We don’t yet understand the long-term causes and effects at the intersection of natural phenomena and human behavior. But we do know that creating long-term value in our resource-constrained world will require a unified approach to design.
To begin, I’ll borrow from Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and recommend in a nice, friendly font to the reader of yet another article on sustainable design, DON’T PANIC. Like the Hitchhiker’s Guide, purportedly a guide to life, the universe, and everything, sustainability and sustainable development are about how the Earth’s natural systems work and how they affect and are affected by individual and aggregate human behavior. That we don’t really understand the long-term causes and effects at the intersection of natural phenomena and human behaviors is, as you might imagine, quite a barrier to sustainability. Neither mortal nor computer model has the information and perspective necessary to demonstrate exactly what is going on or what best to do. I am clearly in the mortal uncertainty category.
However, the opportunities I’ve had to look at sustainability issues from a variety of institutional points of view in a many communities and cultures have yielded some ideas about what we might try and what we should avoid.
Forget What You Know
Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical when he has used them — as steps — to climb up beyond them. He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.”
I think this is good advice in general and quite important in trying to achieve a more sustainable future. One of the things we know with high probability is that much of what we “know” today about the world, its systems, and their interplay will be proven wrong. It is unlikely that we know the right questions let alone the right answers. All we can do is try to do better given that in which we can have some confidence today and be humble enough to admit our mistakes and change course in the future.
The motto of the Round Table Club is “Adopt, adapt, improve.” This may be an appropriate maxim for the sustainability movement as well. It would be preferable to what seems to be the current motto, which is “I know the right answers and if you don’t agree with me you are evil, stupid, or both.”
The biggest barrier to making more responsible decisions about the present and future is the number of individuals and groups active in the discussion that are absolutely certain about things for which certainty is irresponsible. One particularly virulent form of this phenomenon is the propensity of groups to be certain about the values, motives, and desires of others without ever actually having an honest discussion about these matters.
I am firmly convinced that the ideas and points of view found within the concepts of sustainability and sustainable development are attractive to most of us. If we have the courage to reshape the ideas in ways that have more natural and emotional appeal to the American public, we can, I think, see sustainable development become the context through which civic renewal, greater justice, more equity, and more constructive ownership in America’s future can emerge. If we don’t have the courage to change our approach, if those of us working in the field insist on controlling ideas rather than giving them away, then I am not much hopeful about the future.
Wanted: A Happy Future
One could think of sustainable development, like most thoughtful considerations, as having three stages. The first has to do with understanding cause, effect, and consequence. This is most often where we find science. The next has to do with deciding what, if anything, needs to be done and how we ought to do it. This is the realm of analysis and policy. The third stage has to do with the decision to take action. This is the realm of education, politics, and markets. If there is any lesson I’ve learned (and I have often learned it in quite painful ways), it is that knowing what is happening, deciding what ought to be done about it, and choosing to do something about it are related but fundamentally different ideas.
In many instances, science is providing us clearer insights regarding effects caused by human behavior. In some instances, what we ought to do about the undesirable effects is becoming clearer. Far less often do we see society changing its behaviors and instructing government and the marketplace to make different choices in order to avoid the undesirable consequences of our current desires and expectations.
If this is going to change, if our society is going to translate its embedded values into a more constructive approach to the future, we need a different approach to the questions begged within considerations of sustainability. It seems to me that this is true whether we are talking about our future in common or our individual futures. Rather than focusing on the abstraction “sustainability,” we should shift our attention to securing a happier, more secure future for people. The end needs to become the future success of human society in households, neighborhoods, communities, and nations. We must become clearer that from the perspectives of rationality and morality, the elements of sustainability — economics, environmental stewardship, and civil society — can never be considered as legitimate ends in themselves. They are always means toward a preferred future that creates greater opportunity for more people over a longer period of time.
By this I mean that sustainability is both a physical reality and a political choice. The physical reality is that there is a limited amount of land, fresh water, and natural resources. As we use these up or alter them so they no longer provide benefit, we limit our future potential. Technological innovation can help clean up some of our messes, translate underutilized resources into useful stuff, and occasionally provide substitutes for resources that are scarce. However, so long as we are confined to Earth, limits that will result in population collapse are inevitable.
