In Part II, various examples of groundbreaking environmentally sustainable multi-household low-rise housing models, such as BedZED (London) and The Commons (Melbourne), are discussed and analysed. Similarly, complementary planning initiatives arising from grassroots action and environmental movements involving profession-als and politicians, show how urban developments can encourage local economies, ‘pocket neighbourhoods’, small parks, guerrilla gardening,
‘tactical urbanism’ and ‘smart’ sustainability. Therefore, this chapter centres on the commercial market and mainstream opportunities for apartment living today.
The challenge of reducing carbon emissions
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), buildings accounted for one-third of energy-related CO2 and three-fifths of halocarbon emissions worldwide in the 2000s. Most significantly, IPCC researchers concluded that a transition in this sector would offer the simplest and least expensive reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG)
emissions. Even though current stock had built-in energy inefficiencies, the IPCC indicated that almost one-third of building CO2 emissions could be cut by 2020 if a transitional strategy was successfully adopted.
Easy improvements could be made through new builds but retrofits and reconstruction, especially wholescale as in apartment blocks, also offered strong potential for savings. For instance, the relatively simple changes to apartments – as shown ‘before’ and ‘after’ in Figure 3.2 – are estimated to reap reductions in energy use of 90 per cent.43 They include pushing out walls to replace internal balconies with external ones shading a greater number of windows, placing solar panels on the roof, removing chimneys, and covering external doorways.
Small apartments in high-density communities have become central to the regeneration and intensification of global cities. Policymakers have seen the compact apartment as offering a context, in and of itself, for more or less sustainable household practices. However, holistic envi-ronmental assessments of the sustainability of apartment households show less potential. To pre-empt discussions in Chapter 4, the practices of householders cannot necessarily be contained, constrained or even driven by the design and other sustainability features of their dwelling.
Furthermore, sustainability features of commercial purchases are often minimal, set by council building standards, and purchasers are limited by cost and what is on offer.
Certainly, with respect to ‘stuff’, the smallness of an inner-city apartment compared with a suburban detached dwelling seems to create an imperative to think twice before buying and to facilitate sharing appliances with neighbours. However, say in a block of mainly singles in micro-apartments – as discussed below – self-containment can mean replication of both minimal and comparatively under-used kitchen, laundry and bathroom facilities and appliances. Some apartments come with all white-goods already installed. If such appliances were all highly energy-efficient, this would enhance sustainability, but this is often not the case so the outcome might well be worse than if occupants self-selected white-goods.
Consuming in a city comes at a relatively high environmental cost once transport of goods and services is included. The measure of ecological footprint distance (Def) indicates the average distance natural resources are transported to service city needs, which is key to assessing, monitoring and improving environmental costs or benefits of living in cities.44 For instance, even if certain city dwellers save money, time and
carbon emissions by taking public transport rather than a car to work, an holistic assessment might reveal air travel for their holidays in distant places erodes and even reverses the sustainability and other environ-mental gains of living a compact urban life.
Arguably, purchasing or renting an apartment offers fewer benefits, less diversity and options, than a detached house when it comes to sus-tainability features, such as solar or other renewable energy use, high levels of insulation, appropriate siting to maximise passive solar energy gains, and other design features maximising use of recycled construction materials and gardens, including roof and vertical gardens. If walls and furniture (such as wardrobes) are structurally inbuilt, this minimises flexibility. Occupants can end up in a state of hyper-alienation, surrounded by aloof residential neighbours with whom they have little or no conversation and simply share the odd pass-by in an echoing hallway and lift chamber. Alternatively, they might find apartment living
Before: over 150 kWh/(m²a) After: 15 kWh/(m²a)
Figure 3.2 Energy savings from German apartments retrofitted using passive house principles
Source: Sketch based on photographs in Diane Ürge-Vorsatz, slide show on her co-authored Climate Change Mitigation in the Buildings Sector: The Findings of the 4th Assessment Report of the IPCC – https://www.ipcc.ch
facilitating a lot of sharing, from bulk food purchases to eating together, cooking for one another and sharing entertaining and activities.
