3 Aerial view of Pioneer and Crescent Halls, NTU 4 Constructed wetlands of Pioneer and Crescent Halls, NTU
DO GOOD
The sustainability movement in the 1960s and 1970s was about co-existence with nature, a response to a post-war surge of industrial activity and urban expansion2
approach to one that argues for do-less-harm. We were free to pollute or waste as long as we did it within the carrying capacity of nature. We turned a blind eye to the decimation of planetary systems, the dismantling of communities and urban ecosystems, all in the name of economic growth.
In my latest book Ecopuncture: Transforming Architecture and Urbanism in Asia (2019), I make the case that the window for less-harm has, in fact, closed for many Asian cities3
. Take Mumbai. Since the 1990s,
it has lost some 36 per cent of forest cover; 31 per cent of wetlands; and 12 per cent of water bodies4 that same time, it commissioned some 750 Green buildings, enough to earn the title ‘greenest city in India’5
. In .
Yet, the silos of building versus city, city versus ecology, are not unique to Mumbai or South Asia. Southeast Asia lost about 13 per cent of forest cover since 19906
predicted that the region could squander three-quarters of its original forests by 21007
. Even if all future buildings were to be Green, it is .
the American environmentalist and activist, Paul Hawken, presents 100 ideas that curb greenhouse gas emissions and, in some cases, extract carbon from the atmosphere8
In his book Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Climate Change (2017), . The first takeaway from his book is
that the cumulative effect of acting on the full list adds up to more than the sum of its parts. It is possible to talk about reversing global warming. The second is that every alteration has a ripple effect. Lowering meat consumption—one of the top five decarbonisation strategies—improves human health, which can, over time, reduce spending on healthcare. In other words, natural systems affect human systems that influence financial systems.
Put simply, some actions have a domino effect. And in any domino effect, the initial trigger is sometimes far from the point of final impact. We do good in one place and it benefits someone somewhere else. Critics of do-good ask, “What if the one who initiates and pays for an action is not the one that profits?” We have been persuaded by the Green movement to focus on direct and quick returns. Greening is predicated on self-interest, argued on grounds of cost savings, better health or productivity. It favours short-term results, deprioritises actions that take longer to yield returns or ones that contribute to the commons. This is now the glass ceiling of Green: a hard separation between private cost and public good.
This gap is not unresolvable. Consider Hong Kong. For years, it subsidised private actions that benefited public space. A network of above-ground public walkways emerged, one linkway at a time, spurred on by a policy that rewarded developers for connecting their project to an adjacent site9
. Since then, we drifted from a do-no-harm
. A developer that did this
was granted additional floor area. Over time, these discrete connections come together to form a contiguous web of public spaces, filled with social and commercial life: a win-win for all stakeholders. Singapore is another city that has used policy to guide private action. Developers are incentivised to add green roofs and façades to their buildings. The overarching goal is to have 200 hectares of vertical greenery in the city by the year 203010
.
Hong Kong and Singapore teach us that policy is the bridge between short-term and long-term interests. It creates a level playing field and can be formulated as carrot or stick. Greywater recycling, for instance, has quick return on investment and could therefore be mandatory. However, the creation of public space or ecological habitats, which benefit the commons, may need to be incentivised.
SEEK HOLISM
The do-good approach raises another question: what is the whole that designers must change? The world we know is profoundly connected. The current pandemic has revealed just how inextricably linked it is. It is hard to contain infections within a political border or social enclave since we exist within many scales and interacting systems at the same time. Buildings are subsystems of neighbourhoods, neighbourhoods of cities; human-made systems are nested within natural systems.
The pandemic also reminds us that in tackling systemic problems, the city matters. Decisions at the urban scale—say, networks of mobility, population density, green public space—affect the spread of disease. I would argue that this is where we ought to start in tackling most big problems. We must probe the city; rethink how it works. What is its metabolism? What is the ecosystem that it relies on? How big is its ecological footprint? How does its form affect its performance? To address the metropolitan scale, itself a system-of-systems, we must adopt a whole systems approach. This means seeing, understanding and designing connections and interfaces, flows and exchanges, within a complex network of evolving systems.
30 FUTURARC
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