Eco-retrofitting - from managerialism to design

As all environmental problems are caused by human systems of design, sustainability can be seen as a design problem. Given the massive energy and material flows through the built environment, sustainability simply cannot be achieved without the re-design of our urban areas. ‘Eco-retrofitting’, as used here, means modifying buildings and/or urban areas to create net positive social and environmental impacts – both on site and off site. While this has probably not been achieved anywhere as yet, myriad but untapped eco-solutions are already available which could be up-scaled to the urban level. It is now well established that eco-retrofitting buildings and cities with appropriate design technology can pay for itself through lower health costs, productivity increases and resource savings. Good design would also mean happier human and ecological communities at a much lower cost over time. In fact, good design could increase life quality and the life support services of nature while creating sustainable‘economic’growth. The impediments are largely institutional and intellectual, which can be encapsulated in the term ‘managerial’. There are, however, also systems design solutions to the managerial obstacles that seem to be stalling the transition to sustainable systems designs. Given the sustainability imperative, then, why is the adoption of better management systems so slow? The oral presentation will show examples of ways in which built environment design can create environments that not only reduce the ongoing damage of past design, but could theoretically generate net positive social and ecological outcomes over their life cycle. These illustrations show that eco-retrofitting could cost society less than doing nothing - especially given the ongoing renovations of buildings - but for managerial hurdles. The paper outlines on how traditional managerial approaches stand in the way of ‘design for ecosystem services’, and list some management solutions that have long been identified, but are not yet widely adopted. Given the pervasive nature of these impediments and their alternatives, they are presented by way of examples. A sampling of eco-retrofitting solutions are also listed to show that ecoretrofitting is a win-win-win solution that stands ready to be implemented by people having management skills and/or positions of influence

Challenging 'best practice' subtropical design

Genuine sustainability would require that urban development provide net positive social and ecological gains to compensate for previous lost natural capital and carrying capacity. Thus far, green buildings do not contribute to net sustainability. While they reduce relative resource consumption, they consume vast quantities of materials, energy and water.i Moreover, they replace land and ecosystems with structures that, at best, ‘mimic’ ecosystems. Elsewhere, the author has proposed a‘sustainability standard’, where development would leave the ecology, as well as society, better off after construction than before.ii To meet this standard, a development would need to add natural and social capital beyond what existed prior to development. Positive DesignTM or Positive DevelopmentTM is that which expands both the ecological base (life support system) and the public estate (equitable access to means of survival). How to achieve this is discussed in Positive Development (Birkeland 2008). This paper examines how net positive gains can be achieved in a ubtropical as well as temperate environment

Eco-retrofitting with building integrated living systems

Building integrated living systems (BILS), such as green roofs and living walls, could mitigate many of the challenges presented by climate change and biodiversity protection. However, few if any such systems have been constructed, and current tools for evaluating them are limited, especially under Australian subtropical conditions. BILS are difficult to assess, because living systems interact with complex, changing and site-specific social and environmental conditions. Our past research in design for eco-services has confirmed the need for better means of assessing the ecological values of BILS - let alone better models for assessing their thermal and hydrological performance. To address this problem, a research project is being developed jointly by researchers at the Central Queensland University (CQ University) and the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), along with industry collaborators. A mathematical model under development at CQ University will be applied and tested to determine its potential for predicting their complex, dynamic behaviour in different contexts. However, the paper focuses on the work at QUT. The QUT school of design is generating designs for living walls and roofs that provide a range of ecosystem goods and services, or ‘eco-services’, for a variety of micro-climates and functional contexts. The research at QUT aims to develop appropriate designs, virtual prototypes and quantitative methods for assessing the potential multiple benefits of BILS in subtropical climates. It is anticipated that the CQ University model for predicting thermal behaviour of living systems will provide a platform for the integration of ecological criteria and indicators. QUT will also explore means to predict and measure the value of eco-services provided by the systems, which is still largely uncharted territory. This research is ultimately intended to facilitate the eco-retrofitting of cities to increase natural capital and urban resource security - an essential component of sustainability. The talk will present the latest range of multifunctional, eco-productive living walls, roofs and urban space frames and their eco-services

