. Everywhere barbarous indifference,
hard egotism and nameless misery everywhere plundering under the
protection of the law, and all so shameless, one can only wonder
that the whole crazy fabric still hangs together.
The streets are
generally unpaved, rough, dirty, filled with vegetable and animal
refuse, without sewers or gutters, but supplied with foul, stagnant
pools instead. Moreover, ventilation is impeded by the bad, confused
method of building of the whole quarter“
This quote doesn’t exactly describe
today’s City: it is from 1845, written by Friedrich Engels, who, as
you probably know, later partnered with Karl Marx to write Das
Kapital. In 1845 Engels wrote The Condition of the Working
Class in England and in it the chapter called “The Great Towns”.
In
the quote you can detect both faces of the City. The collective
power arising from two and a half million people and the
environmental degradation arising from this. And even a hundred and
seven years later, in 1952, London’s “big smog” killed 4000 people
during five days in December. And in the US, Pennsylvania’s
Pittsburgh presented its own version of an industrial inferno.
And
Cities didn’t just have a bad reputation among protagonists of
workers and poor folk but also among intellectuals such as Frank
Lloyd Wright. He had famously answered, "Abandon it" when
being asked how he would go about improving Pittsburgh. And perhaps
even more tellingly he also generalized about cities:
“So
I think that to decentralize today you have not only got to go out
as far as you dare go but five times as far. And the city then will
get you before it passes away unless the blast released with the
H-bomb happens along. Sometimes, don't you think that would be,
perhaps, merciful? (May 27, 1954)
The unsustainable industrial City of the late 19th century, and
first half of the 20th century was followed by de-industrialization
and decline resulting in the shrinking city. Some former
industrial meccas such as Detroit, North Philadelphia, and East and
West Baltimore got so depleted that some people saw their future in
urban farming!
The smokestack city and its follower, the declining city, created a
lasting perception of Cities as unhealthy, environmentally
disastrous and dangerous places – a perception which hung around
until very, very recently. So much so, that through the nineties up
to a thousand people a month fled the City of Baltimore.
As we all know, the
shrinking City created the auto-dependent ballooning suburb where we
occupy up to 20% more land area for each additional 10% of
population growth. Because land is the one thing we cannot add or
grow, we must consider this pattern utterly and entirely
unsustainable.
If the old
industrial City was unsustainable because of too much density and
unhealthy conditions resulting from it, the current sprawling
suburbia is unsustainable because of its lack of density and the
fact that land is finite.
What have we
learned so far?
1.
The City and its surrounds
interact with each other
2.
To address sustainability
we must look at both places, the City and the land around it, the
built environment and the unbuilt environment.
3.
We need a regional view of
communities and open spaces.
Shrinking cities and
low-density sprawl are only a problem in some parts of the
hypermobile post-industrial societies in which old assets such as
deep water ports, navigable rivers, minerals or railroads don’t
count for much anymore. Globally we have an ongoing trend towards
urbanization. Significant proportions of population increases in the
developing countries have been and will be absorbed by urban areas
(from 45.6% in to 83.4% in 2000). Urban settlements in the
developing countries are, at present, growing five times as fast as
those in the developed countries.
Regarding Cities, we
find ourselves right now at the historically interesting
intersection where globally, Cities and urban conglomerations
continue to grow at unprecedented rates and where the postindustrial
societies are rediscovering the city as a place of opportunity and
quality of life.
Locally, for the
first time in 50 years, the exodus from Baltimore has stopped.
At this
intersection where Cities attract people in developing countries as
well as in post-industrial countries the question of the sustainable
City is ever more urgent.
As Canada’s National
Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy put it:
A nation's
competitive advantage is directly related to the performance of its
cities.
Before we can ask
how to achieve a sustainable City, we should take a look at what
sustainable means.
For this, let me go
back to 1968, a time of upheaval and change. 1968 was also the birth
year of the “Club of Rome”, "a thinktank and a centre of research
and action, of innovation and initiative". It still exists and is a
group of scientists, economists, businesspeople, high-level public
servants, heads of state and former heads of state from around the
globe that was established as a new way of addressing the larger
questions confronting global society because the existing ways were
too narrow and governments too compartmentalized. They were an early
NGO and in 1972 they published the then famous opus “Limits of
Growth”
I cite two major
conclusions form “Limits of Growth”:
1. If the present
growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution,
food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the
limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the
next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather
sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial
capacity.
2. It is possible to
alter these growth trends and to establish a condition of ecological
and economic stability that is sustainable far into the
future. The state of global equilibrium could be designed so that
the basic material needs of each person on earth are satisfied and
each person has an equal opportunity to realize his individual human
potential.
Ha, there was the
word sustainable, did you notice? And there is optimism. The Club
of Rome raised the issue that eternal growth is non sustainable, 33
years later we still haven’t really faced this issue and continue to
work within systems that rely on growth on all levels: Markets,
sales, production, efficiency, revenues, size of corporations,
automobiles, body size, you name it.
