Rising East Online

Sustainability Continued

Re-Tracing The Footprint

In the Sustainability issue of Rising East (No 3, January 2006), James Heartfield took issue with the concept of sustainability as devised and developed by Herbert Girardet. Here is Girardet’s reply.

James, please take off your blinkers

I was intrigued to read James Heartfield’s piece – ‘Herbert Girardet and the Plastic Concept of Sustainability’ in Rising East (No 3): How green is our Gateway. Heartfield clearly went to a lot of trouble to trace the intellectual genesis of my work over the last 30 years in which I have spent much time and energy to try and understand the environmental predicament of modern urban-industrial civilisation. After summarising some of my work, Heartfield goes in for the kill:

‘Everything but humanity is precious to Girardet, but humanity is not precious, at least not in its productive aspect, and not to be accounted for. His analysis of ‘the Metabolism of London’ registers ‘Inputs’ under heading one as oxygen, water, food and so on, but heading two is not ‘Outputs’, but ‘Wastes’, including CO₂, SO₂ and NO_x. The only city product that counts is pollution.’

I respect the right of the critic to criticise and why should I regard Heartfield’s writings about me any differently? But it is not nice to be portrayed in a one-sided sort of way. In various places I have stated unequivocally that I regard cities as ‘magnificent manifestations of human creativity’. In the 1970s I spent three years studying for a degree in social anthropology, a discipline which is, above all else, concerned with the rich complexities of the human story. For me having a deep interest in humanity came to mean, trying to answer the question as to how our modern cities, humanity’s primary habitat, can exist sustainably in terms of their resource use. And since this had not been done to any significant degree by other authors, I thought that it would be worth trying to find answers to this existential question.

I took an interest in the urban metabolism and the related concept of the ecological footprint of cities because I think it helps us to understand how to make efficient use of resources. My study of London’s footprint in 1995 led me to conclude that this extended to 125 times its surface area, or about 3 hectares per Londoner, or the equivalent of most of the UK’s productive land. My figures were quite widely publicised at the time and raised much concern about how London could make more efficient use of resources. The environmental strategies developed by the Greater London Authority in recent years are clear expressions that much can be done to get London into better shape for the 21st century.

However, it was beyond the scope of my low-budget study to account for the specifics of London’s food system (with 30 percent of food being wasted), the marine eco-systems that supply Londoners with fish, and the land needed to feed Londoners’ pets. In the last few years, two further, highly funded and much more detailed footprint studies have been published which have doubled my original estimate of London’s footprint, raising even more concern about the sustainability of modern urban systems and lifestyles.

The first attempts at quantifying the ecological footprint of cities were made in the early 1990s by the Canadian ecologist William Rees. Since then efforts at quantifying the footprints of cities and nations, undertaken by Mathis Wackernagel and his Global Footprint Network, have become an exact and sophisticated science, with an ever-increasing amount of data now available to compare the spatial impacts of human resource use across the world.

I want to briefly comment on what Heartfield says about acid rain and how we portrayed the problem in our 1986 BBC TV series Far From Paradise. The evidence of severely damaged forest was irrefutable. SO₂, NO_x and photo-chemical smog were identified as the main culprits. The research findings, stimulated by concern about the condition of forests across Europe, have since led to significant measures on removing these waste gases, such as putting scrubbers in the smoke stacks of power stations and catalytic converters in the exhausts systems of cars. These measures have helped significantly to improve the condition of forests and the air quality in our cities. What on earth is wrong with that?

I want to pick up one other point: The first, edited book I published in 1976 was called Land for the People, and my chapter in it was called ‘New Towns or New Villages.’ I argued that in a highly urbanised society we should concern ourselves not only with a high quality of life in our cities, but that the time may have come to find ways of reviving rural life and even creating new villages. Well, in the last 30 years millions of people have moved from cities to rural areas and as the last barns are snapped up for conversion by ex-urbanites, and as less and less young rural people can afford to get on the housing ladder, there may well be a case for actually building new villages in rural areas. I stand by these ideas today, and they may well require revisiting current rural planning regulations. Exactly what is wrong with that?

In an age of growing concern about climate change and peak oil we certainly need to get to grips with what it means to create sustainable human settlements. A large proportion of cities is located in coastal regions and river valleys. The latest research on climate change suggests that in this century we may be faced with sea level rises of several metres as well as devastating floods linked to growing climate chaos. Cities use the bulk of the world’s fossil fuels and they will also by the primary victims of this unnecessary profligacy.

Advocates of unfettered, unreflected material progress should take heed of the fact that there is a fundamental difference in the way we live today as compared with all previous generations of human beings. Every year we burn a million years of accumulated fossil fuels and this makes our current food, industrial, transport and urban systems possible. When only a small proportion of humanity was engaged in this experiment, we could just about get away with it. Not any longer. Now that China and India, otherwise called ‘Chindia’, with 2.4 billion people, are getting onto the same roller coaster, we are into a different order of things. In the face of these realities, sustainability thinking is called for as a matter of great urgency, and today designers, planners and policy makers all over the world are actively seeking to address these crucial issues.

