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.

'And', not 'Either/Or'

I have argued elsewhere that Carter did the sustainability movement a great disservice, even with the best of intentions, when he admonished the American public to turn down the thermostat and put on a sweater. In so doing, he immediately framed the discussion of sustainability as one of choosing between comfort (or quality of life) and survival. The subtext was (and in some quarters still is): either sacrifice and save the world or be comfortable and the planet goes to hell.

But as an architect, my training and experience suggest another context. Design without constraints typically does not lead to stunning results. When designing a building, there are the constraints of site, climate, budget, structure, materials, the end-user's expectations, and even codes and ordinances. While some of those constraints are artificial, and many are inconvenient, in the end the synthetic solution to conflicting constraints is what good design is all about. A professor of mine whom I admire greatly, the late Richard Dodge, used to say, "Architecture is about eating your cake AND having it too."

From an architectural perspective, sustainability as a context for design goes wrong when it becomes the only context for the conversation called, let's design a building. The same holds true when any one constraint — the arbitrary nature of zoning ordinances; the cost of a project; the caprices of an owner or the willfulness of the designer; the dictates of a style police — holds absolute sway and drowns out the other voices in the conversation. The result is can be drab lifeless buildings with PV arrays stapled on.

But when sustainability and the energy a building consumes and generates adds its voice to the chorus, the result is a richer, deeper, more meaningful project. Another dimension has been added to building, another perspective now exists for its interpretation and use, another story has been added to its life and the lives of those inhabiting it. In other words, we become concerned with making our world a better place, and living richer lives in more beautiful places. Not either/or, but and.

Revisting the Brundtland Report

The overarching thesis of the 1987 United Nations report, Our Common Future: The World Commission on Environment and Development, could be thus summarized:

“The human misery due to the poverty of the developing world, paired with the excessive consumption of natural resources by the developed world, begets a menagerie of social, economic, and environmental ills, and these in turn beget more human misery.”

The Brundtland report thereby goes far beyond mere critique of resource management in its systematic (and oft-repeated) raising of issues of poverty: lack of proper sanitation, housing, education, nutrition, clean water, and healthcare (“decent human life”). Whereas in the northern hemisphere sustainability is commonly and popularly thought of as the preservation of natural resources, the report puts the problems of third world poverty front and center.

This juxtaposition of overuse of resources on the one hand and dearth on the other is raised again and again: in areas of agriculture, economics, housing, industry, and pollution, to name but a few. Implicit in the contrast is the quite sensible assumption that wealth is the result of abundance. But there are notable instances where that assumption might be undermined, or at least subverted.

It has been argued elsewhere that we have or nearly have reached the state of peak oil: where worldwide oil production, which heretofore has increased, plateaus and begins its inexorable decline. While a scarcity of oil may pose economic problems for both industrial and developing worlds, the decline of this resource is forcing technological and political advances in the energy sector. As a result, the world can look forward to an eventual decline in sulfur and carbon emissions from oil, both directly from reduced consumption, and indirectly due to improved efficiencies. And it is precisely the sort of efficiency improvements occasioned by recent oil market price increases which the World Commission on Environment and Development encourages. In this case, then, the impending dearth of an essential resource will eventually lead to environmental and even economic improvements.

In the case of coal, on the other hand, abundance of this resource is quite problematic. If we are near or at peak oil, we are perhaps two centuries from exhausting coal. Furthermore, coal is far more polluting than oil, with much more elevated levels of sulfur and carbon emissions. One might even imagine synthetic fuels derived from coal becoming economically feasible, not unlike that developed by Standard Oil and I. G. Farber and used by Nazi Germany. It is conceivable that given an abundance of coal, we have a future of greater carbon and sulfur emissions to look forward to.

The question then arises: how are advantageous environmental policies to be implemented when the beneficiaries of resource exploitation are not (at least in the short term) disadvantaged by such undesirable exploitation. If environmental consequences are not immediate, what structures can be implemented to make them so? “The enforcement of common interest often suffers because areas of political jurisdictions and areas of impact do not coincide.” (p. 47). Interestingly, the Lovins article I cited in a previous post picked up on this conundrum ten years after Our Common Future and in detail described the energy problems posed by economic systems in which a building’s developer is generally not its occupant. It appears that another decade on the same problems persist.

The conclusion is inevitable, if unpalatable in the immediate: “… it makes long-term economic sense to pursue environmentally sound policies.” (p. 334). It is precisely the abundance of a useful but noxious resource like coal, which makes the kind of market-driven environmental restrictions of interest. The Kyoto Protocol’s Carbon Credits provide a mechanism whereby the deleterious effects of pollution may be traded like a (negative) commodity, theoretically eventually leading to a reduction of atmospheric greenhouse gases. Hence an abundant but environmentally undesirable resource can be curtailed by being linked to an artificial negative commodity.

This subversion of abundance can lead to true wealth derived through sustainable development. But in order to do so, structural changes must be put in place to penalize consumption and reward conservation of particular resources. The use of market forces to do so is one way in which the call for action by the Brundtland report has been heeded. The alternative may be that “long-term” effects of short-sighted decisions may be just around the corner.