Contents with links to the contributor's biographies
Chapter 1 If sustainable design isn't a moral imperative, what is? Paul Hyett
President of the Royal Institute of British Architects Paul Hyett sets out the moral imperative for an environmental duty of care. He further argues for the legal protection of function for environmentally minded architects, more than the protection of title, in an effort to curb what he calls "...the devastating outcomes of scientific and technical progress".
Chapter 2 Zen and the art of life cycle maintenance Austin Williams
Austin Williams, Technical Editor of the Architects' Journal, says that sustainability can spur the imagination. Yet sustainability can also encourage a lowering of expectations in architectural development, to be further institutionalised by bureaucratic guides, policy directives, or environmental management systems such as ISO 14001.
Chapter 3 The popular legal fiction Daniel Lloyd
Lawyer Daniel Lloyd looks at a possible extension to the professional duty of care for architects, who may face an insecure legal future as a consequence of sustainability. The law could entertain what he calls a 'popular legal fiction' - effectively an environmental duty of care.
Chapter 4 Ecological frequencies and hybrid natures Pamela Charlick and Natasha Nicholson
Relationships between the human species, nature and technology are considered by Pamela Charlick and Natasha Nicholson. They go beyond exchanging the metaphor of buildings as machines for that of a city as an organism with a metabolism, to reject the "...determinist, rationalist, and hierarchical view of the world based on the logic of the machine".
Chapter 5 Design tokenism and global warming Helene Guldberg and Peter Sammonds
Helene Guldberg of spiked-online and Peter Sammonds, Professor of Geophysics at University College London, argue for a sense of proportion about climate change and the impact of development in a challenging interpretation of latest scientific findings. Click here for an extract
Chapter 6 Sustainable development and everyday life Phil Macnaghten
Phil Macnaghten, a leading researcher into public attitudes to science and environmental initiatives, examines the difficult relationship between global issues and immediate experience - key determinants of the public interpretation of the imperative of sustainable development.
Chapter 7 The economics of sustainable development James Heartfield
James Heartfield, the co-editor of this book, asks whether the ideas that have been reworked in sustainability were about encouraging imagination, promoting scientific and technological solutions to supply side problems, or contesting the social limitations of capitalism.
Chapter 8 Engaging the Stakeholder in the development process Miffa Salter
Urban Task Force member Miffa Salter, from the Office for Public Management, warns that the impulse to include ever more public opinion in both public and commercial decision making processes may be little more than a diffusion or evasion of responsibility.
Chapter 9 Why it is no longer appropriate to underestimate the opposition Margaret Casely-Hayford
Promotion of 'stakeholding' and third party interests is having a strange effect in development, as Margaret Casely-Hayford considers. Strangest of all is the recasting of developers in the role of victim in the planning process. This suggests a reluctance to jettison the initial consensus and compromise often realised through the discussion of sustainability.
Chapter 10 The trouble with planners Alan Hudson
Lecturer Alan Hudson interrogates the distance between policy-making elites brokering a Third Way of public and private sector partnerships, and those affected by decisions. Policy makers assume people want to be consulted, or can come to agree in the consultation process.
Chapter 11 Reinvigorating the English tradition of architectural polemic Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius
Historians Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius remind us that while contemporary planning density prescriptions are contemptuous of evident popular demand for gardens and mobility, they are often far less adventurous than previously contested phases of urban policy.
Chapter 12 Town and country in perspective James Heartfield
James Heartfield puts the relation between town and country in perspective, situating sustainable development in relation to the current agricultural crisis resulting from the productive success of farming.
Chapter 13 The sand-heap urbanism of the twenty-first century Martin Pawley
For Martin Pawley the opportunity for manufacturing architecture on an industrial scale is upon us again. Yet the demand side managers of sustainable development, like supply side technologists of the machine age, make the mistake of treating people as passive participants in a technocratic project of modernisation. Pawley calls for an experiment.
Chapter 14 Revolutionary energy Shane Slater, Ben Madden and Duncan Price
Shane Slater, Ben Madden and Duncan Price of Whitby Bird and Partners know that an urban application of hydrogen fuelled technologies could revolutionise energy production, buildings and city wide transportation. With no technical limit on hydrogen fuel cells to higher densities, this also raises the prospect of rural development.
Chapter 15 Smalltowne Sean Stanwick
The approach to sustainability by the Prince of Wales in Poundbury has been developed in Canada as New Urbanism, and revamped in the urban village idea of the Urban Task Force. Sean Stanwick explores how the resultant 'Smalltowne' is little more than themed development, bound up with voluntary but intrusive codes of personal behaviour.
Chapter 16 From strategic adviser to design sub-contractor and back again Peter Walker
Peter Walker analyses the drift of the architectural profession into a sub-consultancy, away from a position of influence between client and contractor, and towards that of architectural stylist with real liabilities.
Chapter 17 Architecture or clerkitecture?
In that drift from a pivotal role the construction industry there are contradictions and dangers in the teamworking and partnering arrangements imported from the very different world of manufacturing, as Daniel Lloyd and Deborah Brown recognise in their joint chapter.
Part 1 Changes to basic duties for architects in the law Daniel Lloyd
Part 2 Partnering agreements Deborah Brown
Chapter 18 Development rights for the hydrogen fuelled future Ian Abley
Ian Abley, director of audacity.org and co-editor with James Heartfield, concludes by reconciling earlier arguments. He raises the possibility of encouraging manufacturing production of hydrogen serviced architecture across the range of densities by returning development rights to all landowners. There is, after all, no reason that sustainability should mean a low growth economy with low rates of building replacement. That is no mandate for architecture, but a rejection of the machine age, and a retreat from the task of improving the environment.
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