BUFFETED BY THE megatrends of climate change and resource depletion, our cities will need multiple strategies to resiliently adapt. In previous chapters we discussed the investments cities can make in transportation, food, water, wastewater, solid waste, and natural infrastructure to make their metabolism more resilient. These provide much of the flexible armature upon which cities thrive.
Another important element of any city’s metabolism is energy. In the suburbs, automobiles often are the largest energy consumer, with the energy expended to get to and from homes often as high as the energy used in the home itself. But the story is different in cities. For example, 80 percent of all energy used in New York City is consumed in its buildings. If one wants to make a city more resilient, greening its buildings is a high-leverage place to intervene. A city can reduce the energy and water use of its buildings with an integrated package of regulations, incentives, investments, measurements, and feedback to shift occupant behaviors. Such programs also make economic sense. Energy and water reductions of up to 30 percent typically cost very little to achieve, and generate a return on investment on the order of 20 percent a year for their owners. With appropriate financing, even deeper reductions are achievable.
Green Buildings
The green building movement began in the late 1960s as part of the cultural flowering of alternative ideas. Local builders and architects began experimenting with new technologies, designing and building homes made of logs, adobe, and other local, natural materials; using solar systems for electricity, heating, and hot water; and using composting toilets for waste. E. F. Schumacher, a British economist who wrote the influential book Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered, described the systems needed for the world to regain its natural balance as “appropriate technologies.” These, he proposed, are technical systems that are small-scale, decentralized, labor-intensive, energy-efficient, environmentally sound, and locally controlled.1
In 1973 instability in the Middle East caused oil prices to shoot up from $20 a barrel, where they had been for nearly a century, to $100 in less than three years. The United States was completely unprepared for this dramatic spike in energy costs, which affected almost every aspect of the economy, and hit the building and transportation industries especially hard. Real estate values dropped. Higher oil and electricity costs pushed many struggling building owners in inner-city neighborhoods like the South Bronx over the edge, leading to an increase in abandonment. American automakers lost market share to much more efficient Japanese and European car manufacturers, forcing the closure of plants throughout the Midwest. The ensuing economic crisis provided a sobering glimpse into how dependent our civilization had become on fossil fuel.
President Jimmy Carter, who was deeply interested in science and the environment, responded by significantly expanding government investment in renewable-energy research. As a symbol of his commitment to create alternatives to foreign oil, President Carter put solar panels on the roof of the White House. Unfortunately, Carter also created incentives to shift most of the nation’s electricity-generating plants from burning foreign oil to burning domestic coal, accelerating climate change and spewing mercury and other toxic waste into the air.
The oil shortages of the mid-1970s that awakened the United States to its energy vulnerability hit low-income families hardest, often forcing them to choose between paying for heating oil and gasoline, or other necessities like food and medication. To provide relief, in 1976 Congress created the Weatherization Assistance program, which helped low-income and senior owners of existing homes make them more energy efficient, freeing up funds for food, health care, education, transportation, and housing.
The Other 99
In 2015 there were roughly 135 million buildings in the United States, of which a majority were single-family homes. All together these buildings consume 40 quadrillion BTUs of energy annually.2 In boom economic years the United States increases its stock of buildings by about 1 percent, whereas in slow times the nation’s building stock increases by only about a third of a percent. Although it’s important for all new buildings to be as energy efficient as possible, they consume only 1 percent of the nation’s energy. Increasing the efficiency of the other 99 percent, the nation’s existing building stock, has a much larger impact. Weatherizing and upgrading existing homes—sealing up cracks and gaps in the exterior walls, adding insulation, replacing old single-pane windows with double-pane low “e” windows, substituting new, efficient water heaters and boilers for old ones, and installing Energy Star–rated appliances—is an easy first step toward creating greener and more economically viable communities, and reducing the emission of climate-changing greenhouse gases. And weatherization makes economic sense. Federal studies show that every dollar invested in home energy conservation pays back $2.51.3
These simple fixes not only can reduce energy use in our buildings by 30–40 percent but also can increase employment. A study by the Center for American Progress projected that the United States could create 650,000 permanent jobs by weatherizing 40 percent of its homes. Ninety-one percent of those jobs would be with small businesses, companies that employ fewer than twenty people. And 89 percent of the materials used in weatherization are made in the United States.4
If a nation wants to be more resilient in the face of climate change, economic volatility, or potential energy shortages, the easiest place to begin is with energy-efficiency retrofits of its existing buildings. We also need to make new buildings greener, and it’s not hard to do.