The political choices have to do with how we approach the inevitability of limits. Should we worry about limits that are inevitable but not immediate? Should those of us who are doing just fine feel any obligation to our fellow humans whose local systems are in collapse? Should we take steps to make life better for future people we will never know? These and many more questions are in play when we ask ourselves, Should we try to make human development more sustainable?
For too many people, sustainability is perceived to be about maintaining the status quo. For others, it is about returning to some preferred past that we only imagine existed. Neither point of view will likely be successful in getting us the future we want because change is the status quo.
In 2003, Arup’s Foresight, Innovation and Incubation team began an investigation into those global areas of influence that have been identified as most likely to have a major impact on society, on our business, and on the business of our clients. The results of this research to date have been published in a series of cards that illustrate the social, technological, environmental, economic, and political impacts of each driver. The selected examples below help illustrate the sources of conflict that shape the choices stakeholders make on the path to sustainability.
Conflicts Shape Choices
Security vs. risk. Oftentimes we are certain we know the answer without having undergone any sort of methodological approach to gaining knowledge. For instance, communities almost always resist waste-to-energy facilities in part for fear of emissions. But do they know that one of the things most communities love can be much more damaging? It would take at least 120 years for a standard waste incinerator to produce the amount of dioxins caused by London’s millennium fireworks display, according to the group Reduce the Use.
How do we, in communicating what is really at stake in such key decisions, move beyond conventional wisdom into actual rational conversations about cause and effect?
Equality vs. equity. Someone once described to me the term “equal opportunity” as “free entry into a rigged game.” History has largely divided control of natural resource wealth based on power. Equal opportunity is quite different than equity — the fair distribution of the necessities of life. As our world develops, there are circumstances in which greater equality of opportunity is created with little corresponding equity of distribution. As a result, the ability for people to compete and get their own share is limited because the capital has already been divided up.
China’s coal mine death rate per million tons is some 50-fold higher than the rates in many developed countries. According to China Daily, 4,746 people were killed in 2,945 coal mine accidents in 2006. In this case, the source of the energy resources necessary to run China’s economy are dependent on the opportunities given to coal miners to compete for coal mining jobs. But that doesn’t mean coal miners are gaining an equitable stake in the benefits accruing to the Chinese economy from their work. To the contrary, because of the lack of health and safety in the mining industry in China, the miners are getting worse than inequitable opportunity. They have to put their lives at risk at a much higher rate than the rest of the developed world in order to meet their needs and the needs of their families.
There’s a direct relationship between the materials used in construction and the CO2 consequences of those materials, that is clear. But there’s also a direct relationship between the materials used in construction and the human health and mortality rates of the people producing the raw materials necessary to build those buildings.
Optimism vs. pessimism. In the top 50 countries in the United Nations’ 2006 Human Development Index (a comparative measure of life expectancy, literacy, education, and standard of living), more than half of the populations live in urban areas.
On one hand, there’s every reason to be optimistic about the benefits that accrue to people who live in urban places. But there can be no such optimism unless the urban places are well planned and well governed. In the case of unplanned settlements resulting from internal migrations from the countryside to the borders of cities, little optimism is possible. Human health suffers dramatically and civility breaks down even though on a marginal basis the prosperity of the individuals may increase.
One-third of the world’s urban population lives in what are defined by the U.N. as slum conditions. Urbanization has taken on the negative connotation of slum growth. Already about 900 million people are estimated to occupy informal settlements characterized by insecure tenure, inadequate housing, and a lack of access to water or sanitation. The U.N. projects that by 2050, some 6.4 billion people (70 percent of the world population) will inhabit urban areas. People living in slums have worse health outcomes and are more likely to be affected by child mortality and acute respiratory illnesses than their non-slum counterparts.
Even in developed countries, urban dwellers suffer health problems. Tuberculosis is making a worrying comeback in London, with a fourfold increase in some areas over the past decade. In the world today, more people are dying of tuberculosis than at any other time in history.
There is an element of the developing world in every First World city. Clearly, it is not enough to design great buildings without considering the context and social purpose for those buildings.
Communities of place vs. communities of interest. In his book Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, Jonathan Glover considers the elements of individual and group choices about the present and future. For him, there is no single underlying basis for the choices we make. Instead, we make choices rooted in the interplay of self-interest, sympathy for others, respect for others, and concerns about our own morality.
