This is an exciting moment for architects. We are at a philosophical turning point between pre-climate change and post-climate change eras. With Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth hitting the screens in autumn 2006, the tide may finally turn from scepticism to acceptance: climate change caused by humans is a fact, and is likely to have a huge impact within our lifetimes. We need solutions, and we need them fast.
Just as the industrial revolution brought modernism, so climate change will bring a new urban aesthetic. I have always argued that sustainable architecture, far from being an architecture of constraint, opens up boundless possibilities for unbridled creativity, and an imperative to build more, not less. Architects are uniquely placed to find solutions to climate change, for two reasons.
Firstly, a major barrier to engagement is complexity. Sustainability issues such as climate change are vast and nebulous, and there are few black-and-white answers. But as architects, we are used to finding clarity in complexity. We are used to thinking creatively and tangentially to overcome problems, and finding ways to make progress despite incomplete information and shifting contexts.
The second reason is that architects excel at visual communication. The climate change movement lacks visible, seductive solutions, and it desperately needs them if it is to stop people jumping straight from doubt to despair, and instead inspire them to take action. Al Gore quotes architect Daniel Burnham saying “Make no little plans, they have no magic to stir men’s blood.”
Architects can deliver the vision, but we need to change our thinking. We don’t respond well to calls for ‘less of this’ and ‘restraint on that’. It simply doesn’t fit our culture, our economy, the way our brains work. It’s boring. We want to be heroes (and heroines), we want to use our agency and our creativity to make things, to do more, not less. No wonder the current policies of incremental restraint - Part L, BREEAM - leave us cold. They remind me of the spoof chant for a rally of moderationists:
Speaker: “What do we want?”
Crowd: “Incremental change!”
Speaker: “When do we want it?”
Crowd: “In due course!”
Our current policies are too little, too late. Look at the figures. We need to reduce our emissions by 60% by 2020 as a minimum, to slow down global warming, let alone reverse it. Clearly, a 10% improvement in new build efficiency or 20% onsite renewables are not enough. What’s worse, they lull us into thinking we’re tackling the problem.
Even zero-energy buildings and cities don’t solve the problem - sorry Bill, Ken, and the Dongtan team - although they’re a leap in the right direction. Rather than looking to ‘build the same as we did before but 10% less damaging’, or even ‘build something that will do no harm’, we actually need to build things that restore the environment. We need every new building, every new road and public space and lamp-post to be compensating for the existing stock.
So I see your Zero-Emission City and I raise you Restorative City, a city which absorbs carbon dioxide and pollution as fast as the ‘old cities’ can churn it out. It’s not pie-in-the-sky: we already have exterior wall paint that absorbs vehicle pollutants, and buildings with a larger area of green roof than their footprint (think folding). Once building envelopes are net absorbers of carbon, we will design for maximum surface area, taking cues from lung capillaries and roots. Our designs will be radically transformed.
Suppose the UK set out to achieve a carbon-neutral built environment in one year. We replace about 5% of the building stock each year, so these new buildings would need to absorb the emissions of the other 95%, creating not 10%, not 20% or even 100% of their own energy needs through renewables, but 2000%. Ludicrous? Impossible? Or a tempting challenge?
I invite you to suspend your disbelief and take a cue from Bertrand Piccard, the Swiss inventor who beat Richard Branson around the world in his balloon. Is he sitting at home whining about new regulations? Is he hell: he’s out there designing a solar plane, due for its maiden flight in two years’ time.
In a decade we went from seeing eco-architecture as ugly and freakish, to BedZed, to zero-carbon cities. And now, Restorative City. Can we find and implement solutions to climate change before it’s too late? We have to believe we can, and get busy designing, because the only other option is to give up, jump on the next sleazyjet flight to see the last remote corners of the earth before they are flooded or melt, and book a front row seat for the apocalypse.
Pascale Scheurer MA(Cantab) DipArch MSc RIBA. Pascale Scheurer is a Chartered Architect and Director of Seductive Sustainability, which she runs in collaboration with Holly Porter. Seductive Sustainability creates and promotes pioneering seductive and sustainable architecture for 21st Century living. We believe that sustainable design does not need to be dull, expensive, confusing or ugly - it can surprise and delight its users while not costing the earth. We offer services in consultancy and design for individuals, companies and public institutions on all scales - from private houses to whole cities.
