As if mounted on a drone, we glide smoothly through the city. The pix-elated buildings resolve as we approach. Below we can see the transport in-terchange in St Peter’s Square, vehicles crisscrossing smoothly, automated lights keeping people moving. On the corner of Oxford Street and Great Bridgewater Street, the multistory parking garage is bedecked with trailing plants. Between the traffic flows are islands full of lush trees. We turn onto Portland Street and move toward the Number One Portland Street build-ing, where one wall of the skyscraper has been clad with an algae farm. Sun glints off the windows on the other side of the building, which tilt and re-fract the sunlight. Gliding up, we can see the city covered in roof gardens.
When I first began my ethnography on climate change in Manchester, an engineer working for Arup showed me this digital model that imagined a potential green future for the city (Harvey 2009; Knox 2013). The model deployed many familiar tropes used in descriptions of global ecocities: ex-panses of green space, clear water, blue skies, and images of people happily enjoying nature- infused urban public spaces (see May 2008; Rademacher 2017; Sze 2015).1 With these kinds of images informing my sense of what a
68 · Chapter two
study of climate change in the city might look like, I was therefore, perhaps naively, taken aback by the way in which work to tackle climate change in Manchester appeared to have very little to do with “nature” thus conceived.
For reasons that I mentioned in the introduction and began to outline in the previous chapter, an imaginary of climate change linked to the kinds of images usually associated with green cities or ecocities was marginal to the work that was being done to tackle the problem in government of-fices in Manchester. It surfaced only occasionally as an explicit matter of concern among those who were working to do something about climate change. Within the city council, for example, the officers who constituted the “green team” had responsibility for business engagement, resource- use planning, buildings and energy, schools, and health; meanwhile, a whole team of people manned a helpline funded by the Energy Saving Trust to provide people with advice on how to reduce their fuel bills. While the bureaucrats working in the green team had environmental credentials, of-ten having completed degrees in environmental science or geography, or having previously worked for environmental charities, only one person in the city had a role that was directly related to nature, a job that came un-der the heading of biodiversity officer. His work involved activities such as maintaining parks, planting wildflower corridors along arterial routes into the city, commissioning wood art and birdhouses, and planting trees.
This work, while seen as important to the city as a place to live, was often described as peripheral to activities to tackle climate change that focused more on servicing the metrics described in the previous chapter. As I was reminded on more than one occasion, “it is not all fluffy bunnies and save the world.”
That nature, and even climate change conceived as an environmental issue, seemed to fall into the background of administrative practice was something that people working in this area were aware of. When I was in-vited to give a presentation about my own research to the environment team at the local council, whose primary responsibility was ensuring the reduction of carbon emissions both within the council and beyond, I framed my presentation in terms of an anthropological study of climate change described as a concern with changing global environmental condi-tions. In the presentation I talked about Western environmental imaginar-ies, focusing on way in which the environmental movement mobilized the 1968 earthrise image of the whole earth taken on the Apollo 8 space mission as an alternative figure that indexed the fragility of the earth as humanity’s
The Carbon Life of Buildings · 69
only home. I was surprised when a number of the officers who had watched the presentation came up to me afterward and commented on how great it was “to actually be able to talk about why we are doing this.” One of the people at the meeting commented that they “hardly ever have the chance to talk about climate change,” a point that was hit home by the presenta-tion that followed mine, which explained the organizapresenta-tional changes that were happening in the local authority as a result of budget cuts. Bringing everyone abruptly back down to earth and the internal politics of the city council, the head of the team explained to the officers assembled how a re-duction in funding was likely to impact on people’s work, threatening even the prospect of their continued employment within the city council.
Although few explicit discussions about climate change as a global vironmental problem were taking place in the day- to- day work of the en-vironmental strategy team, climate change was present, albeit in a rather different form. In place of discussions about climate change as I had origi-nally conceived them, what occupied people instead was buildings, which received a huge amount of attention. This was not the sustainable version of ecobuilding and green planning pursued by those involved in green ur-ban planning or environmental architects like those described by Anne Rademacher (2017) in her work on sustainable architecture in Mumbai, or the earthship models of future living pursued by Californians and Scots keen to live a low- carbon lifestyle (Harkness 2009), nor were these build-ings like the spaceship model of smart sustainable cities such as that pur-sued in Masdar City and described so evocatively by Gökçe Günel (2019).
Instead, the buildings that occupied conversations were the already ex-isting houses, municipal buildings, and offices that constituted the urban landscape on which climate change was now being overlaid. In relation to buildings, climate change appeared less as a utopian vision of how a city could be than as a figure that cast a shadow over the way buildings were currently approached as objects of governmental concern.