Nowhere is the ascendancy of self-interest more apparent than in addressing our housing issues. Getting housing built for the homeless and poorly housed is a serious problem. In my days as planning director for the city of Seattle, we used the term “affordable housing” to describe housing units that could be afforded by those with household incomes less than the median household income for the area in question. After a long and painful process, we discovered that for most residents in the communities in question, the term “affordable housing” meant “housing for people who aren’t like us, who don’t share our values, and who are threats to our property and lives.” It is not surprising that there is such resistance to affordable housing.
In the United States, gated communities represent an average of 10 percent of the new homes market and more than 30 percent in low-density urban areas. The motivations for living in a gated community are mostly driven by fear of crime and difference.
In a 2005 poll of United Kingdom nationals on the question of multi-culturalism, almost two-thirds responded that multi-culturalism makes Britain a better place, while just under one-third responded that multi-culturalism threatens the British way of life.
Finding ways to reduce the psychological distance between communities that perceive themselves as stakeholders in the future of a place and those that they perceive as not stakeholders is very tough. If we can’t find formulas in which sympathy, respect for rights, and concerns about each other’s individual moral identity balance the perceived self-interest of those who fear the change, then it is possible only at huge political cost.
Direct costs vs. externalities. There is one school of thought that “natural disasters” as such do not exist. What do exist are natural phenomena such as wind, flooding, fire, drought, and infectious disease. The disastrous element is added when human society puts itself in the way of likely natural phenomena or changes the ecosystems that have evolved in relationship thereto.
Natural systems are area-appropriate and have evolved over millennia to absorb the forces at work and recover quickly. Much human development destroys the natural systems that have evolved and substitutes inadequate alternatives.
Estimated economic losses of more than $170 billion were caused by the three large hurricanes of 2005 (Katrina, Wilma, and Rita). Only around one-third of these losses were insured. The consequences for New Orleans of Hurricane Katrina were made much worse as a result of filling surrounding marshlands, which provided land for housing development, and substitution, which had eliminated the natural buffers that can slow storm surges. The consequences for the city demonstrate clearly that when human systems fail, they do so with great consequence to life and property. They also demonstrate that the financial, cultural, and social costs of recovery can be extraordinary. To replace the Gulf Coast’s natural buffers is estimated to cost $40 billion.
“Our actions now and over the coming decades could create risks of major disruption to economic and social activity on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th century. And it will be difficult or impossible to reverse these changes,” says noted British economist Sir Nicholas Stern.
The “Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change,” commissioned by the U.K. government in 2005 and the most comprehensive analysis of the economics of climate change carried out to date, found that the costs of mitigation to avoid dangerous climate change could be limited to around 1 percent of global gross domestic product each year, whereas the costs of inaction might be equivalent to losing 5 percent to 20 percent of global GDP per year and possibly more. The report noted that mitigation and adaptation should not be viewed as alternatives. (Although adaptation remains the accepted term for cities’ response to climate change, I prefer preparation, which implies a need to get off our laurels and do something.) Preparation will be needed to deal with the unavoidable impacts of climate change even with mitigation. In the longer term, preparation is likely to be insufficient to manage the most serious impacts of climate change if mitigation efforts fail.
Present vs. future. At present, the design community is focused primarily on reducing the carbon consequences of development. This is largely being addressed through energy efficiency versus less hydrocarbon-intensive forms of generation of power. While checklists and standards such as LEED force us to focus on this carbon question, we are likely leaving out many equally important considerations.
Cities house half the world’s population but consume three-quarters of the world’s resources and produce three-quarters of the world’s pollution. Two-thirds of the world’s ecosystems are now severely damaged, mostly due to global urban consumption and waste disposal. It is widely assumed that urbanization will continue. But the growing scarcity of water and the high cost of the energy invested in transporting water over long distances may itself begin to constrain urban growth.
The development of urban areas was made possible through the concentration of food production to create a surplus. But many cities have now come to depend on highly unsustainable supplies for most of their food. In London, the components of a typical Sunday lunch for four people travel over 24,000 miles. In contrast, many cities of the developing world have built upon a tradition of sourcing food grown locally. Shanghai is one of the world’s fastest-growing cities, yet half the 2,432 square miles administered by the authorities has been set aside for urban agriculture. Are we taking food needs into account in urban design?