Designing and Constructing New Green Buildings
The energy shortages of the 1970s were followed by an energy glut in the 1980s. Americans quickly forgot the oil crisis and the energy conservation measures it inspired. The Reagan administration, with its pro-oil energy policy, took the symbolic step of removing President Carter’s solar panels from the roof of the White House and, more detrimentally, cut the budget of the National Renewable Energy Lab by 90 percent. But the most damaging legacy of the Reagan administration was its promotion of the false notion that investing in environmental strategies, and regulating environmental impacts, must inevitably undermine economic vitality. We now know that environmental protection and economic development can be very mutually reinforcing, but it’s been hard to correct the misunderstanding that we must make a choice between the economy and the environment. In fact, China is now spending 12 percent of its GDP on health and other costs related to its horrendous urban air pollution. So failure to protect the environment is very expensive.
But until the 2000s, the American environmental community also didn’t recognize the conjoined environmental and economic potential of green cities. It, too, believed that the economy and nature were deeply separate.
Even today, despite the fact that twice as many Americans work for solar industries as work in the coal industry,5 many Americans still believe that environmental regulations, incentives, and investments stifle growth. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Wind, solar, and biomass generate 2.5–9.5 times as many jobs as coal, oil, and gas for every $1 million contribution to GDP.6 The World Economic Forum’s 2013 Green Investment Report notes, “Economic growth and sustainability are interdependent, you cannot have one without the other. . . . Greening global economic growth is the only way to satisfy the needs of today’s population, and up to nine billion people by 2050, driving development and well-being while reducing greenhouse gas emissions and increasing natural resource productivity. . . . The investment required for water, agriculture, telecoms, power, transport, buildings, industrial and forestry sectors, according to current growth projections stands at about US $5 trillion a year to 2020. . . . The challenge will be to enable an unprecedented shift in long term investment from conventional to green alternatives to avoid locking in less efficient, emissions intensive technologies for decades to come.”7
As the 1980s gave way to the 1990s, a small group of committed architects, engineers, builders, and academics began to consider how to develop more environmentally responsible and energy-efficient new buildings. In 1993 the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) was formed as a nonprofit trade organization with a mandate to promote the design, construction, and operation of green buildings. The USGBC had no regulatory power, but its founders, Mike Italiano, David Gottfried, and Rick Federizzi, surmised that if they could create a market for green buildings and green building services, this leverage point could change the design and construction industries’ culture. To do so, they proposed to independently certify green attributes of buildings so that their greenness could be evaluated and compared, and “bragging rights” could be conferred on buildings that achieved the highest ratings.
In 1998, the USGBC issued its first green building rating system, LEED, an acronym for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. The LEED system assigns points for a variety of environmental attributes, including energy efficiency, use of recycled materials, water efficiency, and use of low-toxicity materials: the higher the point score, the greener the building. Buildings that meet minimum standards can be certified as LEED buildings, and those that perform better than baseline achieve rankings of silver, gold, or platinum. By 2015 the LEED system had spread from the United States to much of the rest of the world. More than 3.3 billion square feet had been certified under the program, a number that was growing at a rate of almost 2 million square feet a day. LEED particularly appeals to the higher end of the market: almost half of all new buildings valued over $50 million are being LEED certified. The founders of LEED were right—voluntary certification and transparent information could transform markets. LEED gold certification is now part of the definition of the world’s best office buildings, and top companies and law firms will not consider moving into a new building without it.
The growth of green buildings improves the resilience of cities, helping them use less energy and water. Green building also supports the development of local cyclical economies—construction and demolition wastes are easily recycled into new construction materials. LEED-certified buildings on average are now diverting more than 40 percent of their demolition and construction wastes from landfills to recycling, with the best reaching 100 percent. This involves recycling about 80 million tons of waste a year, and the amount is expected to grow to 540 million tons by 2030.8
One of the strengths of LEED is that its point system is continuously being improved by feedback from the owners, architects, and contractors who use it. It is also increasingly focusing on outcomes, requiring that certified buildings measure and verify their green achievements. The program has also diversified, rating hospitals, industrial buildings, and university labs.
In its early years LEED was not well suited to multifamily housing, and this was especially true when it came to affordable housing. The solution to this problem came in the form of the Enterprise Green Community Guidelines.
The Greening of Affordable Housing
Enterprise Community Partners is a national not-for-profit that brings more than a billion dollars a year of financing, technical assistance, and other community-enhancing solutions to low-income neighborhoods throughout the United States. In 2004 Enterprise launched the Green Communities program to encourage the design and construction of green affordable housing.
