Water Quality and Development

The tap, it could be said, is where the environment meets the house. As the fundamental infrastructure of community (at any scale), water is the first requirement for habitation, prior even to shelter. Drainage is a primary concern of Vitruvius when siting a city. Poor sanitation and water quality was in the West and is now in the developing world the greatest cause of disease; decreases in infant mortality (indeed most mortality rates) due to proper sanitation far exceed mortality decreases due to medical advances. Yet this necessary infrastructure, like power, is typically taken for granted in developed countries.

Within the context of new suburban development, Butler and Karvonen argue for the efficiency of an integrated approach when designing for water supply, sewer, drainage, runoff, and quality (Butler, K.S. and Karvonen, A. Integrative Water managements and Conservation Development: Alternatives for the Central Texas Hill Country. The University of Texas at Austin. December, 2004). Intentionally or not, their report supports organic notions of community development outlined in Melosi, albeit on a much smaller, suburban scale than the urban context the latter frequently cites. This integrated approach is on the one hand necessarily mechanistic, in that it relies on engineered sanitary solutions with distinct components or systems, but it also somewhat biomimetic in its emphasis on the interrelation of those system components.

This is in marked contrast, for example, to legacy urban sanitation systems. For good cause, 20th century sanitary infrastructures treat water supply, drainage and runoff, and sewer as independent systems. But in a justifiable effort to avoid contamination of the water supply, opportunities to lessen the impact of gray water are missed. For example, in a region prone to flash-flooding and with considerable impervious cover concerns, the City of Austin generally does not allow impervious cover credits for rainwater harvesting systems. (This is likely due to the fact that impervious cover limits are in many cases zoning restrictions designed to control scale of development masquerading as water-quality ordinances.) Likewise, expensive detention and retention ponds are not systematically downsized in consideration of bio-retention measures. Outside of designs negotiated ad hoc with City officials, such integrated sanitation strategies are not currently codified in CoA regulations.

In considering infrastructural change, whether an integrated sanitary system or an environmentally-sensitive power distribution system, in most urban settings one inevitably must overcome the considerable inertia of legacy systems. Butler and Karvonen’s report arguably addresses a relatively tractable problem: how best to provide infrastructural water resources to a suburban Greenfield development. Faced with an installed urban infrastructure, however, the problem becomes far less tractable:

“…decisions made about sanitary systems in the nineteenth century had a profound impact on cities more than 100 years later.
“one of [W. Brian] Arthur’s concerns was that a decision will ‘lock in’ an inferior technology path … early decisions on the path affect immediate decisions limiting available … [and] future [options].
“In 1842 … Sir Edwin Chadwick took a bold stand on the need for an arterial system of pressurized water which would place house drainage, main drainage, paving, and street cleaning into a single sanitary process… this remarkable hydraulic system was never implemented …”

—Melosi, The Sanitary City, pp 11-13

How then to circumvent the path dependency of a current infrastructure? Is it best to rely on market forces? Citing the rural electrification of early 20th century America, Nye argues that contrary to popular American notions, such changes can only take place when legislatively mandated. Butler and Karvonen admit as much:

“Individual home owners are typically not able to directly influence the direction of new developments or housing products—to move them towards more sustainable futures in terms of water use and environmental impact.” (Part 1, p 13)

Yet they hesitate to challenge the common perception of the invisible hand as all-wise, with this rather unsubstantiated claim, contradicted somewhat in the paragraph just prior (second passage):

“It is increasingly clear to the public that there can be large differences in the costs of living among communities and individual residences.” (Part 2, p 7)

“developers … all agreed that their successes were not achieved by marketing their projects simply as ‘green developments’ ” (Part 2, p 6)

One is inclined to suspect that American consumers tend to make decisions based on short-term costs rather than long-term value. An integrated, environmental approach to infrastructure may just have to be mandated.

Back from AIA National Convention

I've recently come back from the AIA National Convention, including Al Gore's Keynote Address. A great deal of interesting material to digest, especially as the theme of the Convention was "beyond green". I'd like to touch on two of the presentations in particular.

Odell, Wilson, and Lazarus delivered a lecture on "Sustainable Design in the Post-Katrina Era". Their most intriguing suggestion was that "passive survivability" — that is, a building's ability to allow its occupants to survive a disaster for a short or long period of time — was a design objective lying on a continuum with "sustainable design".

Before electricity and before Willis Carrier developed mechanical cooling as we know it today, buildings responded to their climates passively because that was the only possible response. From the dog-trots of the pioneer South and Southeast United States, to the cupola-bearing antebellum plantation houses of Louisiana, to Tewa adobe structures, to the passive cooling wind towers of ancient Persian architecture, humans have built in response to their climate, with great ingenuity, using natural materials at hand. In the last 80 years or so, however, we have become more and more estranged in our architecture from the climatological imperative. I am far from suggesting we pull the plug on mechanical cooling and heating (although I am not a fan — pardon the pun — of forced-air systems). Nevertheless, our current and justifiable preoccupation with climate may bring architecture to a kind of full circle.

Societally, we tend to think of architect-designed buildings as something of a luxury, forgetting that the role of architecture is founded in that basic human need, shelter. Since less than ten per cent of the built environment is designed by architects, that perception is reinforced by a paucity of professional design. Naturally (hopefully?) the lay public understands that large buildings are predominantly architect-designed, but roughly half the energy consumed by buildings (the built environment accounting for 42% of energy consumption in the US) is consumed by residences — and we see examples of lay residential design all around us. Some of it is good; much of it is not. I would argue that thinking of passive survivability is really just another way to consider the role of climate and environment as shape-givers to our buildings. Thinking in those terms as we design (or commission designs) may not only grant our buildings greater efficiency and smaller ecological footprints, but give their users greater satisfaction and joy.

Boecker, Martin and Schaffner (two architects and an engineer), in "Integrated Whole Systems Design: Redesigning the Design Process for High Performance Buildings", presented a model for a collaborative design process involving clients, stakeholders, and design professionals working democratically (my characterization, not theirs). While I didn't find their model ground-breaking by any means, it was refreshing to hear an engineer argue for early-stage collaborative design to a roomful of architects.

One of the model projects they presented involved a developer who was building a school to be leased back to the state (of New Jersey, I believe). They were able to convince their client (the developer) to invest in up-front system efficiencies because the same developer would be the building operator and would be paying utilities. As Lovins points out in his "Institutional Barriers to Energy Efficient Buildings", the problem with the vast majority of buildings is that the developer is rarely the operator; this disincentivizes intelligent (and egoistic) developers from creating energy-efficient buildings. The example used, therefore, was an ideal project, and not a common model for development. Unfortunately when I raised this issue and asked how up-front efficiency investments could be sold to a developer following a traditional development model, I did not receive a satisfactory answer. For a (much) deeper analysis of the inherent problem, read Lovins' article.