© Pascale Scheurer and Surface to Air ltd 2006.
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Ed Balls was appointed Economic Secretary to the Treasury on 5 May 2006. 1 He is married to Yvette Cooper, appointed Minister for Housing and Planning at the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister on 9 May 2005, 2 itself replaced by the Department for Communities and Local Government on the day her husband got his latest job. Ed is Member of Parliament for the Normanton constituency in West Yorkshire, 3 and Yvette is MP for the neighbouring constituency of Pontefract, Castleford, Knottingley, and Normanton Common. 4
Mr and Mrs Balls have three kids, and like any parents, they want the best for their children. That is at least part of their appeal to their electorate. ‘I represent hard-working people who are proud of their strong communities and who have fought hard across generations to defend them,’ said Yvette in her Maiden Speech in Parliament on 2 July 1997. ‘They are proud of their socialist traditions,’ she said, ‘… and have fought for a better future for their children and their grandchildren.’ 5
Similarly, Ed says:
‘I always like to book tours of Parliament for people who live in our area. But I was especially pleased when I received a letter from six-year-old Ben Williams earlier this year. He came down from Horbury to the House of Commons in July - and it was great to catch up with him in my constituency office.’ 6
As the lad was only six it is unlikely that Ed would have had much difficulty with his questions. If his guest had been in his twenties, hoping to set up his own household, Ed may have been asked how this visitor was to afford even modest housing near decent employment in 2006. For as the Economist has observed, wages have fallen so far behind the cost of housing, whether mortgaged or rented, that it is only low interest rates that soften the otherwise unaffordable monthly equation.
The ratio of average house prices to average earnings stands at 6.0, higher than the last peak of 5.2 in 1989. Thanks to cheap lending today, average payments on new mortgages account for 40% of average take home pay, whereas in the credit fuelled boom of the 1980s average payments were about 60% of average pay. For those wanting to set up home and without well-paid jobs, this is a huge problem. While for others, more established, further into careers, the fact that average house prices have increased by 175% since 1997 is a welcome increase in value. 7
Ed at the Treasury might be concerned at the precariousness of that situation. But this property boom is popular. Frustrated house hunters or overextended first time buyers all want a part of that rising “balloon”, as the Economist saw it, even though the number of people for whom it has risen out of reach, is itself rising.
The property market balloon has risen during the New Labour decade because house building had failed to meet the demand for household formation, and continues to fail. There are more people wanting a home of their own than there are homes available. Prices continued to rise, and now speculation has taken hold. A bit more house building - and even subsidised “affordable housing” - is not going to ease the generally high level of speculation in increasingly unaffordable property.
The boom is based on housing undersupply, but the falling supply itself was complicated with a policy shift. Government contracted out policymaking to the Urban Task Force. The clue was in their title. Following the anxieties of the previous Conservative administration, 8 the Urban Task Force was more concerned with the effect that household growth would have on the countryside. 9 They set themselves against car-based suburbia as bad for the environment. Whether suburbia was what people wanted hardly came into it. 10
Since the late 1990s suburbia has come to be seen as an environmental problem, not the solution to the demand for affordable living space which it was taken to be throughout much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The recent policy shift has hardened into a presumption against developing greenfield land at lower densities, with spacious housing and big gardens. 11 It was presented in the phraseology of sustainability, following the Bruntland definition (named after Gro Harlem Brundtland, a Norwegian politician, diplomat, physician, and an international leader in sustainable development and public health. She chaired the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), and the Report of what was better known as the Brundtland Commission, Our Common Future, was published through Oxford University Press in 1987):
‘Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’ 12
Ed and Yvette subscribe to the aspiration of the Brundtland Commission, as will many of their constituency, and the wider electorate. Before Ministers like Yvette started talking about “Sustainable Communities”, Catherine Slessor of The Architectural Review had sensibly observed that the Bruntland report definition of sustainability ‘… serves as a starting point, but it hardly suffices as an analytical guide or policy directive.’ Slessor also articulated the hopes of many practitioners when she argued that ‘… sustainability should not be seen simply as a corrective force, but as a new mandate for architecture.’13 In my opinion, it has neither been a corrective, nor has it led to much architecture.