Over the last decade a great deal of research has been focused on the nexus between transportation, health, and affordability for low-income families. After the cost of housing, transportation is the second-largest expense for low-income and working-class families who depend on the automobile to get to and from work, school, shopping, and so on. When affordable housing is well served by public transportation and residents can easily walk to nearby workplaces, schools, retail stores, and medical providers, it not only saves them the cost of auto ownership, but is healthier for both people and the environment. The Enterprise Green Community Guidelines encourage the development of affordable housing in transit-rich locations with other services within walking distance.
The Green Community Guidelines also encourage developers to address other issues typically faced by low-income residents. For example, they often live in poorly insulated homes, with huge winter heating and summer air-conditioning costs. Reducing their energy and water usage helps lower the high utility bills low-income families must pay for heat, air-conditioning, lighting, and washing. The air quality of low-income neighborhoods is often quite toxic because they tend to be located on cheap land, close to industrial areas, power plants, bus depots, highways, and incinerators. These direct exposures not only make residents of low-income communities more prone to illnesses, but also reduce their resilience, making them more susceptible to environmental triggers in the home such as glues, caulks, binders, and other volatile compounds found in typical paints, kitchen cabinets, and flooring. The Enterprise Guidelines require not only the use of nontoxic materials in the home, but also sufficient air circulation to clear out toxins.
To increase the scale and impact of its green guidelines, Enterprise focused on another key leverage point in the metabolism of urban development: financing. All affordable housing is funded by a complex package of public and private financing, so Enterprise began to educate the banks, investors, cities, and states that fund affordable housing on the benefits of its guidelines. The green program added only 1 or 2 percent to a building’s construction budget, an amount that was easily repaid from lower operating costs. Enterprise Green Community criteria are now required for construction of affordable housing by most major cities in the United States, by more than half of its states, and by all of the major banks. By 2020 is it very likely that all new affordable housing built in the United States will be built green, the first building sector ever to meet this goal.
Via Verde—Gardens in the Sky
At the groundbreaking ceremony in May 2010 for Via Verde, a new model of green affordable urban housing located in the heart of the South Bronx, Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr., proclaimed, “Let it be known throughout the world, that where the South Bronx once burned, we are building gardens in the sky.”
Via Verde is full of green design features, but none is more visible than its garden-covered roofs. The project sits on a long, narrow site running north to south, bordered by a rail line. It has public housing and a high school on one side, and a long, low retail and office building on the other. Via Verde’s design strategy turned the site’s odd shape into an advantage. The tallest part of the complex was placed on the north side, and then stepped down so that it is lowest on the south side, allowing its roofs maximum exposure to the summer sun. These roofs provide the community with an orchard, fruit and vegetable gardens, and outdoor places for children to play, for seniors to read and relax, and for all to exercise.
The project was an outgrowth of the “New Housing New York Legacy Competition,” a brainchild of the New York branch of the American Institute of Architects, Enterprise Community Partners, and then–New York City Housing Commissioner Shaun Donovan. The contest challenged developers to come up with a new model for green affordable housing development. The winning co-developers were Phipps Houses and my own company, Jonathan Rose Companies, with the design by the architecture firms Dattner Architects and Grimshaw.9 With Via Verde, we set out to see if we could not only provide energy-efficient affordable housing in a transit-rich location, but also improve health outcomes for its residents. Our premise was that green affordable housing constructed from healthier materials—with lower energy costs; lots of public transit, shopping, and other services nearby; and an on-site health clinic—would increase a family’s resilience, its ability to absorb adversity. In addition, if the project was architecturally stunning, it would contribute a sense of pride to its neighborhood. The premise proved to be true.
Via Verde, completed in 2012, was designed to serve families with a mix of incomes, as income diversity tends to create healthier communities and better opportunities for the children of lower-income families. When it opened, its 151 affordable apartments rented for $460 to $1,090 a month to families earning between $17,000 and $57,000 a year. The project’s 71 co-op apartments sold for $79,000 and $192,000, depending on size, and were affordable to households earning between $37,000 and $160,000 a year. Unit layouts include flats, innovative duplexes, and live-work units with a first-floor workspace. The building also has a ground-floor health-care center operated by Montefiore Hospital, a pharmacy, and community facilities that include a terrific gym, a community room, a kitchen, a wonderful outdoor children’s play area, an amphitheater, orchards, and gardens.
Via Verde’s apartments were designed to be at least 30 percent more energy efficient than a standard new building. Motion sensors in stairways and corridors conserve electricity, turning lights on only when needed. Its apartments feature Energy Star–rated appliances, nontoxic materials, and high-efficiency mechanical systems. Its large windows provide panoramic views, daylight, and fresh air. Its elevators, corridors, heating system, and pumps are powered during the day by a 64-kilowatt solar system.
