City of Layers: Reconfiguring the Built Environment for Sustainability

Copyright © 2012 by Mark Urizar.

Book Cover: Image of Hobart Waterfront Urban Development Proposal,

Urizar & Partner Architects (UPA), 2006, www.aaax.com.au

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 03/13/2020

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CONTENTS

Foreword

Chapter 1—Decisions and Outcomes

Nature’s Limits

Questions, Decisions, Consequences…..

Chapter 2—Architecture and Design Decisions

The Enabling of Appropriate Architecture

Architecture and Social Obligations

The Built Form Lifelong Design and Configuration Decisions

Chapter 3—Technology and Design

Information and Knowledge Management

Material Selection

Embodied Energy

Recyclability

Built Performance and its Management

Energy, Available Resources and Management Processes

The Renewable Distributed and Integrated Energy Initiative

Renewable Resource Harvesting

Solar Energy

Water Harvesting and Management

Waste Management, Mitigation and Reduction

Other Renewable Initiatives

Chapter 4—The Process of Enabling Architecture

Planning, Design and Project Management

The Delivery Strategy

Verification and Benchmarking Works

The Lithgow Project Example

The Performing Team

Leadership and Knowledge – Power

The Project Team

Collaboration and Relationship Management

Resolving Conflicts Effectively

Performance Management

Chapter 5—Enabling Sustainability

The Design Challenge

Mirroring Nature / Biomimicry

Sustainable Urban Growth

Transitioning to Benefit Sustainment

Chapter 6—Architecture and the City of Layers

Architecture and Urban Planning

Density, Diversity and Urban Growth

Urban Configuration

Art Matters

Built Form Interfaces

Chapter 7—The Emerging Future with Technology

Keystones

About the Book and Author

Works Cited

This book was written with the belief that once we better understand our possible futures and options within the built environment, we would chose to participate and contribute by doing responsible and appropriate things; the right things and doing these things right. With these, we have the potential to resolve the many present social and environmental problems, and help transform the built environment into a self-reliant and possibly, a sustainable entity, in our lifetime.

Foreword

There is no other comparable expression to architecture. In its simplest form, architecture provides physical shelter, and in its most complex form, it can inspire and affect us both emotionally and spiritually. Architecture has been a vital component of our development, as it rightly, or wrongly defined so much of our lives and environment. As much as we have influenced what is created, the architecture has, in turn, influenced us, both in our behaviours and well-being. With such a capability, architecture has the potential to truly enhance our lives and help resolve many of today’s emerging social and environmental concerns.

We shape our dwellings and afterwards our dwellings shape our lives.¹

Throughout human history, both the shelter and art aspects of architecture fulfilled a very real individual and social need. From the very basic and ancient shelter structures to today’s highly engineered solutions, architecture expresses what we feel and think. As it defines our spaces, it adds to our culture in ways that benefits us, as individuals and as a society.

Architecture evolved with art and a sense of the possible. The earliest known architecture had a very pure and natural form that reflected the way things were. This representational or realism style culminated with the early Greek architecture. And as society became more sophisticated, this style morphed into the romanticism or idealism style, as evident with Gothic architecture. And as time passed, architecture evolved further. It began to lose its reference to nature until it became the abstract style, the modern built form we have today. As the ancient architecture reflects who we were, the newer-built forms represents who we are now, what we value, and aspire to.

As the built form evolved and formed communities and societies, so evolved the architecture-from buildings to today’s complex urban form. And this is where the majority of us now live. We have confined virtually everything we do within built spaces, which have come to reflect how we choose to live and what we like to do. And without much imposed restriction and limited choices, the architecture we produce has endless possibilities.

We use an infinite number material, elements, components, systems, and combinations that vary from stone to steel to glass, from transparency to lightness, from void to solid, and from the inspirational to the disturbed. However, with limitless choices, we have inadvertently disregarded the associated consequences and the long-term liabilities of our decisions and actions. As a result, the built environment has become an endless string of narrowly defined and, often, not-so-well thought-out solutions, configured to function with open-loop processes, where large quantities of energy and resources are consumed at one end, and at the other end, equal amounts of waste are produced. This is our built environment. It is now the largest energy-consuming human entity and a major contributor to ongoing climate change and ecological damage.