In Britain, defining suburbs as unsustainable has not led to architectural achievement so much as the building of a gradually increasing but still inadequate number of smaller flats, or “micro-flats”, without parking, mostly on brownfield land. The property boom based on numeric undersupply has been reinforced by the constraints on approving greenfield land for development, forcing developers to cram more flats into more expensive sites. This is surely a failure to meet the housing needs of the present, justified as an attempt to protect the countryside for future generations. While building on greenfield was never a guarantee of architectural quality in the past, at least building suburbia created useful living space.
Ed and Yvette are not setting out to deny people useful housing, and they don’t aim to fob people off with “micro-flats” exchanging at high prices in the ballooning property market. They will say they want more “decent” housing. Yvette attended a seminar organised by the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) in March 2006 on the theme of Housing - establishing the evidence base. In her presentation she explained that while Government aimed to increase housing supply, Ministers were also clear about continuing to prioritise new development on brownfield sites. She said she was keen to hear how “the evidence base” should be interpreted to inform Government policy. 14 Sadly of course, the Planning Minister already had a policy on resisting new house building on greenfield land, which agencies like the CPRE are only too keen to support with their evidence.
More of that “evidence” was recently published. With great fanfare at the end of August 2006 the Department for Local Communities and Local Government announced that ‘… existing stocks of available "brownfield" land could accommodate up to one million new homes.’ Patting the National Land Use Database of Previously-Developed Land firmly on the back, Yvette’s colleague, Planning Minister Baroness Andrews rushed to the high ground of sustainability. She imagined that even less new housing needed to be built on “greenfield” land than the mere 26% built currently, emphasising that ‘there is a real need to build more homes if we are to meet the housing needs of future generations and these statistics show that many of these could go on re-used sites.’ 15 Of course by “homes” we know she means mostly flats, sustainably crammed by ingenious designers of “Communities” into the spectrum of land in need of some kind of reclamation or remediation; not too many houses with gardens and parking spaces. And certainly not the sorts of houses her friends live in. But that aside, space for a million new homes in England right now - that has the “WOW factor”.
The NLUD-PDL was established in 1998 by the Office formerly run by Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, 16 the man who demanded a “WOW” factor in development. The NLUD is now part of the Department for Local Communities and Local Government, known as “De-CLoG”, under Ruth Kelly, Yvette’s boss. NLUD has done a sterling job when you read this in depth report; Previously-developed land that may be available for development: England 2005. 17 The clue to what the report really tells us is in the title. This is about land that “may” be available for housing development. Through all the categories and figures it says quite clearly that of the total brownfield land of 63,500 hectares identified by the 85% of all local planning authorities that provided information, 27,600 hectares, or 44% is “potentially” suitable for housing. If that land were all developed at just over an average of 35 homes per hectare it could result in 981,000 dwellings – just shy of the headline one million. NLUD also recognizes that there may be barriers to development for some of this housing capacity: not all of it can be expected to come into use in the immediate future.
Well OK! Not all of that land is needed now if annual housing output remains as it is at present - lower than 200,000 per annum. In 2004/2005, 191,000 homes were built in Britain.18 In England that amounted to 156,000, which looks like it has increased to 163,000 this last year.19 So there is a rash of commentators all saying that 100% of new housing could be brownfield, not the 74% as at present. Assuming too that if more brownfield land comes available then that situation could be maintained indefinitely even with an increase in housing output. NLUD must seem like a dream come true for the brownfield boosters in the Urban Task Force. 20 It was Sir Peter Hall, an advocate of “Garden Cities” at the Town and Country Planning Association, 21 who withdrew his support for the UTF out of concern for what he saw as The Land Fetish being established in British planning policymaking circles.
