Urban Futures 2030

Contents

• Ralf Fücks
  Preface
• Sabine Drewes and Walter Prigge
  Urban Futures 2030 – the Sustainable City of Tomorrow

I Philosophy, Predictions, Position

• Peter Droege
  The Sustainable City: the Energy Revolution as a Key Urban Development Paradigm
• Philipp Oswalt
  Well-Tempered Architecture
• Fritz Reusswig
  Architecture and Climate Change
• Weiding Long
  Mass Urbanization and Climate Change in China: Challenges and Opportunities
• Piet Eckert
  “And next to it, at an appropriate distance, go build the city of our time”

II Projects

• Sebastian Jehle
  Sustainable Architecture
• Matthias Schuler
  The Masdar Development – Showcase with Global Effect
• Ted Caplow
  Building Integrated Agriculture: Philosophy and Practice
• Sabine Müller and Andreas Quednau
  Master Planning of Xeritown, Dubai
• Simona Weisleder
  The City in a Changing Climate: Key Theme of the International Building Exhibition in Hamburg
• Andreas Hofer
  KraftWerk1 – Cooperative Sustainability
• Michael Müller
  Sustainable Building: More Than Eco-Architecture
• Stefan Denig
  Munich’s Path Toward a Carbon-Free Future
• Joachim Eble
  ECOCITY – A European Approach to Sustainable Urban Planning

III Policy

• Ulrich Hatzfeld
  Paths Toward a Sustainable City
• Peter Hettlich
  Ecological Building Activity – Modern and Sustainable
• Franziska Eichstädt-Bohlig
  Germany: Seeking the Sustainable City
• Ulla Schreiber
  “Tübingen macht blau” - The university town’s successful climate protection campaign

Authors

Preface

This publication is a result of the international “Urban Futures 2030 – Urban Development and Urban Lifestyles of the Future” conference organized by the Heinrich Böll Foundation and the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and held in Berlin on the 3rd and 4th of July 2009. Urban Futures pursues two corresponding ideas. Our first objective is to deepen the transnational dialog over the role of cities in solving the climate crisis. How do cities respond to the great challenge of our time – the drastic reduction greenhouse gas emissions and adoption of a sound new development path for the future? How can they meet the demand for energy and the mobility needs of an urban population that is growing worldwide without ruining the ecosphere once and for all? From the perspective of global climate justice, it will be crucial to reduce the carbon emissions of highly-industrialized countries by 80 percent by the year 2050. Yet the rising economic powers of the South will also need to make the transition to lower emissions in the foreseeable future in order to keep climate change within manageable limits. The signs are encouraging: China, for example, is in the process of planning CO2-neutral cities for hundreds of thousands of inhabitants that will cover their energy needs using renewable resources and be designed for carbon-free mobility. The impulses for urban transformation in Europe and North America arising from such projects were discussed in detail during the conference.

Our second objective is to collect visions and models of sustainable architecture and urban planning and present them to a broader public. Dealing with climate change will mean taking a critical look at our building work – work that can only be truly described as “building culture” if it lives up to the need for sustainability. What is needed is a “low-carbon building culture”, as described in this volume by the climate researcher Fritz Reusswig. Constructing, operating and demolishing buildings alone accounts for 40 percent of German greenhouse gas emissions. Together with traffic and industrial production, building-related energy consumption is one of the major sources of urban CO2 emissions. Future-oriented urban planning and architecture must provide answers to climate change, and “greening the city” is the new megatrend, as numerous architectural conferences and a genuine boom in ecological building activity testify.

This publication contains contributions by numerous presenters of the Urban Futures conference, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone involved for their support in its swift production. This compilation makes no claims with regard to completeness or academic rigor. Nevertheless, it covers a noteworthy range of the current discussion on climate change, architecture and life in urban settings.

The contributions cover fundamental thinking on the future structure of cities and an “energy revolution as a paradigm of urban development” (Peter Droege). They also highlight intelligent architecture that unites ecology, aesthetic appeal and technology in a new synthesis. Other contributions present approaches to sustainable architecture that go beyond “eco-building”. Interested readers will discover numerous visionary ideas ranging from climate-appropriate passive air conditioning of buildings in the desert of Abu Dhabi to urban agriculture on New York City rooftops. It goes without saying, of course, that the future of the city is not just a matter of individual new buildings. In Europe in particular, cities are essentially complete, and visions therefore focus on transforming them to protect the climate while improving quality of life and ensuring greater social justice. Some of the possibilities available here can be seen in sustainable cooperative projects in Switzerland as well as in experiments in local power generation in the IBA building exhibition in Hamburg, Germany. How technological innovation can work more closely with grass-roots climate protection movements will require further discussion. With this publication, we hope to deliver numerous impulses to the debate, and above all, to the practical aspects of planning and building.

