Resourcing the future

Sustainability is defined as a duty owed to future generations, but the resources we currently enjoy came from the supposed unsustainable growth our parents realised. Returning to either the inefficient or polluting practices of the past is not, where avoidable, a sensible option. However, deliberately slowing the pace and scale of development in the belief that this will clean up the environment is considerd a sustainable approach.

Technological modernisation can hardly be stopped, and so is not inherently problematic to environmentalists, subject to new methods and materials being environmentally assessed. Yet only by advancing with social purpose are previously unimportant or inaccessible materials turned into a stock of resources. That means changing how we work rather than simply modernising patterns of labour intensive work.

The first session will question why construction professionals choose resource efficiencies over labour productivity, rather than aspire to achieve both. Such a supposedly sustainable approach considers human labour as the renewable resource.

This unnecessary polarisation favours savings in resource use, including land use, to the point that increasing urban density is now an obsession while construction remains a site based chore. So will our children thank us for sustainable development? Will the pursuit of sustainability turn construction into a resource efficient and capital intensive manufacturing industry, or just modernise the construction site?

Any solution that merely leaves things "no worse", however difficult even that may prove to be, must be wholly inadequate.

Instead of acknowledging the necessity and unknowableness of innovation, sustainability deals with the intractable problems posed by time, change and circumstance by means of hindsight, not foresight.

"Is this project sustainable?" becomes a request not for an honest answer but for a series of passwords. Sustainability becomes another way of deciding who is in charge.

(Sustainable) development should evolve in such a way that development can continue, and such finalism in the end offers no answer to anything.

Will our children thank us for this bout of fundamentalist madness? No they will not.

Click to go to the next presentation in this session by Graeme Jennings

Will our children thank us for sustainable development?

Ian Abley (chairman) With this question in mind, it is my pleasure to introduce Martin Pawley. He is a columnist for the Architects' Journal and World Architecture, the author of Theory and Design in the Second Machine Age and Terminal Architecture. Martin is the keynote speaker this morning on the first theme of Resourcing the future.

Martin Pawley It is a great pleasure to be here, and thank you for inviting me. I am appalled at the way public debate has been turned into something else in recent years. A debate in my time was a proposition followed by a refutation and then personal abuse! Nowadays the personal abuse seems to have been lost.

My favourite way of asking the initial question is can we survive sustainability? It is a stroke of genius to make this the introduction to the whole event rather than some uncontentious point.

The origin of the term sustainable development is generally taken to be the Bruntland Report of 1987, which describes it as "…development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." A simpler restatement is Dr. Peter Smith's "…leaving the planet to the next generation in no worse state than that in which the present generation found it."

These two statements, like the many other variations on the same theme that can be seen and heard these days, embody a breathtakingly serious number of contradictions and flaws. What they gain in verbal felicity they lose in practical logic. They are in fact textbook examples of the political fudge, or a form of words that combine opposite positions by proposing the authority of a third. Thus a politician might say something like "…I have no desire to stop the private citizen from driving where he or she pleases, but we cannot have our countryside overrun with traffic." Both motoring and anti-motoring lobbies will probably agree with this statement, but what they will find that they have agreed to is contained in the tiny little word "we" buried in the middle of the sentence. Henceforth it will be "We" who decides who drives where and when.

The incompatibility of mass motorisation with rural tranquillity will not be resolved because it has never been confronted. Instead it will move into the area of privilege, regulation and enforcement, licences, passes, permits and criminalisation. "Leaving the planet to the next generation in no worse state than that in which the present generation found it." This is a similar political case. It sounds a very worthy aim but it embodies contradictions and confusions that will only be resolved by totalitarian means.

The term "present generation" for example is ill defined. Does it mean everyone alive today, or every one of working age today, or everyone in a developed country today? As for contradictions, since we have arrived at the third millennium after what is alleged to be centuries of increasingly unsustainable development, surely any solution that merely leaves things "no worse", however difficult even that may prove to be, must be wholly inadequate.

Clearly, if we are in the business of legislating for environmental tranquillity it would be much tidier to start again, choosing an age when everything really did seem more or less sustainable. For example the early nineteenth century as depicted in TV serialisations of the novels of Jane Austen, and then pass laws to ensure that nothing ever got any worse than that. The fact that starting again like this is patently impossible illuminates the impossibility of sustainability; because its proof must always lie in the future. 200 years after the event we are well placed to savour the romanticised perfection of life with Elizabeth Bennett, but by the same token we will have to wait until the year 2200 before we can create the same romanticised visions of our own delectable year 2000.

This much having been said, it has to be admitted that, despite its oxymoronic construction, the term "sustainable development" does convey a meaning of sorts. But unfortunately, in operational terms it has already been overtaken by the much more amorphous and dangerous single word "sustainability". As a result it has attracted to itself innumerable meanings, all of which are unclear.

In one sense it poses as a distant goal, the Shangri-La of sustainable development - the state of sustainability - in another it will present itself as a moral good, like liberty, equality or fraternity. More and more commonly these days it is the battle cry of a movement with an agenda of political, social and technological repression.

