Day six: Whole life value - places and buildings that learn

"This is part of our 10 Big Ideas which we hope will help the transition to a very low-to-no-carbon economy make cities, homes and work places better, movement easier, society stronger and improve quality of life...oh, and save the planet." The Beyond Green Team

Day six: Whole life value - places and buildings that learn

"Stop making cr*p". Allan Chochinov, Core77, 13 April 2007

The climate crisis is coinciding with a crisis brought about by decades of throwing up disposable, un-loved and short-lived buildings in what are increasingly becoming non-places and anyplaces. We think that resilient and adaptable places and spaces supported by whole-life financial and broader economic models are the way to go. So what are these places like and what's the economic and business model that will make them not just possible but the norm?

Here's a game for a cold afternoon. Think of your favourite street in your favourite city. Now list the three main reasons you like it. We guess they'll include some of the following: It's always busy, but also restful. There are lots of people there for different reasons regardless of the time of day. Every time you walk along it, something's different - maybe a new shop or cafe - but the same buildings adapt and the street never really changes. It's beautiful, grand even, but also quite ordinary in the context of the neighbourhood. The buildings are mostly old, well-detailed and with different fronts and finishes that make them interesting to look at individually and as a piece. The pavements are wide and nicely finished. Thanks to the mature trees and shop canopies it's great even when wet and windy. People live there; it's someone's home.

You may have in mind the street where you live or work - in which case, lucky you. Chances are, though, you'll be thinking about a city you visited - perhaps Amsterdam, Berlin or Paris (or indeed London, Edinburgh or Newcastle) or any of the other destinations many Britons routinely head for in search of a weekend fix of the cultural authenticity they find lacking in their everyday environments. They (or rather we) don't make them like that anymore.

In Britain in 2009 we've grappled with the end of an extraordinary 15-year boom which literally altered the landscape, generally not for the better. Construction boomed, and buildings became commodities for short-term, quick-win trading. In the rush to make windfall gains from the cycle of cheap credit, high demand, restricted supply and apparently inexorable price rises, the idea that the underlying social function of land and buildings is to provide shelter and accommodate real social and economic activity was forgotten.

But the last few years were the denouement of decades of building for ‘the market' in a roughly similar way. The proliferation of glass-and-steel business parks and red-and-brown housebuilder estates, and in city centre regeneration areas office buildings and blocks of flats that are transparently cheap and nasty compared with the converted warehouses and merchants buildings with which they often share river- or canal-front, is the modern British property market embodied (literally). Buildings are constructed to maximise the margin between development cost and the price for which they can be sold on and forgotten about as quickly as possible and capital recycled into the next project. No value is accorded to beauty, longevity, adaptability or sustainability and there is no pretence of building for posterity. A basic form of spatial literacy - the understanding that sophisticated economies and societies need proximity, interaction and continuity to function effectively and that individual acts of building must therefore be co-ordinated for the good of the whole - has been eroded. Planning has become an exercise regulating the worst excesses of the market rather than the means by which elected local governments exercise their legitimate role and responsibility to describe - and shape market forces to secure - a vision for their city or town.

Indeed, the public sector bears some of the responsibility for the culture of short-termism. Public funding for regeneration and development has often taken the form of what Jane Jacobs called "cataclysmic money": funding for big infrastructure, iconic buildings or comprehensive site regeneration schemes (never for ‘place'), usually with tight spend-by dates and always with value-for-money criteria including a discount rate that renders any lifetime beyond 40 years or so practically worthless.

We urgently need to replace the culture of short-term gain with one of whole-life value, and not just because it's giving rise to environments that are fractured, disposable, dull and unloved and which in turn make for hollowed-out societies and moribund economies. The act of building itself incurs huge carbon emissions, from the extraction and production of building materials to the energy consumed in construction; recent estimates suggest that in a very energy-efficient building this ‘embodied carbon' can account for half of a building's whole-life carbon emissions.

But how? Well, we know that the best old places and buildings keep getting better with age, repaying the investment that went into them many times over, generating higher prices and creating social value in the form of terrific, vibrant, popular neighbourhoods. Many of these places were built out of paternalism, noblesse oblige or a desire for posterity, norms and values largely (and for the most part thankfully) consigned to history. Others came from vested interest: a realisation that building once-and-for-all-time could turn land into a permanent, reliable and generous source of income - the ‘estate' in its original meaning. We need to make land and buildings once again the province of long-term patient money, so that a greater initial outlay on design quality, robustness and adaptability gets its reward and developers have a vested economic interest in the performance of the whole neighbourhood - its schools, local economy and public spaces - rather than seeing them as burdensome accoutrements to whose costs they are forced by planners to contribute.

What, aside from a new Victorianism, might enable this? One answer could come directly from the bust: with average incomes and house prices massively out of kilter and credit harder to come by, it's likely that many more people will need to rent or part-own their home, making room for new estate-type models of ownership and management and new opportunities for pension and other long-term funds to invest in solid, reliable assets as we meet latent demand for hundreds of thousands of new homes across the country. Second, we should look afresh at how property is taxed. Because council tax and business rates tax buildings rather than land values they punish anyone who builds a decent, generously-proportioned building made of durable materials, reward speculators who sit on land or use it wastefully, and thus create upward pressure on land values which drives development out-of-town and makes land in more sustainable locations expensive, in turn squeezing build cost margins. Third, government - especially city government - needs to rediscover its sense of vision and purpose and combine it with a renewed role as an acquirer and assembler of land, but which chooses investment partners on the basis of a shared vision for long-term social outcomes, not design contests or generation of capital receipts. Then it won't need planning policy to do quite so much - and perhaps in time the Dutch and Danes will come to British cities to see how authentic sustainable development is really done.

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A PDF version of our 10 Big Ideas is available to download from the ‘what's new' section of our website. Please follow the link, enter the website and select ‘current' under the ‘what's new' page: www.beyondgreen.co.uk

The Beyond Green group puts sustainability principles into practice through strategic and practical projects that achieve real sustainability outcomes. Beyond Green Consulting delivers policy, strategies, plans, place-making and process for authentic sustainable developments which inspire and enable free, pleasurable, healthy and environmentally sustainable living. Beyond Green Living offers advice on sustainable lifestyles, often through brands and communications; TV projects, personal appearances and publications. Sister company BlueLiving has a portfolio of strategic land and development projects with a view to building, owning and managing seminal sustainable developments across the UK.

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