More than 80 percent of the project’s construction and demolition waste was recycled, and more than 20 percent of the materials in the building came from recycled sources. Another 20 percent of the materials were locally manufactured, minimizing transportation energy and supporting the local economy. For example, the concrete blocks in Via Verde were made a hundred miles away in a working-class Hudson River town by the Kingston Block Company, using regionally recycled materials in its concrete products. Via Verde was also designed to consume less water by using water-conserving toilets, showers, and sinks. And the community gardens and orchards are watered with rainwater, which is captured and saved in rooftop storage tanks. This also reduces runoff into the city’s sewer systems.
In keeping with the Enterprise Green Community Guidelines, Via Verde’s residents can easily walk to shopping, they live literally adjacent to schools and sports fields, and are just a few blocks away from subway lines that reach the job-rich East and West Sides of Manhattan.
Green Roofs
Via Verde is not alone in celebrating green roofs. Their rapid spread to all kinds of buildings is based on their many benefits. The first is aesthetic: they look great, and enhance real estate values. Many market-rate apartment and office buildings now use green roofs as a leasing feature. Green roofs also provide direct economic benefits. They protect the underlying waterproofing layer so that it lasts longer. By retaining and then evaporating water, they cool the roof and the area under it, easing air-conditioning demands; this also reduces flow into the storm-water system, and the water that does flow out of the building is naturally filtered. Plants on a green roof also capture particulate matter and filter noxious gases, cleaning the air. They absorb sound, reducing street noise by 40 decibels. Properly planned, they can improve a city’s biodiversity. And like weatherization programs, green roofs create construction and maintenance jobs, they increase occupant well-being, and finally, they grow healthy food, available to residents with minimal transportation costs.
When green building strategies are able to generate multiple benefits like these, they are rapidly adopted into the mainstream of development practice.
Passive Resilience
In 2005, Alex Wilson, editor of Environmental Building News, was ruminating on the length of time it took New Orleans to achieve even the most basic levels of recovery after Hurricane Katrina. Electric power was out for months. In the damp, hot climate, buildings quickly grew moldy, making them uninhabitable. Wilson proposed that in addition to being green, buildings needed a quality he called passive survivability, “the ability of a building to maintain critical life-support conditions for its occupants if services such as power, heating fuel, or water are lost for an extended period.”10 For example, if a building collected rainwater in a cistern and the city water supply system was disabled in a storm, the cistern could provide residents with some fresh water. And if its first-floor walls were made of mold-resistant materials like concrete block rather than drywall, the building could continue to be occupied after it was cleaned up, instead of having to be evacuated until the drywall could be replaced.
In the aftermath of both Katrina and Sandy, oil refineries were shut down and fuel storage and pumping facilities lost power; as a result, gas stations ran out of diesel fuel and gasoline, and a few days after that, diesel generators died. Hospital surgeries were finished by candlelight. Patients had to be moved, often carried down flights of stairs in the absence of working elevators. People, buildings, communities, and cities thrive when they are connected to larger networks and systems, but they need to be designed to function when they’re disconnected. They need to be able to survive when urban systems go down.
Via Verde was designed with passive survivability in mind. If the power goes out in a stifling hot summer, residents can open windows and benefit from natural cooling, since every apartment is designed to face in at least two directions. This, along with ceiling fans and concrete ceilings and floors, reduces each apartment’s use of energy during a hot summer, and stores that heat in winter. The walls are well insulated, and windows have exterior sunshades that protect them from the hot summer sun, but allow in the sun’s warmth in winter. The project’s colorful stairwells are adjacent to the outside of the building and provided with windows so that if the power goes out they will be naturally illuminated by day, saving the battery-powered emergency lighting for nighttime.
Passive Houses
The most advanced examples of passive resilience are “passive houses,” a term developed in 1998 by Professors Bo Adamson of Lund University, Sweden, and Wolfgang Feist, at the University of Innsbruck, in Austria. Passive houses are so well insulated they can be kept warm by the body heat of their residents, lights, and a few small appliances. When the power goes out they may become colder, but they won’t freeze. They typically use less than 20 percent of the energy of normal buildings.
Currently passive houses cost 10 percent more to build, although that cost is rapidly declining. The economic and environmental benefits of the energy they save year after year are enormous.