Indeed you can even imagine Kate Barker getting excited about 100% brownfield housing. As I write she is between the draft and final reports of her Review of Land Use Planning, Noting in the draft that the population of England was 50 million in 2004, living at a density of 383 per square kilometre, Barker accepts that ‘… current projections suggest the population will grow to 56.8 million by 2031, when there may be 435 people per square kilometre.’ 22 Armed now with the NLUD “evidence” that no new housing need be built on Britain’s over-supply of increasingly redundant farmland, Barker may act like an accountant and seek to make us live 13.6% more compactly, as the population is projected to increase by the same amount.
But all this statistical effort to fit a bit more housing into some of the available scraps of previously developed land makes for mean spirited architecture, poor landscape, and underestimates the development that is needed. It also stokes the property boom.
Each estimate of the annual housing supply needed, including Barker’s earlier Review of Housing Supply from 2004, 23 only considers new household growth estimates. No-one commentating on housing – except my colleagues at Audacity, James Heartfield and Professor James Woudhuysen – looks seriously at how the existing housing stock is to be replaced as it wears out. People seem to forget in their partial and apologetic calculations of “sustainable” housing development that existing domestic architecture will not last forever. No “maybes” here; homes have done well if they last 100 years. Heartfield shows the failure to grasp the issue in Let’s Build!
There are three components to calculate the housing we need in Britain in the next decade:
That is why at a very minimum, Heartfield says, we need five million new homes in the next 10 years. 24 He understands well that these can be built on brownfield land as replacement homes, or either brownfield or greenfield land as new homes, allowing some brownfield land to be cleared and returned to landscape. That allows for some creative land use in contrast to the imperative to develop only brownfield. But with only enough brownfield for a million homes squeezed together, and smaller dwellings at the very best, it is not hard to see that a good supply of greenfield land is required to help build the five million homes we need in a decade. As NLUD knows, the “potential” of brownfield will run out before the statistical quantity of brownfield is exhausted. And there is no shortage of greenfield, much of which has some landscape designation:
| Number of sites | Number | Hectares | % of land |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs) | 4110 | 1,072,540 | 8.2 |
| Special Protection Areas (SPAs) | 77 | 609,249 | 4.7 |
| Special Areas of Conservation (SACs) | 229 | 809,199 | 6.2 |
| Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) | 35 | 2,040,000 | 15.6 |
| Green Belt | 1,678,200 | 12.9 | |
| National Parks | 994,000 | 7.6 | |
| Total of Designated Landscape | 7,203,188 | 55.2 | |
| Urban Areas | 1,100,000 | 8.3 |
Source: Kate Barker, Barker Review of Land Use Planning: Interim Report – Executive Summary (London, HMSO, 2006) Table 1: Designations and other land uses in England, posted on www.hm-treasury.gov.uk
We know that much of the Green Belt area that exceeds the total of all developed land, dwarfing by a ratio of 26:1 the 63,500 hectares that represent all brownfield land in 2006, is pretty poor landscape with no agricultural value. Less than 4% of Green Belt in the right places would equate to the total of brownfield land NLUD identifies across England, and “potentially” in the wrong places. Closer examination of national land use classifications will reveal that the headline figure is misleading. 25 Actually, most of that brownfield land is completely in the wrong place to accommodate household growth – in the post-industrial North. Most of the Green Belt land is exactly where it is needed – in the sprawling “megalopolis” that surrounds Old London, which is better known as the South East and East of England. 26 That is 4% of just under 13% of all England, or a mere 0.52%. But of course one million of the “De-CLoG” homes are crammed into 43.5% of that, or 0.226%.
To build Heartfield’s five million homes at the “De-CLoG” density would require no more than 1.13% of England. But this should not simply be added to the 8.3% that Barker recognizes as already developed. Over half the five million are replacements for existing ageing housing. So a large proportion of Heartfield’s homes could and would be on brownfield. If people really wanted to squeeze up it could all be on brownfield, and urban area would not rise above 8.3% of England. But Heartfield’s point is that we simply don’t need to deny ourselves living space. Build on brownfield to replace old homes, or add new ones. But build on greenfields too if that is what people want, thinning out existing areas, building more new and larger homes, with gardens in a richer landscape. Develop creatively again, and recognize that 500,000 a year is still a conservative estimate of the number of homes we need to be building.