Sustainable urban development and transformation is a creative challenge for society as a whole. Policymakers at all levels will also need to do their part. Reaching climate goals in the building sector will require more stringent renovation and construction standards than those currently in place in Germany. Beyond regulations and economic incentives, it will be crucial to excite investors, enterprising building project initiators and the urban public for ecological urban redevelopment. Low-carbon cities could then become a reality in Germany and elsewhere. 

Urban Futures 2030 – theSustainable City of Tomorrow

Visions of how cities should be built or transformed reflect the diversity of views and perspectives on how people will and should live in cities, since planning in any form always also pursues normative goals. Architecture and urban planning reflect the designs that urban society makes of itself and the conflicts of interest related to the use of cities. Problems of the present tend to concentrate in urban centers, as do experimental solutions to those problems. The built environment, its design and its redesign are themselves becoming objects of the debate over the city of the future.

Climate change is a major problem of the present. It has become common knowledge that the world’s cities account for around 80 percent of all CO2 emissions, and that they conversely offer numerous options to mitigate emissions. Along with industrial production and transportation, buildings are among the most important sources of greenhouse gas emissions. In virtually every corner of the globe, the energy efficiency of existing buildings leaves much to be desired. In Germany, for example, 80 percent of all buildings currently exceed the primary energy consumption ceiling of 70 kWh per m2 per year stipulated in the German Energy Conservation Ordinance (ENeV) of 2007. Yet the standards of the ENeV are not particularly ambitious. If the climate-friendly conversion projects of the KfW development bank were to continue at their current pace, an additional 25 percent of Germany’s residential buildings could be brought up to current energy efficiency standards by 2030. However, private builders in Germany invest several times the total of the funding available from the KfW in residential construction projects without benefiting climate protection. Furthermore, population growth and urbanization is putting considerable pressure on many countries for new residential building – especially the newly-industrialized China and India – and ecological criteria are applied to such construction projects only in exceptional cases. The sustainable city of tomorrow faces not only ecological, but also major social challenges, and these are reasons enough to dedicate a conference and this associated compilation to urban development and urban lifestyles of the future.

This publication contains contributions from nearly all of the conference’s speakers that illuminate a variety of aspects of sustainable architecture, as well as future building and redevelopment. It is structured in three sections: Philosophy, Predictions and Positions, Projects and Policy.

Philosophy, Predictions and Positions

The global trends of climate change and urbanization, as well as philosophies and positions on how architecture and building should respond to those challenges, are the subject of the first section. The international energy expert Peter Droege takes his very own prognostic look at the future of cities. He believes that dangers to the affluence and stability of cities will arise from the same sources that permitted them to grow to their current size and wealth – fossil fuels and nuclear energy, with their finite natures leading to the predictable or welcome end of their predominance. In his view, an “energy revolution” in favor of decentral sources of energy from renewable resources will be indispensable – an option for the future that is technically feasible thanks to the availability of intelligent network technology and suitable storage media, but which will require political will to implement. Weiding Long highlights urban development trends in China that are typical of a number of major newly-industrialized countries and illustrate the relationships between population and economic growth, urbanization and increasing CO2 emissions. According to World Bank estimates, in 2015 half of all building activity worldwide will be taking place in China. At the same time, the Chinese also look forward to improving standards of living – this is all too easily understandable considering that many Chinese apartments have an average temperature of 14 °C in winter and 29 °C in summer. These developments will exacerbate climate change despite Chinese plans to build a number of new eco-cities and deploy renewable sources of energy. This underscores the need for action by the West, which still uses considerably more energy per capita – especially in the building sector – and which must reduce that consumption drastically to remain credible with regard to climate policy.

In 1994, Philipp Oswalt developed a rather visionary philosophy for rethinking architecture in light of growing energy consumption and unhealthy buildings which remains valid today and is gradually beginning to fall on fertile ground. He called for holistic, integrated planning of intelligent buildings that encompasses the building’s structure, façade and technology, and which no longer looks upon the inhabitants as a disruptive element. At the same time, Oswalt presented a number of thoughts about the social context of the new thinking in architecture: He called for “new building clients” that place the long-term interests of society before short-term profit maximization and for political instruments to help them to assert themselves. Even though private building clients are showing much more interest in sustainable building than they did ten years ago, these questions remain relevant in the context of a generalization of sustainable building practices.

Fritz Reusswig continues in Oswalt’s vein. After establishing the rather lamentable ecological state of German building culture, he calls on the professional ethics of architects to use their creativity and dedication to breathe life into a low-carbon building culture – in keeping with Bauhaus traditions.

If Piet Eckert had his way, he would rebuild European cities from the ground up as energy-optimized cities of the future. That will not be possible, however, so he is hoping for a greater acceptance of urban density among Europe’s city dwellers.