Brooklyn Passive Townhouse. The lighter buildings of this infrared photograph represent heat passing through the facades of typical brownstones. The well-insulated passive house in the center shows very little heat loss. (Sam McAfee, sgBuild)
Healthy Buildings
The first round of green buildings focused on reducing their impact on the natural environment. The next generation added an emphasis on the health of their residents. In 1997 my firm co-developed Maitri Issan House with the Greyston Foundation, a Yonkers, New York–based not-for-profit that provides housing, jobs, preschool, and health-care facilities for homeless and low-income families. Maitri Issan House was designed for people with HIV/AIDS who, at the time it was built, were dying from the disease. It was one of the nation’s first green buildings to specifically focus on the health of its residents. Along with seniors, young children, and people with chronic respiratory disease, HIV/AIDS patients, with their compromised immune systems, are very sensitive to volatile organic chemicals (VOCs). In developing Maitri Issan House we sought to eliminate every source of VOCs, even building our own furniture to avoid the chemical-laden furniture that was then the only choice in the market. The project also included an on-site medical center that provided both traditional and integrative therapies.
By the early 2000s it had become clear that VOCs were connected to a global epidemic of childhood asthma. We now know that VOCs in the home can cause damage to the liver, kidneys, and central nervous system, as well as cancer, in addition to allergic skin reactions, nausea, vomiting, headaches, fatigue, dizziness, and loss of coordination. Modern buildings are full of these toxic compounds. Kitchen cabinets are made with glues that emit formaldehyde, and carpets, vinyl flooring, and the adhesives that hold them to the floor, as well as paints and caulks, are often laden with VOCs. The Healthy Building Network notes that vinyl sheet flooring, used increasingly in both affordable and market-rate housing, is laden with carcinogens, mutagens, and developmental and reproductive toxicants. A sixty-unit apartment building with vinyl flooring is likely to contain eleven tons of hazardous chemicals. Eventually, it is likely that cities will ban the use of these toxic compounds, as the evidence of their negative health effects becomes more widely known.
The health impacts of VOC emissions, chemical toxins, mold, and insect infestation are significant drivers of health-care costs. Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in northwestern Harlem struggled to deal with the epidemic of asthma that was overloading its emergency room. In an effort to reduce the number of visits, it identified its top hundred asthma patients and increased their drug prescriptions, but that didn’t work. The hospital eventually figured out that the most effective way to cure these patients was not to give them more drugs but to go to their apartments and clean up the mold and other toxins that were triggering their asthma. The lives of the hospital’s patients rapidly improved, their health-care costs dropped significantly, and the emergency room was freed up to address other kinds of urgent care. Recognizing this connection between health and the home environment, doctors in Boston are now authorized to write a prescription for a building inspection if they believe that a health problem is caused by an issue in a patient’s home. But there are other aspects of a building that can also improve its residents’ health.
On Via Verde’s seventh floor, a gym full of up-to-date exercise equipment opens out into a roof garden designed to encourage fitness. The garden also provides quiet, reflective space, as meditation and yoga have proved to be very effective in reducing stress and increasing human resilience. The ground-floor community medical center, run by the Bronx-based Montefiore Hospital, serves both Via Verde’s residents and people in the neighborhood, encouraging a shift from expensive emergency room health care to more effective and less expensive preventive health care. A local pharmacy sits beside it, and nearby bicycle storage areas encourage biking, while state-of-the-art playgrounds encourage youngsters to run and play outside, in the complex’s secure, sunlit courtyard.
New York City’s health department is carrying out a five-year study to determine if living in Via Verde makes a difference to the health of its residents. Every resident who moved into the building when it was first leased was given a health survey. An equal number of residents who applied to the building but did not move in were also surveyed. After five years of data collection, they will be able to compare and see if the building made a difference.
Via Verde’s emphasis on health and exercise is intentional. People living in low-income communities are particularly susceptible to chronic health issues, including depression. As the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Survey notes, “Americans in poverty are more likely than those who are not to struggle with a wide array of chronic health problems, and depression disproportionately affects those in poverty the most. About 31 percent of Americans in poverty say they have at some point been diagnosed with depression, compared with 15.8 percent of those not in poverty. Impoverished Americans are also more likely to report asthma, diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart attacks—which are likely related to the higher level of obesity found for this group—31.8% vs. 26% for adults not in poverty.”11 Given the special vulnerability of impoverished families to suffer from depression and chronic diseases, the benefits of exercise and a healthy diet have an even more positive effect on low-income families than they do for those who are better off.
As the health-care payment system moves toward paying hospitals, HMOs, and other providers a fixed price per person per year, they are motivated to keep their patients healthier at lower costs. One of the least expensive ways to do this is by encouraging healthier buildings. And the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s work demonstrates that neighborhood attributes such as walkability and ten-minute access to parks and open space have positive health benefits. So the built environment affects the quality not only of nature’s health, but also of our own. Perhaps soon our health insurance rates will vary depending on the greenness of our homes and our neighborhoods.