We know that immigration is much higher than between the 40,000 and 50,000 households per annum as cited in the 200,000 per annum estimate of household growth. 27 We also know that household formation is being frustrated by high prices. The 34,000 additional housing helps, but the backlog from recent undersupply that forces overcrowding in established households, where offspring cannot move out, and amongst immigrants trying to get established, needs relieving. Some immigrants may bring their families, but not all.
447,000 Eastern Europeans have successfully applied to the Worker Registration Scheme, 28 which allocates the right to work in Britain, since eight countries joined the EU in May 2004. Of these 16,670 were working in construction as employees. It is estimated that with self-employment, perhaps 100,000 of the most recent Eastern European immigrants are in construction, 29 taking the Eastern European total since May 2004 to 600,000, or about 2% of the British workforce. 30
Occupations of Eastern Europeans who have registered for UK construction work since May 2004
| Labourer | 10525 |
| Carpenter/Joiner | 2355 |
| Bricklayer/Mason | 945 |
| Painter and Decorator | 770 |
| Skilled Machine Operator (construction) | 675 |
| Constructor; Steel | 505 |
| Electrician | 390 |
| Plasterer | 195 |
| Plumbers, Heating and Ventilating Engineer | 190 |
| Total | 16,670 |
Source: Peter Fordham, Davis Langdon, ‘Cost Update’, Building, 6 September 2006, p 75 to 77.
The recent peaks that have punctuated the long term trough of relatively low immigration into the UK suggest that even five million homes in the next 10 years may not be enough. Some of these workers are helping to keep the construction industry going; and, as ever, many new immigrants are supporting all the other unattractive sectors of the British economy. From an enlarged EU and beyond, immigration makes Britain a far better place; it civilizes the UK by bringing the world through the door. In this context, rather than closing the door or limiting construction, we should strive to ensure that expanding housing supply matches increased labour mobility: we should build more homes to make immigration easier. 31
In addition, to assume a 100-year design-life for homes is optimistic, when the sorts of “micro-flats” being built at required densities are not expected to last more than 60 years by the Building Research Establishment. 32 In “innovative” or “Modern Methods of Construction” the structure only has to last that long, while the building fabric will fall apart much sooner, and kitchens and bathrooms will need replacing many times over that period. This seems no better, and potentially a retrograde step from “traditional” masonry structures built on Georgian or Victorian physical proportions and scales of ambition. It is clear old-fashioned and poorly performing sorts of masonry structures can last more than 100 years, and take a lot of adaptation and improvement. But they have their limits too. We should deliberately build more homes with the facility to be upgraded over different design lives, and get beyond the inadequacies of a focus on MMC or “tradition”. 33
Heartfield appreciates that 500,000 homes per annum are not nearly sufficient, but even this many is only a remote possibility with British construction activity as low as it is. Woudhuysen has well understood the factors that answer the question: Why is construction so backward? 34 He identifies the promotion of sustainability as a “naturalistic perspective” as chief among them. The imperative to use brownfield land first was based on a bogus, two-part assertion that the countryside was threatened by development, and that car-based suburbs caused climate change in ways that “urbs” with public transport need not. The consequence of resisting greenfield development has been to force up the cost of brownfield land. Some brownfield land is genuinely up to the money because it offers great location. However the mediocre-to-poor land that has been previously developed would be properly worth less if greenfield could be built on. The planning presumption that over-values brownfield then also forces developers to cram more on their sites than planners would otherwise prefer. That is why the rash of speculative “micro-flat” blocks thrown up appears ugly; as architecture on steroids.