We are not focusing sufficiently on the big questions that shape our future. The activities of urban settlements are key contributors to climate change factors. For most people in the world, the lack of water for irrigation of crops and the lack of potable water for drinking will have a much more dramatic and immediate effect than rising sea levels and the increasing range of communicable disease associated with temperature increases. Global climate change and its current and potential consequences for life property and prosperity are accepted as the major challenge for human society in the next 100 years.
Is it possible that we can actually focus on the present and those key issues that are near-term as we think about climate change and its longer-term impacts? We need to be able to think about more than one problem at a time. The translation of science into policy and practice that stems the acceleration of greenhouse gas production, particularly carbon, while also ensuring social and economic development is still in its infancy.
Faith vs. doubt. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman said “Every scientific law, every scientific principle, every statement of the results of an observation is some kind of summary which leaves out details, because nothing can be stated precisely … .” Every experiment, like every economic model, traffic model, demographic forecast, etc. is by necessity based on reduced information sets. “It is necessary and true that all of the things we say in science, all of the conclusions, are uncertain because they are only conclusions. They are guesses as to what is going to happen, and you cannot know what will happen, because you have not made the most complete experiments,” Feynman noted.
Does this mean that we ought not to use the products of these experiments and models to help us understand our world and choose actions to make things better or avoid making things worse? No. The lesson in this, I believe, is that we need to be more humble in choosing actions to make things better or avoid making things based on the conclusions we draw. We must accept the limitations of our knowledge and embrace doubt if we are going to move beyond the ideological struggles associated with the public policy debates in the United States and in the sustainable development movement in general.
Feynman concluded that the essence of religion is faith, and the essence of science is doubt. The tenets of faith are what we choose to adopt and embrace. The findings of science are by necessity the subject of skepticism and reexamination. Once we are certain we “know” something, our commitment to learn more is reduced. “Doubt is not to be feared, but … it is to be welcomed as the possibility of a new potential of human beings. If you know that you are not sure, you have a chance to improve the situation,” said Feynman.
To my mind, the debate about sustainability and sustainable development has taken on the characteristics of a faith-based struggle — a secular religious conflict. And these conflicts are a barrier to the blending of energy, intelligence, and perspective that will be necessary if we are to cope with the problems we face and the opportunities before us.
Designing the Future
As a society and as practitioners, we are not predisposed to take the time to explore an issue in breadth, to think about how the issue we are studying may relate to or indeed even be caused by another that is not on the table.
The world’s complications are becoming clear, and they are complications we have created for ourselves. Well-intentioned but single-minded policy makers and designers have led a descent into chaotic urbanization. Ever more siloed thinking has led to the creation of transportation systems that do not consider land use, land use regulations that do not account for energy needs, waste systems that fail to reintegrate wasted natural resources through positive use. We must embrace a new design paradigm wholeheartedly, efficiently, and rapidly before we squander our remaining natural resource capital.
The issues our society faces today are highly technical. Climate change is an accepted reality; however, the specific consequences are still unknown. We are struggling to manage dwindling water supplies, overused electrical generation systems, rapid urbanization and re-urbanization, and demographic shifts. Our engineering expertise can easily seduce us into believing that solutions lie only in the scientific aspects of projects. Danger lurks at the end of this path.
The requirements of people, now and in the future, demand that we completely integrate not only aesthetic and scientific factors but the real needs and desires of people, too: their senses, their emotions, their diverse identities.
In a resource-constrained world — our world — a unified design approach is the most rational pathway to long-term value creation. Taken seriously, a unified approach requires us to address issues in depth, in breadth, at their intersections, and over time. Behavioral psychologists, sociologists, physicists, anthropologists, economists, public health officials — all need to be engaged in a broader definition of the design profession. Within this framework, unified design becomes the most robust way to seize opportunities. It also prevents any single interest from capturing the idea of design and holding it hostage, impeding progress toward the ultimate goal: optimizing conditions for sustained human development over an extended period of time.
Gary Lawrence is a principal at Arup and a global leader for sustainable urban development. His views have been shaped by academic and professional practice, most profoundly through his experience as planning director for the city of Seattle. He is a Senior Fellow of the Design Futures Council.