The Impact of Human Behavior
As buildings become more and more energy efficient, the behavior of their occupants becomes an increasingly significant determinant of energy use. The United States Army discovered this when it tried to figure out how green it should make the new family housing that it was planning to build. It created a test community with four model homes—one designed to normal army standards, one to modest green standards, one that was very green, and one that was designed to be net zero, with enough solar power on its roof, and energy-efficient appliances inside, that it should not need any additional energy at all. But after the army collected a year’s worth of data on how the homes performed, the results were confounding. The normal house used the least amount of energy, the net-zero house used the most. What happened? The answer lay in the behavior of the residents. The family that lived in the normal house was very careful—they turned off their lights and TV when they left a room, dried their wash on a clothesline, and used their ceiling fan for cooling except when it was very hot. The net-zero family was the opposite, with lights, TVs, electronic games, and air-conditioning running all the time. The way we build is not enough, the way that we live also matters.
And behavior also matters in office buildings. In 1985, plug loads, the power drawn by plugged-in devices, consumed 15 percent of the energy used in a typical office building. By 2010, office plug loads had grown to 45 percent. Every year we seem to accumulate more and more devices that require electricity—computers, smartphones, iPads, smart whiteboards, coffeepots, microwaves, and popcorn makers. Some of our behavior in buildings is affected by the building’s design; if a room is poorly lit, for example, we’re more likely to add a desk lamp; if the heating system is not well balanced, we might open a window in the middle of the winter when a room is too hot, or plug in an electric heater if it’s too cold. Many behaviors are the result of designs that could be easily improved.
One such strategy is called choice architecture. The way our technology is designed creates a natural bias toward certain behaviors. The toilets in another green demonstration building, the National Renewal Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Boulder, Colorado, were designed to save water with a handle that single-flushes when it’s lifted up, and double-flushes when it’s pushed down. Despite the water-saving technology, very little water was actually saved. Most people are used to pushing down to flush. And it turns out that a surprising number of people flush public toilets with their foot. If the toilet had been designed to single-flush with a downward push, far more people would use that feature—and save water. Another example can be found in American hotel rooms, where it’s all too easy to leave the room for the day with all the lights on; in European hotels occupants must turn on the lights by placing their keys in a switch that turns them off when the key is removed and the occupant leaves.
People also set their behavior according to what they perceive as social norms; as we’ve seen, composting is a social norm in San Francisco, but not in São Paulo. When most people in an office turn off their lights when leaving a room, others follow, even those who may not do so at home. Shifting behaviors has two advantages: it’s quick and it’s essentially free. So in designing an environmental strategy it always makes sense to think through the behavioral issues that could impede or improve its efficacy.
The Garrison Institute’s Climate Mind and Behavior program, an early voice in the role that behavior could play to reduce the human impact on the climate, identified feedback as a key leverage point to shift behavior: the same signal that tunes natural ecologies can also tune our behavior. People who live or work in places where they pay their own energy or water bill will use much less energy or water than those who don’t pay for it. They are more likely to turn off the lights when they leave a room, or to wait for a full load before washing their clothes. When utilities are included in the rent we are more likely to waste them, because we think of them as free. The problem is that we often don’t get our utility bills until a month later, so it’s harder to connect our actions with their costs. Smart meters can give people real-time feedback. For example, a TV on standby gives the illusion that it’s off, but uses more electricity than an efficient refrigerator. With a smart meter display in the home, a resident is more likely to unplug the TV when the meter then reports how much that would save a month.
Behavior-change strategies are increasingly being used by cities to increase their health and resilience. By creating separated bike lanes, they are making biking easier and safer. As a result, it is the fastest-growing method of commuting for trips under ten miles in the United States. In cities that require smart meters to give real-time feedback to residents, energy usage is down. When cities raise water rates, water usage declines. When cities fine residents for not separating their garbage, recycling increases. When a city makes its environmental goals explicit and thinks through how to encourage behavior shifts, it gets the best results.
