Feb 19, 2013 - Let me take you to another reality â my own. When I was kicked ... powerful lights installed on the bui
19 THE FUTURE, GREEN? Deljana Iossifova
THE FUTURE, GREEN?
A Working Paper for SCIBE Deljana Iossifova
The vision of the future is one of ubiquitous scarcity: demand is predicted to outstrip supply – be it for reasons of ever-increasing numbers of urban residents in cities around the world, or of ever-depleting resources and the declining health of our natural environment. One possible and widely propagated response to these emerging challenges has been the sustainability approach: to use as little as possible as efficiently as feasible, so that that more remains available in the future and enough available for all. Smart meters are being hailed as technical aids or even solutions to challenges within the built environment, said to be responsible for 45 per cent of carbon emissions in the UK. Measuring every drop of water, every ray of sun and every breeze of air, collecting information on every resident’s energy use at all times of the day, we are promised that they will help us, the users, to save (on energy, on money) and energy companies, the producers, to distribute and sell in a smart and sustainable way. The refurbishment of existing housing stock is presented as yet another solution to ‘sustainability’ challenges, and this government has just launched its Green Deal initiative to introduce both smart and green technologies to weathered British homes. Whilst the on-going and future pervasive retrofit activities are sure to give the construction industry a much-needed boost, I wonder if this technical fix is, ultimately, going to deliver the much-needed change in the
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3 THE FUTURE, GREEN? realities of people who live their lives tied to the whim of governments, councils and housing associations. Is fixing the facades of estate blocks to match, for instance, current requirements for thermal insulation, going to bring about the comfort and well-being that residents deserve? Or might all this fixing on the surface – justified by the menace of scarcity – be just another step toward the transformation of thinking human beings into mindless consumers prepared to surrender the last bit of command over their lives to ever-calculating, omnipresent and omniscient systems of (profit-seeking) control? Studies have shown that residents on housing estates often gain little financial or health benefits from the retrofit of their homes; one reason is that their energy usage is often already quite low as they struggle to pay for their bills; another lies in the unwanted effects that some well-meant interventions can trigger. Take my favourite example, the recent refurbishment of a housing estate in London’s East End. Built in the 1960s, it sits in-midst a sea of vast and run-down council housing estates, their façades hastily refurbished to camouflage the long-term neglect and entrenched wear – now all the more obvious in the immediate presence of spectacular event architecture (with the Olympic Games 2012 next door) and the rapidly expanding pockets of new-build developments for the fortunate few. When the local housing association took over from the council a few years ago, residents were promised a complete make-over, including new windows (to protect them from the constant noise of the adjacent motorway), better security and a friendlier playground for their children. In a scheme designed to ‘empower’ and make residents proud of their estate – ‘a place with a bright future’ – the local housing association hired a builder to provide an aesthetic make-over and bring the estate up to a state of minimum maintenance. The builder researched refurbishment options using specialist software and building surveys, thermal imaging and air tightness testing and proposed, to the surprise of the housing association, to do all the work they were hired for – and to throw in the
4 Deljana Iossifova complete retrofit of the housing estate and major improvements in energy efficiency from added external insulation, for free. The work was completed over the period of twelve months, but the results were not quite as good as the housing association or the residents had hoped for. Beautified on the outside, the increased insulation and the replacement of windows and door had made many flats even more airtight than they had been before. Coupled with the reality massive overcrowding in the area (one of London’s ‘most deprived’ wards with over 30% of households suffering from overcrowding) and practices aimed at saving on fuel to minimise bills (not opening windows to keep the noise out and the heat in, for instance), the retrofit made living conditions even more difficult for many residents (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Quite airtight before the refurbishment, many flats became overgrown with mould because external insulation and the replacement of windows and doors made them even more airtight. Possible reasons for this malfunctioning include the miscalculation of requirements based on ‘standard’ occupation numbers, rather than actual ‘over-occupation’. Photo: SCIBE.
Let me take you to another reality – my own. When I was kicked out from my Stoke Newington flat a couple of months before the start of the Olympics (of course, our landlord decided to sell), I was thrilled about the opportunity to move into a brand-new flat within a, brightly coloured ‘affordable housing’ development, just a stone’s throw away from the Olympic site.
5 THE FUTURE, GREEN? Every morning, I wake up to the beeping of our smart smoke control system, which has been consistently going off every time one of our upper-floor neighbours breaks open one of the clumsily constructed automatic opening vents (AOVs) because they can no longer bear the suffocating heat that is trapped inside the building, courtesy of our generously glazed facades. This happened so many times, our building management no longer bothers sending out someone to reset the system. Tired residents have taken to breaking violently the little gems of high-end, ever-beeping technology, just to shut them up and get a little bit of rest. Needless to say, the intelligent automated building control system, fooled to believe that the building is on fire, automatically disables our highly-praised key-fob security entry system, complete with high-end security entry phones (with video!) and opens all doors to the public. Anyone can now enter at any time. Unfortunately, the very same system has no effect on the key-fob operated doors to our garbage collection rooms, and judging by the amount of garbage accumulating in front of these doors every day, it may even be that some loop in the system prevents them from opening altogether. But getting some rest at night is not an easy task also because of the reliable and powerful lights installed on the building opposite (‘designing out crime’, anyone?), and it seems only a question of time before residents begin treating these in the same way they treat our beeping smoke alarm apparatus. Our guess is that the solar panels on the roof of our building produce just about enough energy to keep the flood-lights on and the beeping going. Today, as urban practitioners, we are faced with the conflicting realities of globalisation, climate change and perpetual financial turmoil. In our professional lives, we are confronted with the material manifestations of injustice, inequality and waste, knowing that – in order to propose useful interventions – we must find ways to address their non-physical triggers and consequences. It seems that the quick technical fix will likely result in the waste of time, energy and resources. Digital technologies can contribute
6 Deljana Iossifova substantially to successful building retrofit management and monitoring, but in order to deploy them appropriately, it is essential to understand how diverse user groups engage with both the built environment and digital technologies. To do so requires research on the combined social, economic and environmental/technical aspects of building activities. As architects, designers and planners, we need a better, context-specific understanding of the ways in which people live their lives, so that our proposals and interventions respond to their precise needs. I want to argue that the next step must be a step away from design for profit or even enterprise; a step away from design in the service of some few. It must be a step toward the social, and a step toward (re)cognition of creativity as a social skill, as one that serves the needs of the many, and not the wants of the few. After all, the city – indeed – is a shared resource and responsibility; and especially we, as creative professionals, have the possibility of doing otherwise.
WWW.SCIBE.EU Author: Deljana Iossifova, University of Westminster Contact:
[email protected] Published: February 2013 Design: Ben Kirk and Rosie McLaren
Scarcity and Creativity in the Built Environment (SCIBE) is a trans European research project that explores how conditions of scarcity might affect the creativity of the different actors involved in the production of the built environment, based on the analysis of processes in four European cities: London, Oslo, Reykjavik, and Vienna. SCIBE is funded by HERA – Humanities in the European Research Area, a partnership between 21 Humanities Research Councils across Europe and the European Science Foundation (ESF). The SCIBE Working Papers are published as work in progress in order to disseminate the progress of the project: they are thus discursive and provisional and should not be seen as the author’s or research team’s definitive take on the subject. This document is published under a Creative Commons License. This means that you are free to distribute it and quote from it, but that in each case the original must be attributed, acknowledging the author, paper title, date, and SCIBE website (www.scibe.eu) as the source.