So we should challenge environmentalists like Baroness Andrews, and her claim to be meeting ‘… the housing needs of future generations’. Britain is failing to meet the housing needs of generations alive now, of internal migrants, and of immigrants. We are protecting countryside we have no agricultural need for, rather than let people make something of it as landscape by living in it. We are ensuring that ageing housing stock persists by being patched up beyond all practical rationality, often through DIY. We are funding that grotesque “make-do-and-mend” waste of time and energy through rampant property speculation. 35
By focussing on “sustainable communities”, and rejecting as unsustainable the place where 84% of us really live – suburbs historically built on redundant farmland – “Urbanist” policies have created the very model of an unaffordable, unsustainable community. We should stop this nonsense, particularly in the South East of England, before none of us can afford to live where we need to be. Furthermore, carrying on as we are can only add to the likelihood of financial panic – the eventual bursting of the British proerty market ballon, and the worst of both worlds, i.e. a legacy of long run housing undersupply and a deflated property market.
The total area of agricultural land in the United Kingdom was 18.5 million hectares in 2005, or about 77% of the total land area. 36 Agriculture occupies roughly 70%, or 9.2 million hectares of the land area in England. 37 Almost 5% of farmed land in England is subsidised via the European Commission’s Common Agricultural Policy to grow nothing. If Heartfield’s houses were built on all the “set aside” farmland in England at “De-CLoG” densities it would be possible to build 15 million homes over 30 years. At least more of that land is in the right place, compared to brownfield. In the South East, where housing shortage and speculative over-valuation are most acute, almost 9% of agricultural land is barren. But there rich pickings of a different kind:the Treasury gets good value by paying UK farmers £1.5 billion per year to stop people building homes on their land, and risk collapsing the property market. 38 And the £1.5 billion was more than recouped by the £5.5 billion paid in Stamp Duty to the Treasury in 2005 on the vast trade in over-valued British homes. 39
The Treasury will gladly pay far more if farmers undertake the environmental “make-work” schemes being developed by David Miliband at Defra. Already the environmental Stewardship scheme has over 3 million hectares under agreement. That is over 23,000 live agreements in place, representing a first year payments value of more than £105 million, plus the cost of administration. 40 That equates to just over 16% of UK farmland or 32% of farmland in England. That seems cheap at the price, even if extended to 100% of farmers.
The idea that households living at really low densities could diversify the landscape and increase the varieties of wildlife it supports, for free, as a hobby, must fill the Treasury with dread. If land supply were made available to match the demand for homes, the expanded supply would wipe billions, if not trillions, off the total of private house values everywhere – a total which is dependent on under-supply of homes and which passed £3.5 trillion in 2005, 41 or three times GDP. 42
This would be a nightmare for Chancellor Gordon Brown as he waits to succeed Tony Blair as prime minister. Brown has facilitated Blair’s legacy of unaffordable housing and an ecological land fetish. He dare not be the politician identified as reconnecting house prices with wages, but then he is under no pressure to develop a policy which might achieve this. So the balloon keeps rising.
As Brown’s man, Ed must be sleeping easier, alongside the Minister for Housing and Planning, since Kate Barker at the Bank of England handed him the Interim Report of the Review of Land Use Planning in July 2006. Barker has effectively abandoned attempts to substantially increase house-building through land supply. Brown and Blair’s defunct Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott had commissioned Barker to undertake this second review of planning in England in December 2005. The planning presumption against building on greenfield is safe.
Of course Barker I, her 2004 Review of Housing Supply, was only arguing for more housing as a tool to calm the property market down. Barker was clearly under strict orders not to go so far as to risk collapsing house price inflation in England altogether. In reality, the rate of house price inflation slowed in 2004 because first time buyers without parental support were being priced out of the market. Since then property price rises have accelerated again thanks to speculation. Barker II, like most sequels, fails to improve on the bad plot of the first blockbuster. She understands that ‘… several factors are likely to put pressure on the planning system over the next 10-20 years. ’ Her concern is that these factors are going to have a profound impact on our quality of life, as mediated through the planning system. These are:
‘… globalisation, more rapid population growth, climate change, heightened concern about resource depletion, and a changing approach to biodiversity issues. None of these are new, but added together they imply that the issues the planning system addresses will be getting more difficult.’ 43
By focussing on the wide and long range issues of sustainability that preoccupy environmentalists, rather than confront the planning system’s immediate limitation on greenfield land supply, Barker is maintaining the speculative housing market. Putting off taking responsibility for today’s social policy in the name of “future generations” is disingenuous. It is bad for us today, and will not help our children, or their children.