The Living Building Challenge
In 2006 the International Living Building Institute and the Cascadia Green Building Council issued the greenest and most holistic building guidelines to date, the Living Building Challenge. They posed the questions, “What if every single act of design and construction made the world a better place? What if every intervention resulted in greater biodiversity; increased soil health; additional outlets for beauty and personal expression; a deeper understanding of climate, culture and place; a realignment of our food and transportation systems; and a more profound sense of what it means to be a citizen of a planet where resources and opportunities are provided fairly and equitably?”12
These are extraordinary questions that call for a shift from designing and constructing green buildings with the goal of reducing their environmental impacts, to designing and constructing buildings that contribute to restoring a healthy, integrated natural and social ecology. Imagine a city as a forest where every plant, animal, and soil organism contributes to the health of the entire ecosystem. The Living Building Challenge calls on us to think of each new building in the same way.
The first urban multistory building to meet the Living Building Challenge was the Bullitt Foundation’s office building in Seattle, the Bullitt Center, opened in 2014. The building’s flat rooftop solar system generates 60 percent more electricity than the building requires and sends the balance back to the grid. This remarkable net positive energy outcome was achieved by optimizing several building systems to reduce energy use, and integrating them. For example, the building’s windows use highly insulating glass, and computer-controlled sensors and timers open and close exterior blinds to maximize comfort while minimizing energy use. Windows automatically open and close to circulate air throughout the building. Blinds can even be tilted at different angles to let in more or less of the sunlight to warm and light the building, while a solar-powered geothermal system uses the constant 55-degree temperature of the earth to supplement the sun’s heat and to cool the building.
The solar photovoltaic panels on the roof also collect rainwater that is used to water the building’s gardens, to flush its toilets, and to flow through its showers. The building’s wastewater is recycled, collected, and filtered in the basement before being pumped to a natural wetland on the roof where it is cleaned by natural organisms, then piped under the building to recharge the natural groundwater system, now every bit as clean as it was when it started the cycle as rain. And the building’s managers have promoted a green culture to shift its occupants’ behaviors to support the building’s green goals.
Microgrids
Our urban systems tend to be connected, but not interconnected. Buildings are directly linked to street, water, sewer, electrical, and data systems, but these are usually fixed one-way relationships. Once we begin to construct buildings like the Bullitt Center, which generate excess solar power and clean water, we can begin to interconnect them into ecological neighborhoods, or ecodistricts. One of the easiest places to begin is with electrical power. In most cities electricity is generated at a few large plants, often powered by fossil fuels, and then fed into the electricity grid. These grids are often managed by outdated analog systems, which do not respond well to volatility. When the grid is overstressed, the whole system crashes, as it did in northern India in 2012. In the United States, grid disruptions cost the economy between $25 billion and $70 billion each year in lost output and wages, spoiled inventory, delayed production, and damage to the grid.13
One of the advantages of extended power networks is that they can connect cities to remote solar, wind, and hydro energy resources. But the energy system becomes much more resilient when it integrates the large-scale centralized power system known as the bulk power supply with smaller, local, smart, digitally controlled systems like the solar system on the roof of the Bullitt Center. This combination of a range of energy suppliers and scales of supply, along with local battery storage, controlled by intelligent feedback, is called a microgrid. According to Robert Galvin, former chair and CEO of Motorola, “This emerging web of smart micro grids is like a medieval knight’s chain mail, a flexible array that is stronger than the sum of its parts.”14
Without such integration, the current bulk power system is hugely inefficient. A steam-turbine coal-fired power plant is able to convert only 39–47 percent of the coal’s heat to electricity. Another 6.5 percent of the energy is lost due to line losses, or “friction” in the grid.15 The bulk power system is also inflexible. Coal-fired power plants, designed to run twenty-four hours a day, are not easy to turn on and off. And they are terribly polluting.
Microgrids can integrate several sources of power: solar, wind, biogas from waste treatment plants, co-generation, which combines power generation and heating, and bulk power. Local sources of power suffer much smaller line losses. Buildings like the Bullitt Center connected to a smart grid can be both consumers and producers, sometimes buying power, sometimes selling it. Their occupants can also provide power from battery-powered cars parked in their garages during the day, when energy prices are high, and recharge them at night when energy prices are lower. As battery technology improves, more buildings will use them to provide power during the day when it is most expensive, and buy energy at night when its cost is lower, smoothing out demand and increasing the resilience of the system.
Microgrids come in a range of sizes; they can be small enough to power a single building using rooftop solar panels, or gas-fired co-generation plants. Neighborhood-scaled microgrids are becoming increasingly viable. As we have seen, water-treatment plants can generate excess electricity from their biogas digesters to power thousands of nearby homes. Solar power on the roofs of large industrial buildings can also produce excess power to share with neighbors.