Projects

A number of architects pick up the thread from Oswalt and Reusswig. Sebastian Jehle describes sustainable architecture as the art of planning and design that applies “simple technology” – systems that rely much more on reactive and self-regulating natural processes than active, dedicated technology. This involves using technology to optimize natural processes such as air circulation, the changing time of day and the incidence of light rather than creating them artificially – an approach to architectural design that preserves the experience of the natural environment while maintaining the protective function of the building. It is also interesting how these options, with suitable regional variations, are applicable in a variety of cultures and climate zones. Jehle’s examples are based on an office building in Landshut, Germany, and the headquarters of Q-tel, a telecommunications provider in Doha, United Arab Emirates.

Matthias Schuler and the SMAQ team Sabine Müller and Andreas Quednau have similar things to report from their respective viewpoints about how current planning, in this case in various developments in Abu Dhabi, works with the natural environment instead of against it. In doing so, the engineers borrowed a number of ideas from local traditional building techniques.

While Schuler considers the planning of Masdar as a CO2-free city to be a vision waiting to be repeated elsewhere in the world, it is not entirely surprising that these simultaneously simple and highly complex technological solutions for sustainable building can be found increasingly in the United Arab Emirates. As encouraging as it may be to have European architectural offices performing highly innovative work in the Emirates, one must nevertheless hope for investors for the transfer of their techniques. Those who assume that truly innovative sustainable building solutions can only be realized in new buildings are mistaken, however.

In his contribution, Michael Müller highlights new efforts to certify sustainable building in Germany’s existing buildings. Energy savings of up to 90 percent are technically and economically feasible. Further research and – above all – implementation of the available options for existing buildings will be crucial, as new projects now make up a negligible share of building activity and investment in Europe and even in North America and will continue to do so in the future.

In Europe and North America, visions of tomorrow’s building cannot be based primarily on individual, new structures. Visions of the buildings of and for tomorrow must arise from the reinterpretation of quarters and concepts of urban redevelopment. Interested readers will find inspiration to that effect in the Projects section as well. The New York-based BrightFarm Systems urban agriculture company is increasingly making a name for itself. Every hectare of roof area used to grow tomatoes, cucumbers and pumpkins in solar greenhouses frees up ten hectares of land, saves 75,000 tons of fresh water and mitigates 250 tons of CO2 that would otherwise be emitted transporting conventionally-grown vegetables, explains Ted Caplow in his contribution. This is a key project not only to mitigate climate change, but also to address the impending world food crisis. Power generation – preferably using renewable resources – can also be integrated into existing city quarters, as Simona Weisleder explains in her article on the IBA Hamburg building exhibition. An old flak bunker and a former landfill are being used for that purpose. The Kraftwerk1 cooperative in Zurich, Switzerland, is a special example for civic dedication to sustainable urban redevelopment. The initiators realized the first large-scale residential building according to the Swiss Minergie standard on the site of an old mechanical engineering factory and financed it for the most part out of their own pockets. Andreas Hofer, who was involved in the project from the start, emphasizes that the behavior of its inhabitants is a significant factor for a building’s energy performance, and this easily optimizes itself when residential property is communalized in this manner. Joachim Eble uses the EU Ecocity project in Tübingen, Germany, to illustrate the planning of the controlled expansion of residential areas while minimizing the rise in motorized individual transportation that this normally entails. Last but not least, Stefan Denig presents the “Sustainable Urban Infrastructure: Munich – Paths toward a Carbon-Free Future” study which was commissioned by Siemens and provides a city-based perspective on a 90-percent reduction of CO2 emissions.

Policy

Sustainable urban redevelopment needs a suitable policy framework, and representatives of various political institutions and positions provide an orientation here. Ulrich Hatzfeld describes the relevant programs of Germany’s Federal Ministry of Transport, Building and Urban Development. For example, 865,000 apartments have been built or renovated with support from KfW development bank programs promoting energy-efficient construction. Climate protection and global responsibility are also focal points of Germany’s national urban development policy.

Peter Hettlich outlines the positions of the Green Party, asserting that sustainable building can only succeed if binding regulations are put in place for energy consumption and building materials to be used. The Green Party favors energy consumption standards of 60 kWh/m2a for existing and 15 kWh/m2a for new buildings – figures well below the currently applicable limits. They also advocate certifying building materials and broadening the scope of Germany’s Renewable Energies Heat Act (EEWärmeG) to include existing buildings.

Franziska Eichstädt-Bohlig would like to see a federally funded model project patterned after the cautious approach to urban renewal pioneered in West Berlin in the 1980s to create an economically, socially and ecologically sustainable city in the northern part of Berlin’s Neukölln district.

Climate-friendly cities also need good communication: Ulla Schreiber relates how the town of Tübingen is winning an increasing number of citizens over to the cause of active climate protection with its Tübingen macht blau campaign.

Indeed, a citizen’s movement for climate protection in the building and residential sectors remains sorely needed – not only to realize radical lighthouse projects, but to spur legislators on. Renovating existing buildings in Germany to improve their energy efficiency would, for example, have called for a substantial, dedicated stimulus package – an opportunity that has so far largely been missed. The city of tomorrow contains many construction sites – literal and figurative – that will only become sustainable if as many people as possible contribute.