Planning and Infrastructure in England

At the heart of the CLUES project are the numerous urban initatives occuring that are creating a new urban energy system. While some of these are focussed on demand management, many do involve new urban infrastructure. In the light of this, a conference run at the Bartlett School of Planning, UCL last Friday on Infrastructure Development and Planning was very interesting. This highlighted the new regime that has emerged over the last decade and that is being reinforced by the current Coalition Government. Under this approach, planning is centrally about initiating new infrastructure patterns to guide and service new urban development. It also has to mesh with a local government focus on identifying current plans for infrastructure investment from the public and private sectors and matching this against future needs, with a concrete plan (the Infrastructure Delivery Plan) to fill the resulting gap. This regime works most easily where large chunks of infrastructure (a new public transport line) or aggregate infrastructure investment plans (from the health sector) can be identified. How tihs will work when faced with numerous, decentralised initiatives in energy generation and distribution is a moot point. This is an issue we will be looking out for when we conduct our local case studies.

Yvonne Rydin

Frieburg and Malmo (Part 2)

I was in Sweden for the concluding URBAN-NET conference (see http://www.urban-net.org/) which took place in Malmo. This gave the opportunity of looking around Sweden's most cosmopolitan border city and hear the Chair of the Council's Executive Board, Ilmar Repalu, explain about the redevelopment of the Western Harbour as an iconic low carbon settlement. Malmo used to be a shipbuilding port, home to the world's largest crane. By the 1990s the industry had died and the city was left with a large area to regenerate; 1 million sq.m. of dereliction. Sustainability was to be the motto for regeneration and so they started by attraching a Sustainable Housing Expo and built out the first neighbourhood complete with wind turbines, PVs, solar collectors, district heating, heat recovery and an acquifer heat pump into the fractured limestone that allows summer heat to be stored for winter use and winter coolth for summer use. With the advantage of off-shore wind and a PV array, the housing uses 100% locally produced renewable energy. Further developments have continued. Malmo now houses the European Academy for Green Roofs, composting and recycling has been retrofitted into existing council housing areas, and ENVAC has been fitted int to take away waste for recycling. The council bus fleet is 100% powered by biogas; 40% of people cycle to work or school across the flat but windy landscape.
The regeneration of Malmo probably would not have been successful without two features. First, the Oresund bridge now brings the city within 30mins of Copenhagen and has opened up new prospects of inward investment. Second, local government continues to have considerable resources to direct the new development. Electricity supply has been privatised but they still own the water utility and transport is run by a regional public body. When the Swedish government was proposing the creation of a number of new universities, the city council was able to buy the remaining land in Western Harbour and offer it free as a location for the new Malmo University. This was a very canny move as, not only has it resulted in a university in a stunning waterside location, but it has brought a new kind of economic and social activity only five minutes walk from the very centre of the city.
The world's largest crane has now been sold and exported to Korea. The old port workers lined up in tribute to Malmo's passing heritage to see it dismantled and sail away. Now a new iconic twisting tower dominates the skyline, home to some of the service industry that now underpins Malmo's economy. Malmo may have had some luck in being able to underpin sustainable urban development with a rising economic opportunities but it is to the credit of the local council that they took these opportunities and used them so skillfully.

Yvonne Rydin

Frieburg and Malmo (Part 1)

I had the opportunity recently to compare notes on two famed eco-neighbourhoods: Freiburg and Malmo. On 1st March, Wulf Daseking, chief planner of Freiburg came to speak at the Bartlett School of Planning, UCL. He took us through the distinctive planning styles of each decade in the city and highlighted the key decisions that had help create a more sustainable urban pattern. In the 1950s, when considering how to respond to the dreadful bomb damage of WWII, the city council decided to maintain densities in the town and to preserve the pre-existing street lines and plot sizes. Much of the character of the town centre depends on these decisions. In the 1960s, the tram system was put in place and green fingers were preserved from development, preventing continuous urban sprawl. The close link between urban development and accessibility to the tram system was established. Then in the 1970s, investment in public spaces occurred and pedestrianisation extended. The following decade saw a zoning plan that limited large supermarket development dependent on car parking. Existing shopping malls became the focus of densification plans, with added community facilities and green spaces. And more recently, there has been targeted new development which aims at zero carbon standards, low car use, mixed land uses and a strong emphasis on place making. What is distinctive about this period is the development model: a proportion of increased land value on private developments is made available to planners for affordable housing; the council is able to buy land at existing use value and then sells it on at a price that reflects the costs of all the essential infrastructure that the council puts in; and 'baugruppen' are used whereby each plot is built out by a group with a different architect. This enables the cost of new energy infrastructure such as district heating to be recouped and for new development then to fit within the new energy framework. All these principles have now been captured in the Frieburg Charter which was launched by the Academy of Urbanism on 2nd March 2011. Keep an eye out for it!