As I began to follow the social networks that constituted climate change mitigation in the city, I was directed to interviews with various people in charge of buildings. Early on someone suggested I go and speak to the head of Greater Manchester’s newly established Low Carbon Hub, from whom I learned that Greater Manchester had just been given the status of Low Carbon Economic Area for the Built Environment by the UK central gov-ernment. An associated smart- meter pilot program had just been funded that aimed to reduce carbon emissions in office buildings, and the only
or-70 · Chapter two
ganization to officially endorse the city’s climate change plan, Manchester.
A Certain Future (Manchester City Council 2009a), was Northwards Hous-ing, a housing association that was working closely with the city council to reduce emissions in their buildings. Even the digital model that Arup had built, which depicted the green- city future described above, was, it turned out, a marketing complement to another, possibly more politically impor-tant model that was being developed to map and monitor the carbon emis-sions of all of Manchester’s public buildings, as mentioned in the preface to this book.
The key reason given for this focus on buildings was that when analyses of carbon emissions were done on a sectoral basis, buildings provided the biggest win. As we saw in chapter 1, the reasons why buildings had appeared as a sector within which carbon emissions reductions could be pursued was somewhat more complex than this; nonetheless, in spite of these complexi-ties, buildings had been successfully established as a seemingly logical site, a “no brainer,” for climate intervention.2
Moving from the requirement to focus on buildings to the practical work of actually making buildings amenable to carbon emissions reduc-tions was, however, far from straightforward. For while buildings were al-ready a matter of local government concern, both in terms of local authority management of public buildings such as libraries and schools and in terms of a continued level of public engagement in issues surrounding housing provision in the city, this way of engaging buildings did not seamlessly merge with the newfound concern with buildings that climate change brought to the table.
Delving into the challenges of governing the carbon life of buildings, this chapter looks at the already existing epistemological practices that have framed the governance of the city and the governance of buildings, in order to explore how this was being disrupted by climate change. While many regulatory, organizational, and technical issues emerged in rela-tion to the challenge of reducing carbon emissions through an attenrela-tion to buildings, my focus here is specifically on the way in which the reposi-tioning of a city’s buildings as sites of carbon emissions entailed a recon-sideration of the relationship between the city as an object of knowledge and intervention, the practices of governing that such knowledge worked to enable, and the place of climate change as a redescription of relations of responsibility.
The Carbon Life of Buildings · 71 Mapping Buildings
One Tuesday morning I went to visit Jeremy, who worked for one of the energy- saving initiatives within the offices of the city council. Jeremy was one of the first people to explain to me the issues that Manchester had faced as it attempted to focus on buildings as a way of reducing carbon emissions within the city. We sat in a glass room surrounded by a call center peopled with staff who were fielding telephone calls from Manchester residents about energy efficiency and fuel poverty; meanwhile, Jeremy began to ex-plain to me the background to the situation in which he had found himself and the challenges he faced in his work.
During the 1997 – 2010 Labour government, he explained, local authori-ties were put under a statutory obligation to measure and report carbon emissions so that cities could be held to account for their success or failure in reducing their ecological footprint (a target known as National Indica-tor 186). As part of a range of activities oriented toward reducing carbon emissions, the city authorities had worked with a not- for- profit organiza-tion called the Energy Saving Trust to provide Manchester’s residents with both grants for loft and cavity wall insulation and advice on how to save en-ergy and reduce bills and carbon emissions, as well as support for a range of other initiatives in the city that were oriented to reducing the carbon emissions of the city’s buildings.3 By 2011 Manchester had developed some-thing of a reputation for innovative interventions in retrofitting buildings in the city. In late 2011 the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities was awarded £2.7 million by the central government to fund experimental programs oriented toward transforming the built environment of the city so as to make it more environmentally friendly. These included projects to install solid wall insulation in social housing properties, provide interest- free loans to homeowners for energy- efficiency improvements, increase the energy efficiency of empty properties to bring them back into use, and a program called Green Deal Go Early that would experiment with the pos-sibility of generating 80% improvements in the energy efficiency of four-teen homes in the city.
With energy saving shifting from a marginal to a more strategic con-cern, officers like Jeremy had become tasked with producing figures that demonstrated the aggregate carbon dioxide emissions as a way of indexing the city’s contribution to a broader process of national carbon auditing.
For officers in the city council, reducing the carbon emissions of the city’s buildings had revolved around two questions. The first was how to map the
72 · Chapter two
carbon emissions of the city’s buildings, and the second was how to encour-age the reduction of energy use in these buildings through a twin process of retrofitting and behavior change.