Where is the evidence that sustainability exists? In the realm of architecture it is claimed that low-energy buildings are sustainable and environmentally friendly, and that by building more of them we can fulfil the promises made at the Earth Summit in Rio.

This alas, is nonsense. No new building ever saved a kilowatt of energy. "Ecological building means not building at all," as Frei Otto said. All new buildings create additional energy needs and the release of new building land for them is in itself an "unsustainable" activity. In the present state of the relevant technologies there are no construction processes capable of zero energy demand or zero impact upon the natural environment, and only three that can reduce present energy demand.

• Retrofitting energy efficiency equipment to existing buildings.
• Putting new, efficient buildings on existing sites.
• Building in the gaps between buildings so as to reduce their overall surface area.

Significantly all three of these exceptions lay emphasis on existing building rather than any new construction. Improvements in the energy performance of new buildings, however remarkable, can have only a tiny impact on overall energy consumption. In terms of sustainable development this means new buildings represent a waste of resources that would be better spent developing after-market energy efficiency products and materials.

Similarly it suggests putting a stop to the enforced emphasis on art historical accuracy in conservation work, in place of achieving function and energy efficiency, that already constitutes a huge obstacle to the diversion of resources to the area of greatest need.

It makes little sense for sustainable development enthusiasts to speak of the requirements of new construction as though they were compatible with sustainability. Due to the enormous backlog of existing built environment, they can never be of more than marginal significance.

Within 20 years, in a world where, we are told, 60 per cent of the population will live in energy-burning megacities, all of which will be beyond any Western democratic exercise of political power to change, even the most draconian policy of enforced sustainability in Europe must be hopelessly inadequate. Especially so because the process of urbanisation, which innate trends within urban populations always seeks to abate, is instead being encouraged despite the concentrations of greenhouse gases, pollutants, disease and civil disturbance it entails.

Viewed in the light of population increases, mounting energy consumption, transport congestion and infrastructure breakdown, sustainable development, let alone sustainability, is truly impossible. As a survival strategy sustainable development is as flawed as a discussion of thermodynamics, but without admitting to the existence of entropy. There are no more examples of sustainable development in our solar system than there is a mandate for it in our social system. Nothing in the universe goes on forever, so how can human society evolve in order to enable it to go on forever?

The answer of course is that, wisely, we do not even try to answer such a futile question. Instead we strive to create a consensus around precedent and best practice. Thus we treat the resources of the earth as finite and, like a polar expedition faced with another winter on the ice, we plan to ration our resources so that they will last as long as possible. This is a strategy that is already, through the rejection of genetically modified crops and the subsidising of uneconomic organic farming, artificially creating the very conditions of scarcity that sustainable development is supposed to ward off.

In the process this is institutionalising a state of paralysis in place of a market for new resources. The role of new resources is fundamental to this argument. An energy audit taken in Wales in 1000 AD, would not have included coal as a resource. An audit taken in England in 1950 would have looked forward to limitless free nuclear power, but one taken 30 years later would have seen no sign of it. An audit taken in Norway or Scotland as late as 1960 would not have included North Sea oil. Yet all these new resources have played vitally important roles in politics, planning and wealth creation.

Instead of acknowledging the necessity and unknowableness of innovation, sustainability deals with the intractable problems posed by time, change and circumstance by means of hindsight, not foresight. Instead money is poured into obsolete nineteenth century cities, allegedly to protect a countryside that in reality requires no protection, and is better equipped to face the future than any metropolis.

"Is this project sustainable?" Is the question now posed by planners who are no better equipped to answer it than are the architects who present their schemes for this new version of the previous question "Does it block a view of Saint Paul's?" The darker side of such exchanges is that, like all such unanswerable questions, it can be answered by force majeure. "Is this project sustainable?" becomes a request not for an honest answer but for a series of passwords. Sustainability becomes another way of deciding who is in charge.

In its present form sustainability is neither a creative nor a technical vision. All that is known about it is that it is a good thing, supported by the highest and lowest in the land and supposed by almost everybody to require no further justification than their allegiance.

In reality it is certain only of its own end, that development should evolve in such a way that development can continue, and such finalism in the end offers no answer to anything. Rather it offers tautologies that purport to be answers.

Advocates of sustainability are now firmly established in the construction industry. The Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions will publish the results of exhaustive consultation on sustainable development so that it may be enforced. The RIBA is promoting sustainability, as a duty for architects, insisting that ecology becomes a mandatory aspect of an architect's training. Before long sustainability will no longer be a meaningless word but a matter of regulation that will constrain designers everywhere.

Will our children thank us for this bout of fundamentalist madness?

No they will not.

Ian Abley All questions on the three presentations this morning will be taken together at the end. So I would now like to introduce Graeme Jennings, architect director of b Consultants, the authors of the Guide to sustainable roofing systems for Redland Roofing. You will find a courtesy copy of the Redland guide in your delegate packs.

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