Communicating ecologically positive development

It is difficult to present a paradigm shift from resource efficient to ecologically sustainable design, when many students have not yet thought about what sustainability is, let alone what it implies for the design of the built environment ‘Positive Development’ requires students to think beyond green building to something that does not yet exist. The concept of ecologically positive development suggests a product, building, system or urban area that leaves the ecological base and public estate better off than if no development had occurred. For some years now, I have experimented with communicating this paradigm shift in design to students and professionals ‐ with mixed results. This paper discusses some of the challenges, failures and successes in shifting design studio work from environmentally‐sensitive to eco-positive. The framework underlying this exploration is action research. Conclusions about the success of the strategies used for overcoming perceptual barriers to new typologies of architecture are drawn from recent student feedback. The talk will show examples of student projects that attempt eco-positive development projects

Solar core

A simple system is needed for storing heat and coolness created by passive solar design in existing low-income housing world-wide. Birkeland’s Solar Core (2003) coincidentally combines the attributes of a ‘solar chimney’ (which draws hot air out of the building), ‘wind tower’ (which draws cool air into a building) and ‘Trombe wall’ (which stores and circulates heat and coolness).The Solar Core is a new passive solar design concept to facilitate the ecological retrofitting of homes. The project is being constructed by a green builder in the USA who has promised to test it and report on how it performs. It has been presented in several talks and class lectures since 2003

Nature Positive: Interrogating Sustainable Design Frameworks for Their Potential to Deliver Eco-Positive Outcomes

Built environment design is implicated in virtually all socio-ecological sustainability problems. Nonetheless, paradoxically, construction will be essential to creating sustainability by increasing social and natural life-support systems. Given the rates of land, resource, water, and biodiversity depletion, urban development must do more than restore nature. It must increase nature and environmental justice in real, not relative, terms. The necessary technologies and design concepts for nature-positive development already exist. However, most sustainable building regulations, design criteria, and performance standards only aim to regenerate landscapes and integrate more nature into cities. This cannot sustain nature or society. This paper canvasses contemporary sustainable design and development thinking and finds that a progression toward ‘nature positive’ is occurring. However, so-called ‘sustainable buildings’ still do not compensate for past inequities or nature degradation, let alone the material flows, pollution, or biodiversity losses they themselves cause. This is partly because current standards and measurements are based on existing conditions, not sustainability standards, and do not distinguish net-positive from regenerative outcomes. Positive Development (PD) theory provides a comprehensive alternative to conventional sustainability frameworks, planning analyses, decision-making structures, design paradigms, and assessment tools. This paper provides criteria for evaluating the potential of conventional and alternative methods for achieving nature-positive outcomes