With our choices, we have created many seemingly irresolvable dilemmas between humanity and nature, society and ecology, and utility and beauty. These dilemmas have arisen from how we composed and configured the built environment and also, our lives-with each decision made and action taken causing some harm. And these dilemmas cannot simply be resolved with some new guideline or design, or by doing things less bad by reducing, avoiding, minimising, or limiting harm. Resolving these requires a different approach, one that is holistic in nature and is focused at creating socially responsible outcomes.

This is the basis for the ‘city of layers’ concepts and this book. A city is after all, a composition of many different parts and layers. Each can be better designed and configured, so the resulting composition becomes a viable and synergistic whole that can sustain its inhabitants without causing environmental harm.

CHAPTER 1

DECISIONS AND OUTCOMES

After a millennia of seeking protection from the environment, the environment must now be protected from us…..

T oday, our impact on the environment is larger than before. There are simply more of us. We all seem to be preoccupied on some personal quest to improve our well-being and achieve self-fulfilment, despite the costs and consequences. This may well be a trait inherited from our distant past, when we were still competing with others for our survival. Then, it was essential that our kin lived longer and had more offspring. Today, the legacy of this trait remains whilst we no longer need to compete for our surv ival.

In business, competitive traits dominate behaviour. There, our appetite to fulfil our personal need is both insatiable and infinite. We constantly pursue new opportunities to produce and consume more. The more we produce, the more we sell, the more profit we make, the more we consume. To improve efficiencies, we apply technological advances to source more resources, at faster rates, from distant places and in greater volumes. And as we do, we pay little regard to whether these resources are finite or whether such practices are sustainable.

To increase our wealth and improve our well-being, we have privatised many of the world’s natural resources and carved up and sold nearly all the available lands to private interests. Along the way, many of us, as farmers and land-owners are caught within this competitive system. We are forced to compete against nature just to pay our debts, retain our lands and earn a living. On this path, we pay more attention to our legal rights and business transactions than we do on any associated environmental issue or concern.

With the present notions of land ownership, private land use rights, and common resources usage, our ability to perceive, act or resolve any emerging environmental concern is hampered. All our well intentioned measures to deal with emerging concerns are diluted to a piecemeal approach with solutions having to contend with vested interests and legal complexities. We have limited our choices to preventing, mitigating, protecting and restricting certain actions rather than doing things right and the right things. Consequently, our actions are simply not stopping the ongoing ecological damage that is occurring.²

In the past, in the pre-modern age, our ancestors lived with nature. They understood it. To survive, communities collectively monitored and interpreted natural cycles so they could produce perpetual crops. In contrast, today, we live in a larger, denser and artificial urban-built form environment, one that has virtually separated us from nature and our community. We no longer see or experience nature and nor do we understand the emerging consequences we are creating.

Before Christianity and the industrial age, many cultures saw nature as a living entity, as a mother and thought it was unthinkable to damage her or the environment. Since that time, the church, and industrial and scientific revolutions have stopped such reverence by declaring this as druidic superstition. By so doing, nature has been demoted to a dead and soulless assembly of atoms and a resource to be used and consumed, where we can exert our God-given dominion over her. And when some environmental protection is afforded, this comes in the form of environmental stewardship where we only look after nature for some gain, benefit or profit. Such protection pays little regard to the ongoing ecological damage or resulting loss of diversity. As a consequence, the worldwide exploitation of natural resources is ongoing, where most things natural are now transformed into a commodity-consumable product, waste, and more people.