Since the “Limits of
Growth” there have been a slew of activities and organizations
revolving around the topic of sustainability.
1987 the World
Commission on Environment and Development finally the
developed the by now well know definition of sustainability that was
included in its Brundtland Report. It stated that:
Sustainable
development meets the needs of the present
without compromising
the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
Today, April 4, 2005,
I would like to add my very own definition:
Something can be called
sustainable when it can go on for a very long time without self
destructing or causing irreparable harm.
In the category of
longevity Cities fare quite well. The oldest city still in
existence, Jericho, is some 7000 years old. How well Cities braced
the storms of history is described in the Aalborg Charter of 1994
signed by 120 European Cities that banded together to pledge efforts
of sustainability in the context of the Rio Agenda 21:
We, European cities &
towns, signatories of this Charter, state that in the course of
history, our towns have existed within and outlasted empires, nation
states, and regimes and have survived as centres of social life,
carriers of our economies, and guardians of culture, heritage and
tradition. Along with families and neighbourhoods, towns have been
the basic elements of our societies and states. Towns have been the
centres of industry, craft, trade, education and government.
The Aalborg Charter
also alludes to why cities play a special role in sustainability and
to what elements other than longevity and endurance will make a
sustainable city.
1.
The role of Cities
Local
government is close to where environmental problems are perceived
and closest to the citizens and shares responsibility with
governments at all levels for the well-being of humankind and
nature. Therefore, cities and towns are key players in the process
of changing lifestyles, production, consumption and spatial
patterns. We are convinced that the city or town is both the largest
unit capable of initially addressing the many urban architectural,
social, economic, political, natural resource and environmental
imbalances damaging our modern world and the smallest scale at which
problems can be meaningfully resolved in an integrated, holistic and
sustainable fashion.
2.
Social Equity
The poor are worst
affected by environmental problems (such as noise and air pollution
from traffic, lack of amenities, unhealthy housing, lack of open
space) and are least able to solve them. Inequitable distribution of
wealth both causes unsustainable behaviour and makes it harder to
change. We intend to integrate people's basic social needs as well
as healthcare, employment and housing programmes with environmental
protection.
In the North American
context Seattle has developed enlightening sustainability
strategies. Seattle includes in the envelope of sustainability :
1) A tri-partite
model integrating economic, social, and environmental goals &
requirements with greater return and value resulting from more
proactive and comprehensive integration of economy, environment, and
social needs.
2) Life Cycle
Thinking & Management;
3) Ecological
Footprint measurement,
4) “Total cost”
analysis including what is often treated as externality in our
current systems;
5) A Value
Creation continuum in lieu of a “trade-off mentality,”
According to this
sustainability is not just an environmental cause, but it is also an
economic and a social goal. A tri-part model!
In other words: It is
not enough to celebrate the City for busting sprawl by offering
dense accommodation and more transit and walking. To be sustainable
the City also has to look at economic and social aspects.
This brings me back
to our local level and to the small cosmos of my firm and my belief
that we do indeed do green architecture:
In reusing the former
Waverly Press printing facility and converting it to 65 apartments,
we are
·
using a spot that is
already developed and serviced instead of covering a cornfield in
Howard County. 65 apartments on Guilford Avenue will use a lot
less space, energy and resources than 65 single family or townhouses
in the suburbs This is good in the land use category.
·
We are saving the bricks
and sticks needed for a new construction. This reduces energy
consumption and reduces the ecological footprint
·
We are integrating
development in the existing community of Mount Vernon adding to
the value creation continuum that began 1850 when Colonel Howard’s
heirs laid out Mount Vernon Place
·
address the social
equity aspects through a number of apartments which will be set
aside as affordable, something that rarely happens in the suburbs
·
provide economic
benefits through jobs, taxes and purchase power of new
households without adding any significant cost for the city
·
Reduce the mobility needs:
In living in Mount Vernon instead of Carroll County folks can get
around on foot, or by transit instead solely by car.
All that even before
we install a single solar panel, green roof or bamboo floor.
Anyone who wants explore
the ecological footprint issue City versus countryside in more
detail should read the article GREEN MANHATTAN, “Why New York is
the greenest city in the U.S.” by David Owen, Published in the
New Yorker, 10/18/04.
Let me close with the
words of President Johnson and in his Great Society speech of 1964.
Johnson understood the importance of Cities four years before many
US Cities erupted in flames, an insight still lacking with the
current occupant of the White House. Johnson said:
Our society will
never be great until our cities are great. Today the frontier of
imagination and innovation is inside those cities and not beyond
their borders. It will be the task of your generation to make the
American city a place where future generations will come, not only
to live but to live the good life.
In the discussion we
can go further into how Baltimore can be not only a great City for
the good life but also how we can make it a green, environmentally
friendly sustainable City.
Thank you!
Klaus Philipsen, AIA
President ArchPlan
Inc.
ArchPlan is a
downtown Baltimore architectural firm with special experience in redevelopment, infill,
adaptive reuse and rehabilitation.
|