Financial speculation on an undersupply of housing may suit New Labour in the short term, but do Mr and Mrs Balls privately realize the obsession with previously developed land will all end badly? They seem to think they can keep the British house price balloon rising indefinitely using the planning system. Using the planning system to then tax developers to subsidise a few doomed experiments in “affordable housing” seems perverse. New Labour thinking on development for population growth is hopelessly clogged. Barker perfectly expresses the government’s failure to think clearly and grasp the nettle:
‘It is unlikely that there will be one or two simple proposals which will resolve these issues. And there are risks that change itself will add to uncertainty.’ 44
In wanting greater certainty this government, and the consultants it hides behind, are pursuing an illusion of financial stability. Sooner or later Mr and Mrs Balls have to let go of the rising house price balloon, or it will pop.
The human population of the Earth might approach nine billion by 2030, by the highest estimate; by the lowest, it might not reach eight billion: or, perhaps more likely, it will be about 8.3 billion. 45 By this time, the rest of humanity will have solved the technically simple matter of housing production. Britain’s planning system will be the only protection for Britain’s finances secured against property, and it will also be a protection on trade. When it is already possible to build homes at £800/m2 conventionally using bricks and mortar, or to buy modest prefabricated house kits for £30,000, it will not be long before fully finished, mass-manufactured houses are sold as an inhabitable consumer durable. These will be available on the internet for shipping from Asia on a few days’ notice. Then Mr and Mrs Balls might discover they are trying to resist a coalition of families wanting a plot of land within easy reach of where they need to be, and farmers wanting to retire by selling up to them.
Illegal land movements happen everywhere else in the world. 46 To assume that shanty towns don’t happen here is to underestimate the extent of change in a country, Britain, which has gained from immigration, is putting youth in an impossible position, and no longer needs so many of its subsidy dependent farmers. What would Ed and Yvette make of a weekend “land grab” to establish a settlement built with the passive assistance of redundant farmers?
Squatting happened in Essex after the bombing of London, and at the end of the Second World War. 47 Squatting was against farmers and their legal rights to the land, and would remain so if carried out today. But of course if farmers just sell up to setllers for slightly higher prices per hectare than they can sell their land for agricultural use, such settlement would not be squatting. It would be illegal in terms of planning law, but settlers and farmers would stand no chance of being offered planning permission on these terms.
Done better today, using better construction technology, a popular settlement that offends planning might be the Thames Gateway that the visionaries at “De-CLoG” never imagined; and a good deal more than the “WOW factor” John Prescott had in mind. It might be the start of a new generation of popular Superbia. 48
Refusing to increase land supply and discouraging population growth are failings of this government. De-clogging closed minds on matters of house building and immigration is proving difficult – but it has to be done. It has to be done for ourselves, each other, and because we want a better future for our children and their grandchildren.
New Labour will not allow the British population to grow, move closer together or spread out, as best suits the electorate in a democratic country. They don’t seem to have the imagination or confidence to let go of a property market balloon of their own making. They would rather listen to an organsiation like the CPRE which has said the same thing for 80 years. The consequences will be unhappy, unless those in authority are forced to re-think.
Ian Abley is a practising architect and director of www.audacity.org. He is co-author of Why is construction so backward? (Wiley, 2004), and co-editor of Manmade Modular Megastructures, the January/February 2006 edition of AD magazine.
This essay was presented as a paper at Superbia: the case for suburbia, a conference convened at the Centre for Suburban Studies, Kingston University, 23 September 2006.