We have inherited a 3.8 billion year-store of natural capital that consists of oil, gas, minerals and natural resources. This is a seemingly large and an inexhaustible supply. For the past centuries, we have taken this capital in its high quality state and converted it into human-made capital, processed products and materials that can be readily consumed. To encourage and increase consumption, products have been kept at a relatively low price³ and in great supply. Arguably, in the past, unrestricted access and few self-imposed consumption limits were necessary to achieve the desired social, political, and economic stability required to progress society, but is this still necessary today?

As we continue to convert large portions of the natural environment into human-made capital, it is hard to see or realise the consequences or impacts of doing so. Accounting systems consider the extraction and consumption of natural capital in terms of income and gains, and fail to take into account how ecosystems are faring or how much irreparable ecological damage is occurring. Without knowing, we could easily exhaust all available supplies of mineral resources, cut down all forests, erode all soils, pollute all aquifers, drive wildlife and fisheries to extinction, and still have a positive balance sheet. On this path, soon we will reach a point where the global decline in biodiversity and ecology will become apparent, and when it does, it will directly impact us and our well-being.⁴

Many environmentalists rightly view that our chosen path translates directly to more urban sprawl, the loss of ancient forests, natural landscapes, species, more pollution⁵, toxification and global warming.

There are limits to our planet. Consider the Easter Island history- an island that reached a point of total devastation when it could no longer support its inhabitants. It may have taken thousand years, but in that time human activity progressively changed the island from an ecologically diverse and thriving ecosystem into a deforested grassland monoculture.

The Easter Island’s original inhabitants may have acted on the belief they had an unlimited supply of resources, all for their enjoyment, consumption and use. With the little apparent tangible value placed on available resources, these were readily used and consumed. The inhabitants would have initially increased their personal wealth and improved their well-being, but by doing so, they also irreparably damaged their environment and their future. By the time Captain Cook visited the island in 1775, he found the remnants of a large population and people eking out a marginal existence.

Are we on a similar path to Easter Island, but at a global scale?

Ancient Rome, the city that predated modern Rome arguably had a similarly history. Ancient Rome flourished because of its close proximity to bountiful lands, fresh water and resources. As it evolved, it expanded its built spaces onto the immediate and fertile lands. To grow, it used its power and influence to increase its ecological footprint and thereby, also its prosperity.

At the height of its power, Ancient Rome had extended it reach into regions of North Africa and Southern Europe. And to feed of its growing population Rome sourced all its resources and materials from these lands. Through time, this practice reduced the regenerative capabilities of the harvested lands and transformed formally fertile lands into barren lands, possibly through the process of deforestration and salinitsation. This may have precipitated Ancient Rome’s collapse as a superpower.

Today, we seem to be on a similar trajectory as Easter Island and Ancient Rome, albeit on a global scale. Modern cities have expanded onto their most arable lands and thereby have reduced their overall self-sufficiency, becoming overly-reliant on sourcing resources globally, from greater distances and, also increasing the global competition for the remaining, scarcer resources.

The United States highlights our predicament. It has, as a whole, a capacity of around 9 million square kilometres and a total ecological footprint of nearly 27 million⁶. This is the very definition of un-sustainability.

Our lives and built environment are geared for ongoing consumptive growth. We have designed and configured our systems and process, including the built environment to function as a giant-resource consumption machine, metabolizing and converting large quantities of the natural environment into economic benefits and ecological damage. We are playing a zero sum⁷ game with the environment. Our fortunes are inversely tied to each other. Our gains result in nature’s loss and vice versa. As we grow, nature’s capability diminishes. Everything we do seems to contribute to some social problems or ecological damage. Without change, we are bound to soon reach a crisis point; we will either run out of the finite resources or reach the limits of Earth’s regenerative capacity.

NATURE’S LIMITS

So how much of nature do we have compared to how much we use?

The view of the Earth as an inexhaustible reservoir with abundant resources and resilient systems persists to this day. This view has caused a disconnect with reality, and between people and their environment. This disconnect has allowed society to continue with many acceptable practices and processes that are known to adversely impact the environment. These both reduce biodiversity