Jeremy stressed that a key challenge that he and his colleagues were fac-ing was how to produce new knowledge about Manchester’s buildfac-ings that would help them intervene in the problem of carbon reduction. As we be-gan to discuss the issues involved in attempts at carbon reduction within domestic buildings, Jeremy pulled out a spreadsheet to demonstrate where the gaps in their knowledge about buildings lay. Some information was al-ready available — they had relatively good data, for example, on the tenancy of homes in the city. However, a move toward engaging buildings as sites of carbon emissions had made Jeremy aware of the lack of information on the structure and material makeup of the buildings people were living in. Jer-emy raised his eyebrows as he commented to me, “You would be amazed, or maybe you wouldn’t, that we don’t even know what Manchester’s hous-ing stock is!” When I pushed him to explain what he meant, he brought out a piece of paper with a set of tables on it to illustrate the information he felt they needed to know about the city’s houses to be able to both understand the carbon emissions of the city and begin to intervene.
The page was a report produced by the Energy Saving Trust for the lo-cal authority area of Manchester and included the following eight tables:
property type, tenure, property age, glazing type, main heating systems, main heating fuel, external wall type, and loft insulation. The tables had been filled in for all of the properties in Manchester. Each table broke these themes down into subcategories and tallied up the total number and per-centage of buildings falling into each subcategory. In each table there was a row for “unknown.” While for tenure type only 27.6% of properties came under the “unknown” category, this went up to 67.6% for glazing type, 49.2% for external wall type, and 55.4% for insulation (figure 2.1).
Knowing the city’s buildings in terms of their carbon- emitting proper-ties was, for Jeremy and his colleagues, seen as a crucial step toward being able to manage and govern climate change in the city. One meeting about how to tackle the carbon emissions of the city’s buildings began with the chair announcing that we need to be “smart,” or even “smarter,” about how we approach carbon emissions reductions. The management acronym smart referred to here is used to set key performance indicators, the letters standing for “specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely,” with the - er in smarter standing for “evaluate and reevaluate.” Joe, the council officer who was leading this meeting, stressed two of these terms, pointing
The Carbon Life of Buildings · 73
out that success in dealing with the emissions from buildings would come from interventions that were measurable and achievable.
This observation, however, led to a range of questions and issues. One participant in the meeting, a man in his fifties who evidently had expertise in housing but did not work for the local authority, pointed out that the only target currently in the strategy document was to save 35,000 tonnes of CO2
a year by 2020 through a major program of retrofitting domestic buildings with energy efficiency and home generation measures. He then asked the officers a series of pointed questions about the numbers: How was this fig-ure arrived at? (No one could quite remember, but they were pretty sfig-ure it
FIgure 2.1 Detail from the Home Energy Efficiency Database (heed) 2010 Area Summary Report for Manchester, produced for Manchester City Council by the Energy Saving Trust.
74 · Chapter two
came from the 41%.) What did thirty- five thousand tonnes a year actually mean? (Carbon dioxide emissions are cumulative, so was the aim to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by thirty- five thousand tonnes and to sustain this over each year until 2020, or was the aim to create an additional thirty- five thousand tonnes of reductions each year? People shuffled in their seats and looked at one another — they couldn’t remember but would find out.) And was the aim to just use technical measures to reduce energy use, or would this also include behavior change as well? (Again there was no answer.) Even though these questions remained unanswered, the external partici-pant did some quick back- of- the- envelope calculations and suggested to the officers that if they were to achieve their targets, it looked as though they were going to have to commit to retrofitting around eleven thousand properties a year.
The officers present were evidently pleased by this number. One offi-cer said he thought this was going to be a very helpful measure but then pointed out that they do not actually have any current figures for how much of the housing in the city has already been retrofitted. This was a “piece of work” they were aware they were going to have to do in order to know how they were doing and whether they were meeting their targets.
As the discussion ensued, the importance of generating data on housing and retrofits became increasingly evident. When the conversation moved on to thinking about how to bring about behavioral and cultural change, a key concern that officers raised was whether and how this could be mea-sured and evidenced. While one person thought that advice on energy ef-ficiency should be seen as “the glue that pulls all this together,” others wor-ried that it would be vague and hard to evaluate. One officer said that there were precedents for measuring the effectiveness of advice, to which the external participant responded, “What do you mean, like so many pieces of advice equals so many tonnes of energy saved?” “Something like that,”
the officer responded.
The conversation ended with a discussion about how to bring together these different forms of measurement. One problem was that there was no common monitoring system for all these different activities, just lots of bits of data in lots of different places. Everyone seemed to agree that some kind of common monitoring system was needed, though they were aware of the risks of simply compiling all the data in one place, as one would just end up with “a massive spreadsheet.” This prompted the wry reflection that the strategy might need to come with an “origami- style” supplement to deal with these complexities! In the end it was agreed that another “piece of
The Carbon Life of Buildings · 75
work needed to be done across Greater Manchester about how to manage data,” as it is “very important we are reporting the right metrics.”
Managing through Numbers
The need for data to manage issues associated with city governance is hardly new. Indeed, it might be argued that the collation of data about city buildings has been a key part of practices of governing since at least the
The need for data to manage issues associated with city governance is hardly new. Indeed, it might be argued that the collation of data about city buildings has been a key part of practices of governing since at least the