The London Plan steps forward

The consultation draft of the new London Plan, the first revision under Boris Johnson's administration, was published yesterday (Monday, October 12 2009).  I attended the de facto launch last night, at an RTPI event at which Sir Simon Milton, deputy mayor and chief of staff, set out the primary points of the new draft.

Having led the creation of the evidence base for climate change-related policies in the Further Alterations to the original London Plan several years ago, in which climate change became a central theme for the first time in such a major policy document, I was eager to see what the latest climate change policies would hold.  Chapter 5 of the new consultation draft, which addresses climate change, seems an eminently sensible evolution of the existing policies and learns from the shortcomings of the last iteration.

Most important is the approach to climate change mitigation in new buildings as achieved through reduction of carbon emissions.  Last time round, the policies adopted a three-stage approach:  First, design an efficient building.  Second, supply it efficiently with energy - e.g. use community or district heating.  Third, supply 20% of the remaining emissions with on-site renewable energy.  There was only one problem with this approach, which took the 'Merton rule' to new levels (from 10% to 20%):  Everyone in the development community ignored the first two parts and focused on the third, because that was the only part to which a target had been appended.  This has had the effect of helping to raise the prospects for building-scale renewable energy, but has also proven problematic for many developments, even to the point that public-sector developments have found the on-site renewable energy policy unworkable.

The new approach retains the basic framework of the last Plan, but looks at overall energy use, specifying percentage reductions to be attained over Building Regulations minima (Part L 2006):  44% for the next few years, rising to 55% thereafter, and then on to zero carbon (this is for residential buildings; commercial buildings follow a similar trajectory).  The difference between the current Plan and the draft Plan is that while the old one is prescriptive about method, the new one focuses on results; it doesn't really care how developers achieve those reductions.

I'm pleased to see that the prescriptive policy-making has been superceded by outcome-oriented policy-making.  My prediction is that, as developers, consultants, pressure groups and other stakeholders feed in to the consultation process, we will see that the approach comes in for very little criticism; and that the fights will be over the overall carbon-reduction targets.

Jan Jongert of 2012Architecten

Last night I heard Jan Jongert, of 2012Architecten, at an Architecture Foundation talk about his firm's work.  2012Architecten has done some very interesting work in re-use of components.  This is very different from using recycled materials, the more obvious process in which materials are broken down, recycled into a raw state, and then formed, shaped, or worked so as to appear as virgin materials; 2012Architecten use ready-made, already-formed components - washing-machine doors (evidently Miele makes high-quality products which, being properly screwed or bolted together, are easy to take apart), unused automotive windscreens, pieces of wood from the centres of large cable reels - and thus avoid the energy involved in, say, melting down recycled glass and forming it into new sheets, not to mention the transport required to move the materials around.

The ideas are fascinating but raise a host of questions:  Can this work on a large scale?  Don't you need a major exchange for materials?  (It turns out they implemented such a thing years ago, but the idea was probably ahead of its time - the website no longer exists.)

A house they have recently built with a facade made of wood from cable reels (it took them 10 years to go from realizing that this wood could be a construction material to figuring out how to successfully recover and treat it so that it can be used as such) look good, but the pictures he showed the audience were of a suburban subdivision that could be Surbiton, or Phoenix, for that matter.  It's all very well and good to reduce the embodied energy in buildings, but what about the automobile use implied in the location?  Even in Holland, the land of the bicycle, the tram, and the train, some 70% of all journeys are made by car.

The biggest issue, as ever, is one of speed and scale.  If the challenges of climate change mitigation and adaptation are what we think they are; if we do need to reduce our carbon emissions by something between 60% and 80% by 2050; if sea levels are already rising - and never mind crises, real or imagined, in the availability of energy or raw materials - we don't have time to spend on small interventions.  We need to be rethinking all the energy and resource flows in our economies, as well as the spatial implications of reducing the size of those loops, and we need to be doing it now.

Better Specs

Corinne Swain (the first Arup Fellow outside the engineering disciplines and a founder of Arup’s Planning consultancy) and I gave a paper entitled Better Specs?: Foresight, Planning and Climate Change at ‘Unequal Places’, the UK-Ireland Planning Research Conferency 2009, held at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in April.

We have now published an article on planning, foresight, and climate change, based upon the conference paper, in the June 2009 issue of the Journal of the Town and Country Planning Association.

TCPA Members can learn more here.