Yvonne Rydin

Sharing Anglo-American Best Practice

The UCL Environment Institute’s two-day Anglo – American Symposium (24-25 Feb 2011): Sustainable Energy Management and the Built  Environment. Sharing Anglo-American Best Practice was time worthwhile spent. Organised with the support of the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office Science and Innovation Network (Huston Office) and UK Government Foresight, it was an invitation-only event which gather over 30 UK and US academics and practitioners concerned with energy in buildings and the built environment. 

The first day of the event focused on ‘energy in buildings’ and was solemnly opened by Professor Sir John Beddington, the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser. Following a wiz-through the current UK and European energy policy context (presented by Yvonne Rydin of UCL) and its US counterpart (summed up by Rob Petterson of University of Texas at Austin), the floor was open to discussions.

Contributions highlighted the diversity of forces at work in driving energy policy in the two contexts: while in Europe and UK policy has been encouraged and supported by both the European Commission (EU executive) and national government through a wide range of more or less integrated policy documents and legislative pieces, in the US, general business (the economy) has been driven climate change and energy policy as a result of US’ reliance on national coal reserves and relied on relatively patchy state initiatives.

Discussions also debated the UK’s current Localism agenda and raised questions of whether the increasing diversity of approaches at local level could hamper uncertainty for private developers and business, a limiting factor for their involvement; whether the ‘fragmentation’ implied by the Localism agenda should be somehow ‘integrated’ under a ‘national framework’ or ‘standards; and whether ‘local’ is not ‘too local’ when taking into consideration wider sustainability goals.

In the afternoon, the UK’s representatives, Tadj Oreszczyn and Alexi Marmot of UCL, and their American counterparts, Jin Wen of Drexel University and Steve Selkowitz of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, focused on buildings giving us presentations on the key policy and research issues in the two contexts. A number of issues were noted:

• we are moving towards an electric future, with energy policy rapidly moving toward a clearer future, as a result governments and international growing understanding;
• available technologies have not changed much since the 1970s; and
• the R&D has been moving lately away from technology to people and changes in behaviours.

The second day of the symposium focused on the built environment and wider scale of cities. The day kicked off with a presentation given by Lorna Walker of LWC and Sheffield University, which undertook an overview of the British efforts to move forward an urban agenda, including its preoccupation for energy and climate change within the built environment. Seth Schutlz of Clinton Foundation presented next some of their innovative pilot projects under the Climate Positive Development Programme: 17 projects, focusing on private developers and GHG emissions, were spread across 6 continents and sought to employ a ‘common carbon metric’.

During the second part of the morning two presentations were given: Michael Newman of Texas A&M University and Allan Shearer of University of Texas at Austin. Michael posed the question of whether buildings should create energy rather than use energy and advocated integrated infrastructure networks, while Allan considered the social anthropology of energy use.

The event was wrapped up by a round table discussion touching on issues such as opportunities for scaling up and the general public which has not been fully engaged so far despite numerous efforts. The day concluded with an afternoon tour for US visitors of two major British Land commercial developments in London in order to explore their sustainability dimensions.

Catalina Turcu, UCL

4 March 2011

ISSUES 360°

The ISSUES event IMPACT 360° held in London offered a 360° panoramic view of both London’s skyline (from the 28^th floor of Millbank Tower) and ‘EPSRC’s born and bred community’. IMPACT 360° presented 'success stories' from the EPSRC's £45m Sustainable Urban Environments (SUE) research programme to stimulate discussion amongst the researchers, decision makers, practitioners and policy makers about urban futures, urban sustainability and the pathways to achieving impact. There was much talk about inter-disciplinarily, trans-disciplinarily, knowledge transfer and knowledge exchange as seen by academics, practitioners, industries and policy-makers.

Catalina Turcu, UCL

10 February 2010

Scenarios

On Friday I attended an excellent workshop organised by the University of Cambridge Centre for Sustainable Development to progress some scenario work they are doing for Grosvenor Estates on energy management in the property and development sectors to 2050. They currently have four scenarios mapped out:
- Steady Progress (sort-of business as usual but with stronger green values)
- Comfort withoiut concern (climate change? What climate change?)
- Growing Divide (an apocolyptic future of social inequality and unrest)
- Transformational change (the really green option).
These are arranged about two axes concerning values oriented (or not) towards the collective good and the cost/availability of energy.
Developing these scenarios was great fun but I was reminded again how such scenario work depends on the immediate reactions of those present to quite specific questions, questions which they might not have spent much time thinking about. The process assumes that wisdom will arise from the input of many voices at these workshops. In CLUES we are trying to tackle this issue by using scenarios that have already been developed by such processes of engagement but quantifying them and adding detail through a careful process of interrogation over time, looking at the interconnections and complexities. This will hopefully mean that the narratives of the scenarios will have been tested out by the modelling process and be more robust. The scenario work within CLUES starts in Easter 2011.

