Energy-related standards and UK speculative office development

Non-domestic buildings have great potential for energy-related emission reductions in response to climate change. However, high specification office buildings in the UK demonstrate that regulation, assessment and certification (‘standards’) have not incentivised the development of lower energy office buildings as expected. Making use of the concepts of ‘qualculation’ and ‘calculative agency’, qualitative case studies of 10 speculatively developed office buildings in London, UK provide new insight into why this is the case. Interview data (n = 57) are used to illustrate how ‘market standards’ substitute for user needs, and ratchet up the provision of building services to competitively maximise marketability. The examples of energy modelling and the market’s (mis)use of British Council for Offices guidelines are used to explain how such standards perversely bolster energy-demanding levels of specification and building services, and militate against lower energy design, in the sector researched. The potentials for alternative, performance-based standards and new industry norms of quality are discussed. It is concluded that at least the London speculative office market by its very constitution and operation, including the reliance on standards, continues to create increasingly energy-demanding buildings

Time, Practices and Energy Demand:Implications for flexibility

The timing of energy demand is increasingly important given the pressure to decarbonise energy systems, accommodate more intermittent forms of renewable energy supply and reduce peak load. In the transport sector, rush hours and periods of congestion present problems of their own also related to the synchronisation and the sequencing of social practices. This document brings together DEMAND research on the social-temporal ordering of what people do and considers the implications of this work for ‘demand management’ and for efforts to develop more flexible energy system

Changing Energy Demand:Concepts, metaphors and implications for policy

Meeting the UK’s 80% carbon reduction targets (HM Government, 2008) depends on reducing energy demand, of that there is no doubt. There is much less clarity about the types of changes this entails, or how these might come about. This cross-cutting DEMAND research insight reviews alternative methods of conceptualising and steering changes in energy demand. Each of the five approaches we describe has practical consequences – favouring, or cautioning against specific types of policy intervention. Before outlining these strategies we begin with a few words on the fundamental meaning of ‘energy demand’, that is, on what it is that is or ought to be changing

Standards, design and energy demand:The case of commercial offices

In this paper we examine the influence of what we call market standards on design. We do this using the case of the design of commercial offices and the effects of standards on moves towards less energy demanding designs. Theoretically the paper builds on concepts drawn from a range of literatures examining standards, including science and technology studies and the sociology of standards. We argue that standards do important ‘work’ in design processes that require closer scrutiny. We show that in the case of commercial offices this affect the likelihood of the incorporation of low energy technologies. Our analysis reveals: the importance of taking greater account of normative and cultural forms of market standards and their role in design; the value of explaining how standards break the relationship between design and social practice, in our case this meaning that low energy technologies that might adequately cater for office work much of the time are considered inappropriate due to a lack of understanding of office work practices; how standards interlock to legitimate incumbent (higher energy) technologies, and in turn de-legitimise (lower energy) alternatives, through the way they define what is ‘needed’; the value of tactics within energy and sustainability policies designed to govern non-regulatory standards and their effects. The paper thus makes an important contribution to understanding the ‘work’ of standards, and more broadly the production of energy demand in offices

Standards, design and energy demand:The case of commercial offices

In this paper we examine the influence of what we call market standards on design. We do this using the case of the design of commercial offices and the effects of standards on moves towards less energy demanding designs. Theoretically the paper builds on concepts drawn from a range of literatures examining standards, including science and technology studies and the sociology of standards. We argue that standards do important ‘work’ in design processes that require closer scrutiny. We show that in the case of commercial offices this affect the likelihood of the incorporation of low energy technologies. Our analysis reveals: the importance of taking greater account of normative and cultural forms of market standards and their role in design; the value of explaining how standards break the relationship between design and social practice, in our case this meaning that low energy technologies that might adequately cater for office work much of the time are considered inappropriate due to a lack of understanding of office work practices; how standards interlock to legitimate incumbent (higher energy) technologies, and in turn de-legitimise (lower energy) alternatives, through the way they define what is ‘needed’; the value of tactics within energy and sustainability policies designed to govern non-regulatory standards and their effects. The paper thus makes an important contribution to understanding the ‘work’ of standards, and more broadly the production of energy demand in offices

