Searching for the soul of the city
Alan Simpson: The City That Doesn’t Steal From Its Children
By Hans Karssenberg
14-02-2007 /views: 959 in past 12 months.
“Every new home should have to supply at least ten per cent of its own energy, have a water reuse system and be equipped with a recycling system.”
What is the future of cities? Why is it important to invest into cities? What changes should we make in our investment policies in cities? Twelve leading European thinkers about cities answer these three questions.
This week: Alan Simpson: The City That Doesn’t Steal From Its Children.
The British MP Alan Simpson has a passion for urban regeneration. At the same time, he has a deep-felt aversion to many developers, urban planners and architects who fail to adopt a sustainable approach to the built environment. “Their plans provide no room for generating energy locally, water reuse systems or recycling systems. It’s criminal. In this age, we should actually be thinking further than our own boxes and looking for renewable energy without waste. We need visions to make our cities sustainable.”
The urban area is important to Simpson. “The vast majority of people live in cities. The question is how we can establish sustainable ways of doing so in this century. That is the main challenge facing urban regeneration in the next decade. It forces us to make choices about the way we live. If we don’t, urban life will become problematic or unmanageable.”
The British MP Alan Simpson has a passion for urban regeneration. At the same time, he has a deep-felt aversion to many developers, urban planners and architects who fail to adopt a sustainable approach to the built environment. “Their plans provide no room for generating energy locally, water reuse systems or recycling systems. It’s criminal. In this age, we should actually be thinking further than our own boxes and looking for renewable energy without waste. We need visions to make our cities sustainable.”
The urban area is important to Simpson. “The vast majority of people live in cities. The question is how we can establish sustainable ways of doing so in this century. That is the main challenge facing urban regeneration in the next decade. It forces us to make choices about the way we live. If we don’t, urban life will become problematic or unmanageable.”
Climate change
Simpson quotes climate change as an example. “Researchers believe that the rate of climate change gives us only ten years to adopt a completely different approach to the built environment. This means we only have five years to find out what needs changing, and five years to make the changes work.” Simpson believes that urban restructuring is failing to take climate change into account as it should. “We can’t sit around and wait,” he warns. “Large amounts of rain now fall in short periods of time. This is a real problem for the urban environment. The drains can’t cope, water costs are spiralling, sea levels are rising and we give little thought of how to turn this from a problem to a creative resource.”
Consumers and parasites
“Humanity thinks we can carry on using fossil fuels forever,” he continues angrily. “That is madness. We are sacrificing future generations and endangering the planet. We could defend our behaviour when we still didn’t know the consequences. But now we do know and we have to take action. People are not only the earth’s biggest consumers, we have become parasites who make life impossible for the next generation.”
In Simpson’s view, this means urban regeneration needs to recapture some of the Victorian approach to over-engineering. “Victorian cities took the future into account. We have to start doing this again, for example by requiring every new building to recycle or store its own water, and generate its own energy. We have to plan and build for a different future.”
Self-sustaining solutions
One of the solutions is for cities to take ownership of their own energy supply, and to think up self-sustaining and creative solutions for dealing with energy flows. Sustainable energy sources are essential in that respect, thinks Simpson. “The energy input has to be in proportion to the energy output. That means that residents and administrators have to think about how their cities generate energy. Warmth generated during the day in cities can be used at night to heat homes. It can also be shared between commercial and residential users, whose energy needs are often atdifferent times. To do this, we need to work together, in local energy networks. Stand-alone solutions to climate change won’t work.”
Radical change is already happening in some places. “In the Netherlands, ‘hot road’ energy systems are already being built. Road surfaces absorb a lot of heat from the sun. Pumping water through the road surface prevents high temperature variations and reduces road maintenance costs. This ‘renewable energy’ can, in combination with a heat storage system, a heat pump and low-temperature heating, be used for space heating. In this way, every kilometre of road can heat 400 homes. “In Berlin, eighty per cent of new buildings generate their own energy because the government has changed energy market rules to make it more economic to produce energy from your building than to consume it.
Good governance
To set up sustainable urban regeneration in the right way, good governance is essential. Simpson: “Good governance means listening to city residents.” But their voices are often drowned out by the short-term nature of markets. He fulminates against developers, comparing them to robbers. “Most put up low-standard buildings for high prices. Once the sale is completed, they run off, and the new owners or tenants are left with the long-term running costs. It’s highway robbery. We are stealing today what our children must pay for tomorrow.”
For Simpson, there is simply no alternative to radical change. And the way in which change has to come about is equally clear. “At present, change is not driven by political leaders. The real pressure for change is from communities and social movements who can see how life itself is threatened.
Standards
Simpson argues in favour of the government changing the rules and forcing new standards of energy generation and water management to be part of the built environment. If developers can’t deliver, they shouldn’t even be allowed to bid!” Simpson has more than enough examples. “Every new home should have to supply at least ten per cent of its own energy, have a water reuse system and be equipped with a recycling system.”
And city dwellers should become common ownership companies, thinks Simpson. “Establish local energy networks and you can deliver sustainability by establishing cooperatives and forging coalitions. Then ask the public about their energy.” You could give away sustainable energy systems in exchange for long-term contracts for energy services rather than energy consumption. You could even share the profits of energy generation.
Message for urban regeneration
Urban regeneration has to be sustainable. That is the challenge facing us, claims Simpson. “The technology and processes required are available. It is no longer just a question of creating a beautiful, impressive built environment. Architects have often been criticised for being self-indulgent and gimmicky rather than addressing beauty and sustainability in the built environment. Now, the challenge is to combine the aesthetic with the sustainable, in ways that require buildings to become answers to the climate change challenge rather than just contributions to the problem.”
Alan Simpson has been the Labour MP for Nottingham South since 1992. He has a reputation as an independent thinker with strong opinions, and he is a supporter of a sustainable built environment. He changed an abandoned building into a fascinating home with low energy consumption. The heating and electricity come from microCHP and solar panels. The entire building is made from recycled materials. It is a fascinating example of how you can create a sustainable home in the city.
This publication was enabled by ReUrbA2, Provincie Zuid-Holland and the Interreg IIIB programme of the European Union:
This interview is part of a series of twelve, made by Mark Reede, Ellen Weerman, Simon Maas of ReUrbA and Hans Karssenberg of Stipo. They interviewed ten leading European thinkers avout cities to be able to write the Statement for Strong Cities, that was presented to the closing conference of ReUrbA and to Danuta Huebner, the EU commissioner for Regional Policy.
Downloads / links
> Inspiring Cities article on ReUrbA’s Statement for Strong Cities
> Download this interview as PDF
> Alan Simpson MP's personal homepage, with among others a description of his Eco House
> Inspiring Cities Interview with Barbara Botos about the Ecological Footprint
> View the compilation of quotes from the interviews on film.
> View EU commissioner Danuta Huebner’s welcoming response to the Statement for Strong Cities on film
> Alan Simpson MP's personal homepage, with among others a description of his Eco House
> Inspiring Cities Interview with Barbara Botos about the Ecological Footprint
> View the compilation of quotes from the interviews on film.
> View EU commissioner Danuta Huebner’s welcoming response to the Statement for Strong Cities on film
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The highlights of an Inspiring Cities salon in Rotterdam, June 3td 2009.
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