Yvonne Rydin

Raising the cost of energy and carbon is regressive and difficult to compensate

I went yesterday to Professor Ian Gough’s talk at the LSE on the potential tensions between climate change policy and more traditional (welfare state) policies: Climate Mitigation Policies, Distributive Justice and Social Policies. He is working on a two year ESRC grant which looks at climate change and social policy, trying to rethink the political economy of the welfare state. I found his talk extremely interesting and very relevant to our work – he focused on trajectories to 2050 in the context of government’s current targets (34% reduction in gas emissions by 2020), looking at both private (from households) and public (from welfare services such as NHS and education) contributions as well as direct (coming from production or direct consumption of energy) and indirect (coming from embodied energy) CO2 emissions.

After setting out some general facts, predictions and dilemmas, he concentrated on the UK and its ambitious targets for carbon cuts in the 2008 Climate Change Act. He then posed two questions. First, he asked whether the necessary climate mitigation policies threaten state funding for traditional social policies. The current answer to this question was ‘no’: climate mitigation was to be achieved using ‘mandated market’ mechanisms and the direct impact on public finances was tiny. Second, he asked what the likely distributive consequences of climate mitigation programmes were. The evidence to date was clear that the impact was to be regressive and that it was difficult to compensate low income losers. However, all analysis thus far has concentrated on households’ direct emissions stemming from fuel, electricity and petrol, which account for only 20% of the total. He then presented new analysis of all emissions, including those embodied in the consumption of food, consumables, private services, public services and imported goods. The analysis showed that income was the main driver, with household type and employment status also significant. Again, however, emissions per pound of income were regressive, falling as income rose. Thus all conceivable programmes to raise the cost of energy and carbon were to be regressive and difficult to compensate.

Finally, he considered two alternative policies: personal carbon allowances and a big programme of ‘eco-social investment’. These appeared to be the only viable alternatives. However, they have their limitations, would challenge traditional social policy goals and engender severe fiscal competition with the traditional welfare state.

Catalina Turcu, UCL

Michael Rann, Premier of South Australia sets out low carbon vision

During his visit to London, Michael Rann gave a public lecture to UCL students and staff and also a talk to Australian business interests in London. He presented a fascinating eco-modernist vision for how South Australia could support its local economy while contributing to a low carbon future. Part of this concerned extensive investment in renewable energy generation - particularly wind and solar but also 'hot rocks' or geothermal - together with distribution to other states. The aim is for South Australia to be the renewable energy hub for eastern seaboard of Australia. Already over 50% of the country's installed wind power capacity is in the state. This is in addition to a target for 33% of the state's power needs coming from renewables by 2020. The other half of the strategy is based on mining, particularly uranium mining. This interprets 'low carbon' as including nuclear power. There are massive uranium reserves in South Australia: 40% of the worlds known recoverable reserves. The strategy sees the exploitation of these reserves making an important contribution to decarbonising China, who is keen to import uranium for its nuclear power programme. The pair of talks spoke to an energetic and coherent energy/economic development vision for South Australia but also reminded me of the inevitable tensions and conflicts in the environmental agenda. Nuclear energy and uranium mining remain controversial. They raise a host of issues about land rights, local degradation, safe transit and waste disposal. So are all eco-modernist agendas necessarily environmentally friendly?

Yvonne Rydin

CLUES briefing article published

CLUES briefing article published

An useful summary of the project has been just published as a Briefing paper in the Urban Design and Planning Journal. The briefing sets out the focus and approach of the project and the key research questions that it will address. Do you want to find out more? Why don’t you check http://www.icevirtuallibrary.com/content/article/10.1680/udap.2010.163.4.149?

Catalina Turcu, UCL

UCL Public Lecture

Last week I gave a lecture in the UCL Public Lecture series under the title 'Energising the City' in which I presented the argument for tackling energy consumption and carbon emissions at the urban level and considered some visualisations of what a low energy, low carbon city might look like. These drew on the scenarios in the Foresight report 'Powering Our Lives', which we are developing within the CLUES project. I also tried to convey the essence of the co-evolution framework with its view of technological development and innovation as inherently inter-linked with cultural change, economic frameworks and governance dynamics. The videoing of the lecture broke down unfortunately but the slides with an audio commentary (about 25 mins) is available at:

http://www.youtube.com/user/UCLLHL?feature=mhum#p/c/02FB95682C65FD62/9/IE_Ye4y653I

 

Yvonne Rydin