Smart grids form mesh networks, where each node has the capacity to generate and disseminate its own energy and information, but is also able to relay the energy and information of other nodes. If one or more links in the networks go down, others can pick up the slack. This allows microgrids to be self-healing. Because multiple, dynamically balanced energy and information pathways are woven together, if one link breaks, the others continue to provide power. Smart grids can detect power imbalances or outages, analyze the causes, and respond. They observe the behavior of the humans and equipment that use power, learn to predict their patterns, and can provide feedback to help reduce use in times of stress. This integration of energy and information begins to function as emergy, Howard Odum’s pathway to increase the complexity of a system in spite of entropy.
Smart microgrids are informed not only by big data about the larger electrical system that they are part of, but also by small data, localized data that may be of little interest to the larger system but is meaningful on a smaller scale. For example, one of the most energy-consuming aspects of a refrigerator is its defrosting system. During a power shortage a smart local grid could identify all the refrigerators it is serving and signal them to disable their defrosters until the emergency is over. A meshed energy/information network can provide consumers with direct feedback on their energy use, helping to shift energy behaviors, and through social media to encourage a culture of energy conservation. Microgrids also support equality in ecological economics. In contrast to an electrical system operated by a few giant investor-owned utilities, most elements of a meshed energy system are owned by users. Their prosperity arises from the diversity, coherence, and sustainability of the whole.
As the world urbanizes it is electrifying, and this is good. Perhaps no modern system transforms people’s lives as much as electricity. It is responsible for tremendous increases in productivity. Its light makes it easier for children to study at night; it supports cell phone and Internet access, enhancing people’s connections to one another and to a world of information.
The conventional grid system simply isn’t up to the task of bringing electricity’s benefits to every home on earth. The International Energy Agency projects that globally $250 billion per year needs to be spent on energy infrastructure investments for the next fifty years. But there is another model for how this could be spent. As the world’s telecommunications systems expanded into the developing world, they skipped over the expensive, centralized fixed landline model and went directly to the distributed wireless cell phone model. As a result, by 2014, 6 billion of the world’s 7 billion people had access to a mobile phone, 1.5 billion more than had access to flush toilets. In the same way, microgrids can spread the benefits of electrification more quickly and cheaply to the world’s rapidly growing new cities and urban slums, and more easily incorporate green energy sources such as solar and wind power.
Ecodistricts
Ecodistricts, neighborhoods that work together to plan and implement integrated systems, apply the intelligence, range of scale, and diversity of microgrids to as many urban infrastructure systems as possible. Minneapolis’s University Avenue District Energy System proposed to integrate a diverse cluster of users including BlueCross BlueShield of Minnesota, CenterPoint Energy, Minneapolis Public Housing Authority, the University of Minnesota, private building owners, and Xcel Energy. Its goal is to integrate its power, heat, cooling, open space, storm water, parking, and other elements of its metabolism so as to make them more ecological, cost-effective, and resilient. For example, the heat in one building’s wastewater can be recovered, added to a circulating water loop, and used to heat other buildings. Solar thermal energy from building rooftop systems, and ground-source geothermal systems, can be added along the way, as well as the excess heat from servers and refrigerators. Every building connected to the system becomes both a producer and a consumer of heat. Little heat is wasted. And each building is spared the cost of a boiler. Studies show that such systems are cheaper to build and operate, are more resilient to failure since they have a diversity of contributing parts, and have much lower environmental impacts.
Ecodistricts require us to think differently. Rather than designing our buildings to function independently of our neighbors, we need to first think of them as co-dependent, and see how that co-dependence enhances their resilience in a VUCA world. As more and more systems become integrated into ecodistricts, they begin to take on the adaptive characteristics of biocomplex systems. Ecodistricts create active resilience.
Passive and Active Resilience
The twenty-first century will be racked by climate change. Our cities will be subjected to heat and cold waves, flooding, and drought. The third quality of temperament, resilience through green urbanism, can help mediate this volatility. In doing so it helps reduce the impact of climate change and adapt to it.
The world’s energy systems are riddled with waste. Globally we produce 15 trillion watts of power every day, emitting 32,000 million metric tons of CO2 into the air per year, along with many other pollutants.16 While this waste is changing our climate and poisoning our water and air, we are largely unconscious of it. Perhaps the time has come to ask, how much are we willing to waste? The answer should be nothing, and no one.
This requires a reset in our approach to the environment. No longer can we only hope to do less harm. We must set the goal beyond harm, to act in ways that are restorative of both people and places, of the individual and the city and its environment.
The concept of temperament calls on us to see the environment not only from our point of view but from that of nature, where nothing is wasted. Because there is no waste in nature, everything is pure, naturally pure. Only when we aspire for the metabolism of our cities to be just as naturally pure will we be able to bring it into balance with nature.