I have spent quite a bit of time in China recently and this has been a fascinating experience. On the one hand, urban growth there is consuming ever-increasing amounts of materials. China is on a global shopping spree for resources to catch up with European and American standards of living and to build a world-beating economy. Yet at the same time it is becoming a pioneer in sustainable urban development in projects whose scope far exceeds anything to be encountered elsewhere in the world. I am working with Arup as a senior adviser on the Dongtan Eco-City project on Chongming Island, Shanghai, which is on course to set new standards of sustainable urban development. It will be a highly attractive city on a site the size of Manhattan Island which will be made up of a series of pedestrian centres connected by sophisticated public transport systems; it will largely be powered by renewable energy and will make highly efficient use of resources; it will be surrounded by its own agricultural belt using organic matter from the city’s waste system as fertiliser and soil conditioner. Dongtan aims to pioneer a high standard of living with minimal environmental impacts. Construction starts early in 2007.

Heartfield argues that ‘People’s lives are secured by enlarging their ecological footprint, not reducing it. The greater the metabolism between man and nature, the larger are human possibilities, and therefore security. Resource efficiency does not come from limiting industry, but expanding it. ‘Sustainability’ is just another word for austerity. The easiest way to build a ‘carbon neutral’ house is not to build one at all.’

This rapid-fire statement needs to be looked at in some detail. Yes, the modern world has emerged partly due to the increase of the human ecological footprint, and this has opened new prospects for humanity. But in the 20th century human numbers grew fourfold whilst human resource consumption grew 16 fold. We have come to take for granted living off nature’s capital rather than its income. But on a finite planet, infinite growth is an impossibility. Fortunately different options are now available to us, and they involve architectural design and urban planning. Carbon neutral buildings are no longer an impossibility but a desirable aim of planning policy. As evidence from across Europe shows, this does not mean austerity but affordable comfort, and a great many new local jobs and businesses can be created in the process of creating new energy efficient buildings and estates, and retro-fitting existing ones.

Heartfield and his colleagues argue that there is no such thing as a sustainability movement. This is simply laughable. Just look at the ever growing literature, the ever-growing number of campaigning NGOs and the ever-increasing body of legislation around the world. More specifically, there is an ever-growing urban sustainability movement. At the UN World Urban in Vancouver at the end of June where I was speaking about Dongtan, there were no less than 30 separate events dealing with this subject, many of them involving the mayors of large cities from around the world.

I do agree that there is a problem with the sustainability movement, however, in that much of it is concerned with just a little more sustainability rather than defining more deeply what real sustainability is all about. I do not hesitate focusing on the primacy of environmental sustainability because as a friend of mine has eloquently pointed out, ‘the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment and not the other way around’.

Heartfield cherishes the prospect of an urbanising humanity acquiring ever-larger ecological footprints: what a nonsense. Have you ever looked beyond of the edge of the city to try and understand the scale of our global impacts at this moment in time? He should take the trouble to have a look at recent analyses of human impacts, such as the UN GEO 3 study, or the WWF Living Planet index, or, some of the most recent reports by London's New Economics Foundation. As part of my work over the last 30 years I have seen first hand how urban consumption patterns in their current form are eating into the very fabric of our planet’s eco-systems, and how in our urban cocoons we are increasingly in danger of being hit by environmental boomerangs of all kinds.

I find it rather strange how the agenda of people such as Heartfield who, as I understand it, is supposed to represent the progressive left, is so very close to the agenda of the extreme right who are preaching the gospel of personal freedom, uninhibited enterprise and progress without consideration of the consequences.

It is certainly useful to have a lively debate about the future direction of human development. As Heartfield will gather, I think that it is not good enough to argue from a perspective of business as usual. Keeping on the blinkers is no option. Dreaming of a world in which we create gigantic urban structures with no concern about their environmental impacts just to celebrate the triumph of human ingenuity is not longer good enough.

Whatever Heartfield and his colleagues say, we need to weigh the costs of human triumphalism against its benefits. Let us take off the blinkers of self-satisfaction and broaden our understanding of what it means to be human in this dangerous and exciting age. Our global presence and impacts call for a new sense of responsibility and a consciousness that encompasses the natural world of which we are a part. The cities of the future will be profoundly compatible with this natural world or they will not be at all. That is what the sustainability movement is all about and I am proud to be part of it.

At the end of his piece Heartfield states: ‘Girardet comes close to proving that human life is impossible.’ What on earth leads him to that conclusion? In much of my work I have simply been concerned with finding ways of understanding and thinking of ways of reducing human impacts that have been caused by unreflected use of technology, and to help with the process of creating modern, liveable cities. All over the world people are involved with efforts of this kind. Sustainable human comfort does not spring from wastefulness, but from design concerned with efficient use of resources. There is much evidence that this sort if thinking is now becoming mainstream rather than staying peripheral as it has been until recently. The blinkers of self-delusion seem to be coming off at last.

Herbert Girardet is a prime mover in sustainability

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