Design for Sustainability - A Sourcebook of Integrated Eco-Logical Solutions

With radical and innovative design solutions, everyone could be living in buildings and settlements that are more like gardens than cargo containers, and that purify air and water, generate energy, treat sewage and produce food - at lower cost. Birkeland introduces systems design thinking that cuts across academic and professional boundaries and the divide between social and physical sciences to move towards a transdiciplinary approach to environmental and social problem-solving.;This sourcebook is useful for teaching, as each topic within the field of environmental management and social change has pairs of short readings providing diverse perspectives to compare, contrast and debate. Contents: Section 1 Designing Eco-solutions: 1.1 Education for Eco-innovation • 1.2 The Centrality of Design • 1.3 Green Philosophy • 1.4 Responsible Design Section 2 The Concepts of Growth and Waste: 2.1 Limits to Growth and Design of Settlements • 2.2 Redefining Progress • 2.3 Designing Waste • 2.4 Designing for Durability Section. Part 3 Industrial, Urban and Construction Ecology • 3.1 Industrial Ecology 3.2 Urban Ecology • 3.3 Construction Ecology • 3.4 Pollution Prevention by Design. Section 4 Design within Complex Social Systems: 4.1 Complexity and the Urban Environment • 4.2 Unified Human Community Ecology • 4.3 The Bionic Method in Industrial Design • 4.4 Green Theory in the Construction Fields. Section 5 Permaculture and Landscape Design: 5.1 Permaculture and Design Education • 5.2 The Sustainable Landscape • 5.3 Place, Community Values and Planning • 5.4 Playgardens and Community Development. Section 6 Values Embodied in and Reinforced by Design: 6.1 Urban Forms and the Dominant Paradigm • 6.2 Models of Ecological Housing • 6.3 Marketing-led Design • 6.4 Gender and Product Semantics. Section 7 Design for Community Building and Health: 7.1 ESD and 'Sense of Community' • 7.2 Sustainability and Aboriginal Housing • 7.3 Indoor Air Quality in Housing • 7.4 Beyond the Chemical Barrier. Section 8 Productivity, Land and Transport Efficiency: 8.1 Greening the Workplace • 8.2 Sustainable Personal Urban Transport • 8.3 From Sub-urbanism to Eco-cities • 8.4 Density, Environment and the City. Section 9 Design with Less Energy Materials and Waste: 9.1 Living Technologies • 9.2 Housing Wastewater Solutions • 9.3 Autonomous Servicing • 9.4 Timber Waste Minimisation by Design. Section 10 Low-impact Housing Design and Materials: 10.1 Earth Building • 10.2 Strawbale Construction • 10.3 Bamboo as a Building Resource • 10.4 Hemp Architecture. Section 11 Construction and Environmental Regulation • 11.1 Legislative Environmental Controls • 11.2 Economic Instruments • 11.3 Building Codes and Sustainability • 11.4 Assessing Building Materials. Section 12 Planning and Project Assessment: 12.1 Planning for Ecological Sustainability • 12.2 Bioregional Planning • 12.3 Environmental Management Tools • 12.4 Limits of Environmental Impact Assessment

Ecological Waste: Rethinking the Nature of Waste

The design and construction fields have a central role to play in moving toward a ‘zero waste’ economy. Total resource consumption, both upstream and downstream from development, could be greatly reduced through ecological design. This will however require a paradigm shift to a more whole systems understanding of waste - as distinguished from what we could term ‘marginal analysis’. This paper introduces the idea of ‘ecological waste’, which accounts for the loss of ecosystems in assessing development. Ecological Waste analysis would consider the time and cost of replacing a living forest ecosystem and not just the biomass or ‘resource’. This is intended to move the goal post toward the aim of eliminating ‘designed waste’, or the duplication, disposability, planned obsolescence and wasteful end purposes to which a large portion of resources are sometimes directed through design. For the purposes of this paper, sustainability is understood in its strongest sense: as expanding future options. It is recommended that note Gen 4: Positive Development is read as a preface to this paper.

Space frame walls: facilitating positive development

This paper reports on progress in developing new design and measurement concepts, and translating these concepts into practical applications. This research addresses gaps in ‘best practice’ green building, and is aimed ultimately at replacing green buildings with sustainable urban environments. Building on the author’s previously articulated concepts of Design for Eco-services and Positive Development, this research will demonstrate how to eco-retrofit cities so that they reverse the negative impacts of past design and generate net positive ecological impacts, at no extra cost. In contrast to ‘restorative’ design,this means increasing ecological carrying capacity and natural and social capital through built environment design. Some exemplars for facilitating Positive development will be presented in this talk,such as Green Scaffolding for retrofits, and Green Space Walls for new construction. These structures have been designed to grow and change over time, be easily deconstructed, and entail little waste. The frames support mini-ecospheres that provide a wide range of ecosystem services and biodiversity habitats, as well as heating, cooling and ventilating. In combination, the modules serve to improve human and environmental health. Current work is focused on developing a range of such space frame walls, optimised through an innovative marriage of eco-logical design and virtual modelling