East London has a long shoreline, with many inlets and creeks, especially along the north bank of the River Thames. Some areas are very low lying, and need coastal protection from storms, and from the possibility of sea level rises due to Global Warming. There are also a number of redundant dock basins which might be used as “tide ponds”. Tide pond walls could double as coastal defence barriers against sea water ingress. Tides can be considered as the most predictable, and reliable form of renewable energy
This form of energy has been harnessed from Roman times for small milling operations on coastal sites. No part of the UK is further than 70 miles from tidal water. The gravitational energy from the Sun and Moon move sea water up and down in a regular, predictable and constant pattern. Thus Britain is well placed to take advantage of this inexhaustible energy source. To do this either the flow of the tide must be harnessed as it moves round these islands [1]; or the sea must be channelled to flow from a high tide level to a low tide level, which is the approach followed in this article. This involves creating "ponds" in the walls of which equipment is sited to generate energy from the flow. As the ponds will both fill and empty, the equipment must be capable of bi-directional flow. The equipment must also be effective under conditions of flows below its maximum capability, and have a high conversion of flow energy to mechanical or electrical energy.
These conditions are met by a water engine. The operation is that of two weighted floats being alternately raised and lowered by water entering the chamber underneath them, and then draining out of it. The flow is controlled by flap valves. Flow can be in either direction, as controlled by the valve programme. See myweb.tiscali.co.uk Also page at same website.
The floats are linked to two sets of hydraulic rams, so that the force of the floats rising and falling is converted to hydraulic oil (or water) pressure. This pressure stream can then be used to power machinery, including electricity generation equipment, heat pumps, and other rotating equipment.
The mechanism is essentially a pressure intensifier. In that the low pressure of a few feet of water is converted into 3-4000 psi hydraulic pressure. The operating range for single units is from 1ft to 10ft head of water, and is thus suitable for large-flow, low-head installations in rivers, and for tidal power collection using "ponds". Higher heads can be handled by "cascade" installations of two or more units in series, though reverse flow is thereby inhibited.
In the 1980s two machines were built and reported on by ETSU [2,3,4] but since then only two small test machines have been built. The mechanisms are simple and robust, and in volume production should be comparable in cost with other hydropower equipment. Maintenance should be simple, and given good construction parameters, the equipment should have a long life. For example, all parts in contact with sea water could be made of fibreglass or other non-corroding materials.
A major cost, however, is the construction of the ponds. Three approaches can be considered for tidal energy collection: the estuary approach; the shoreline; and the open sea. Both the last two entail additional energy income being generated from wind and wave energy, and from fish farming; plus, where appropriate, the use of the tide pond walls as a protection against coastal erosion by the sea, and possibly as flood prevention barriers. The open sea approach is similar to that being pioneered by Tidal Electric off Cornwall, but using water engines, and adding the extra income-generating items mentioned above. For estuary and inshore installations the hydraulic power could be piped ashore. Inclusion of hydraulic accumulators for some energy storage would help iron out peaks and troughs in demand; and the driven items, heat pumps, generators or other machinery might be mounted well away from sea water.
The estuary and shoreline approaches benefit from the possibility that initially all power developed by water engines would be collected by an hydraulic main and taken on shore, where a central generating or other energy using facility could be set up, well away from the sea. Given suitable materials of construction the water engines could just act as pumps, delivering sea water under high pressure into the hydraulic main. In a similar manner to the London Hydraulic Power Company, which at its height in 1930 supplied 8000 machines with power through 186 miles of pipes. [5] Or Bristol's Avonmouth Docks, which were originally powered by hydraulics. [6]
There are of course many inland applications for water engines, in locations with heads of 3m and below. But sadly while Eire has surveyed such sites [7], the UK has only done surveys down to heads of 3m, with none below. [8]
A potential application for water engines is to drive heat pumps. The major energy advantage is that while electricity generation may give 60-65% of the tidal energy as usable power, a direct driven heat pump, which excludes electrical machinery, "adds" to the energy output to the extent that for every 100 units of hydro energy available, up to perhaps 250 units of heat energy can be delivered by a heat pump system; the "extra" energy coming from cooling the sea.
Andrew Stobart BSc Chem.Eng is secretary of the Grühaus Project, Liverpool
Based on an article extracted from Marine Scientist, N0.9 Q4 2004 page 42, by A F Stobart BSc.Chem.Eng
See also www.grunweb.org.uk
© 2004·06
Among the mountains which the planners and developers have to climb to make the Thames Gateway a success are two peaks still shrouded in cloud. They are the peaks of Carbon Emissions and the local Knowledge Economy:
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