The Last Mile and the Next Day:The changing times and spaces of shopping – implications for energy demand

There are many forms of shopping and all have consequences for the movement of goods and people, and for the patterns of energy demand that follow. In bringing different aspects of DEMAND research together we make three key points. First, different modes of shopping affect the practices and energy demands of consumers and of retailers, distributors and producers alike. Second, patterns of energy and travel demand vary depending on how aspects of shopping are organised in time and space. However, our third point is that different forms of shopping co-exist, overlap and change. Rather than trying to compare the energy demands of physical vs online shopping, as if these were coherent forms, the more important task is to explain escalating expectations of delivery and of what shopping entails. For all forms, what matters is how the ‘last mile’ is organised and why the ‘next day’ is so significant. In developing these points our aim is to inform and promote further research and reflection on the travel and energy demands associated with shopping in all its forms

Flexi-mobility:Helping local authorities unlock low carbon travel

This paper sets out eight key contentions about the need to re-think transport policy that emerged from three years of quantitative and qualitative research into people’s travel practices. Based on these contentions we suggest the need for a ‘toolkit’ to be assembled to take a new approach to enabling a transition to the wider use of low carbon mobility. This approach would be centred around evidence that there is much wider variation and flexibility in people’s travel patterns than has previously been recognised. Cultivation of this could allow sustainable transport policy, particularly at a local level, to set ambitious but achievable goals that aim to get more people, travelling by non-car modes more of the time, rather than seeking to achieve complete changes in travel practices all of the time

Background paper for the ISF/Demand Workshop on Office (Work) Futures

Attendees at the Office (Work) Future(s) workshop will have different interests but the ideas and materials included in this position paper are hopefully broad and diverse enough to provoke thoughts and responses from all. The central question to be addressed is how might we think about Office (Work) Future(s)? Related questions are: • Where is the future office and whose office is it? • What will it look like and how will it be serviced? • Where and when will future office work take place? • What is the role of technology in these office/work futures? • What are the energy demand implications of these potential futures and how might they be steered? This document is a first attempt at corralling and exploring some of these issues, and identifying questions that arise. It is an attempt to capture different ‘visions’ of the potential futures in this area that are identifiable at this moment in time. It is by no means comprehensive and part of the purpose of the workshop is to capture other work and particularly academic perspectives on this material – suggestions for material to be followed up on is particularly appreciated. In the different sessions of the workshop discussion will be prompted by presentations given by a number of people in response to this document. It is hoped that the responses to the paper and the discussions at the workshop will help to shape ongoing work on energy demand and the future of office work, and the creation of a research programme for a future funded projec

Mobility Justice and the Right to Immobility: From Automobility to Autonomobility

Modern societies appear to be unthinkable without intense exchange across geographical distances, without extensive mobilities of people, goods, ideas and information (Canzler et al. 2008: 1). While, in pre-modernity, spatial mobility had been associated with insecurity and danger (…), in modernity, mobility (…) gradually turned into a common right claimed among equals.” (Rammler 2008: 61). Thus, the continuous increase of mobility associated with a continuous increase of progress, freedom and autonomy appears to be the still valid promise of modernity. However, the present threat of climate change and the finite nature of fossil and other nonrenewable energy fuels, as well as issues of global justice, question the possibility of prolonging a growth of mobility into the future. On the level of cities and communities also, motorised traffic produces increasingly negative impacts on the social and spatial level. Moreover, what is commonly understood as a freedom turns more and more into the compulsion to move. This tension between two major human goals in relation to mobility, which we label provisionally 'freedom' and 'sustainability', form the point of departure of our short explorative paper. In order to untangle the herein contained strands of values and arguments, we will firstly sketch the connection between capitalist growth and increase of movement of goods, information and people. Secondly, we will look more closely at the association of mobility and freedom and argue that it is a very specific concept of freedom – the nuclear individual, freed of spatial and social bonds – which constitutes the basis of this mobility-as-freedom ideology. In regards to the social and ecological costs of this mobility dispositiv, we will thirdly make an attempt to think of future mobilities in a new, utopian way drawing on examples from history and literature, through which we hope to better reconcile freedom and sustainability