Public transit-oriented development alongside apartment blocks is efficient but certainly not cost-free. Compact cities require a lot of attention from planning professionals and policymakers who propose, plan, establish, ensure finance for, and supervise the expanding or upgrading of all kinds of inner-urban infrastructure. Aside from commercial considerations and the creativity of the architect, councils set various building standards, many of which can work against sustainable practices. For instance, some councils insist on one car space per apartment but make a common bike rack or cage optional. Proactive sustainability councils offer incentives for apartment developments with sustainability features, such as collection and storage of rainwater for re-use, water-efficient tap fittings and landscaping, and collective grey-water systems. This might cost more upfront but saves on operating costs so, after some time, financial as well as carbon and other environ-mental savings accrue.
Many city building regulations are only starting to incorporate standards for adaptability and flexibility. Maximising how our built environment can be re-used, and the adaptability of space and functions was recognised by early-twentieth-century modernists, such as Le Corbusier. They acknowledged that flexibility is a critical characteris-tic for meeting social challenges such as aging in place and growing, and shrinking, family households. Such architects placed restraints on space, took a minimalist approach, prioritising efficiency and led, for instance, to folding furniture and multi-functional rooms that can be, say, a study in the day and dining room at night. Standardisation, a function of mass manufacture, called for adaptability in design and an aversion to the one-size-fits all or stereotypical Mr and Mrs Average.
Adaptability can be achieved within a unit, an apartment building or compact neighbourhood by diversity of floor plans, enabling movement between habitations, housing designs, by making doors and hallways reasonably wide, and minimising stairs for whole-of-life, multigener-ational use and for different needs and abilities. Common spaces for basic and social activities, such as laundries and roof-top gardens, also economise on space.45 Yet dwellings characterised by such ideals are limited in mainstream urban markets and their cost is prohibitive for most people.
Urban affluence
Glowing sustainability evaluations of city living made by authors such as Glaeser in his Triumph of the City and Owen in his Green Metropolis can be roundly criticised for selective environmental foci.46 Holistic analyses find that overuse of natural resources and energy are just as or more associated with consumption of food and other goods and services than with transport, household energy and water use which are the foci of many sustainability audits of city residents. For instance, a 2007 study indicated that the operating costs of houses and transport only account for around one-tenth of the ecological footprint of an average Australian, whose consumption exceeds many in North America and Europe.47
The same study showed that household use, construction and renovations accounted for around 25 per cent of the average Australian’s total water use and 42 per cent of GHG emissions. Food, and other goods and services, accounted for the remaining 75 per cent and 58 per cent, respectively. Therefore, given its increasingly affluent character, urban apartment living can translate into highly unsustainable
‘consumption hotspots’:
despite the lower environmental impacts associated with less car use, inner city households outstrip the rest of Australia in every other category of consumption. Even in the area of housing, the opportuni-ties for relatively efficient, compact living appear to be overwhelmed by the energy and water demands of modern urban living, such as air conditioning, spa baths, down lighting and luxury electronics and appliances, as well as by a higher proportion of individuals living alone or in small households.
In each state and territory, the centre of the capital city is the area with the highest environmental impacts, followed by the inner suburban areas. Rural and regional areas tend to have noticeably lower levels of consumption.48
Indeed, a 2015 study found that goods and services produced from resources and energy sourced elsewhere, and land necessary to absorb related CO2 emissions, accounted for the bulk of the average Canberran ecological footprint, 8.9 global hectares per capita (2011–2012) or 3.5 times the then global average! The top five most damaging impacts were from use of electricity, hospitality venues, petrol, gas and transport.49
Given that carbon efficiency cannot compensate for growth in per capita consumption and population, analysts of causes of global GHG emissions (1990–2010) have concluded that, ‘policy makers need to address the issue of affluence’.50
On a planetary scale, Girardet highlights the spatial and environmen-tal perversity of parasitic cities dependent on global hinterlands – a range of ecosystems are stressed by flying, sailing and road-transporting basic needs into cities – production and distribution requiring much more energy than the calorie content of the transported food. He estimated that, by the late twentieth century, the ecological footprint of Londoners was 293 times its surface area, twice the surface area of Britain! A more detailed, and probably more accurate, City Limits study (2000) calculated a figure double that of Girardet.51
This critique redirects our thinking on individualistic lifestyles that naturally evolve within capitalism with production for trade, profit and growth eroding Earth’s natural limits. Studies suggest that larger households living in smaller spaces, eating more communally, sharing and minimising consumption, and relying on locally grown and made basic needs, offer ways for us to achieve more sustainable practices.
Nevertheless, innovative design and new technologies are popularly heralded as making urban apartment living sustainable. The next section shows a marred track record, especially in terms of unaffordability.