Cities, People, Planet. Talk

8/6/2019 Cities, People, Planet. Talk

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Cities, People, Planet -- A tale of three citiesFrom a talk by Herbert Girardet

I first came to Tokyo in 1998 when a TV producer from NHK Television, JunFurukawa, had initiated a very interesting TV series project, called "The People'sPlanet." Through his initiative, it became an international co-production, aiming totake a look at the state of the world, between NHK, CNN, Discovery Channel and otherbroadcasters from around the world. We spent two years filming in 40 countries andmaking six one-hour programs. I understand that this series was shown on televisionmany times here in Japan, on NHK's various channels, and it was also shown all overthe world.

At that time it became apparent to me that there is a great deal of work going on inJapan on many aspects of sustainable development that the rest of the world does not

know about. Now, I don't only make television programs but I also publish smallbooks called 'Schumacher Briefing s' on environmental issues, several of which havealready been published in Japanese. And it came to me when I met Junko Edahiro fromthe Japan for Sustainability network and newsletter, that it might be interesting for achange to do things the other way around, to take information from Japan, and topublish it in English. Because it is remarkable just how many different types of initiatives by companies and local authorities, to do with waste recycling, energyefficiency, renewable energy and sustainable transport, are happening in this countrythat the rest of the world doesn't know about. So I am here primarily to work with

Junko and Kazunori Kobayashi on producing a short book drawing the content of theJapan for Sustainability Newsletter.

But today I will talk primarily about the issue of cities and sustainability, because that'swhere I have done most of my work over the last 20 or so years. So the title of my talk is "Cities, People, Planet," which is also the title of a new book that I've just finishedwriting. And the subtitle is "A tale of three cities," because I have, over the last 10years or so, worked with a number of cities, but the three cities I've done the mostwork with, are London, Vienna and Adelaide. But before I go into detail, I would liketo just give you a very brief background to the issues that I've concerned myself withas a writer, filmmaker and consultant.

I am starting with London, which like Edo in the 18 century was the city of about onemillion people. This is roughly the size to which cities could grow before the IndustrialRevolution. Cities need to supply themselves with resources, such as food and energy.And if you don't have fossil fuels, and if you don't have access to food from far away,it is very hard for cities to grow larger than that. London, in the 18th and 19th

century, made use of steel technology on a large scale for the first time, for makingsteam engines, ships, railway lines and canons, and many other symbols of political,


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economic, military and industrial power. It grew from 1 million in 1800 to 8.4 millionpeople in 1940. Today, we have over 20 cities of this size all in various parts of theworld, and some 400 cities of one million people. Vast cities such as Tokyo or SaoPaulo, with 20 million people or more, would not be possible without the steady supplyof electricity to get the people to go up and down in the lifts of buildings, or fossilfuels to transport people within the city, but also supply goods and resources fromaround the world.

So in recent decades urban growth has taken place on an unprecedented scale, but thedownside of this growth is that it has caused massive environmental damage, and alsomassive human deprivation, particularly in countries where the economy of the citiescannot keep pace with the migration of people from rural areas into city, such as inLagos or Nairobi.

There has been much publicity on the issue of economic globalization of trade, and of course, Japan and Tokyo are key players in this. The world has been transformed as aresult of availability of fossil fuels and we have unprecedented concentrations of urbanlife due to the use of new technologies and the spread of global trade.

All over the world we have economic and urban growth, but what our accountancysystem does reflect, unfortunately, is the fact that in order for that growth to takeplace, you have to deplete resources somewhere else. In our accountancy system, weonly look at the plus side of the story, not the minus side. An image such as a burning

forest in Amazonia, shows the process of converting forest to cattle or soybean fields,not for local consumption, but for consumption in cities somewhere else across theglobe. And of course, these forests also supply timbers to distant cities. But as cities useresources, natural resources are being depleted. You can say that cities literallyswallow forests in order to make their growth and lifestyles possible, but the depletionof natural capital that occurs in the process is not reflected on any balance sheets.Nature and resources come in at zero costs, and this is not the way to run sustainableworld.


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We all like economic growth and financial growth, because it seems to benefit people,business and government. It contributes to higher standards of living, higher companyprofits and increased government revenue. But the associated story of resourcedepletion, disrupted ecosystems and increased pollution is not told clearly enough and

often enough. So we need to start measuring the depletion of resources, and other'externalites' that result from our urban economic activities. Scientists have beendrawing attention to the environmental costs and impacts of economic growth andurbanization, including the ever-growing problem of climate change. Problems ask forsolutions, and many 'forces for change' have arisen from this.

We have scientists researching these matters and journalists reporting them, we havepublic protests, international conferences such as the Earth Summits the United Nationshas been organizing, resulting in national and international regulations and legislations.These initiatives are slowly beginning to change the way we run our cities and oureconomies.


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LondonNow I would like to talk a little bit about my own work, and I will start with Londonand some of the things I've done there. In the 1990s I started to look at London'senvironmental performance, and I realized that it has a highly unsustainable'metabolism' - that is, use of resources and output of wastes. As with many other cities,London has implemented an essentially linear process of taking resources fromsomewhere in the world and dumping wastes somewhere else. But nature, in contrast,works in a very different way. It generates no wastes. All waste materials in naturebecome nutrients for future life. For instance, if leaves fall off a tree, they end up onthe ground and, within a few years, will be converted back into new soil, and help togenerate the growth of new trees.

So in my view we have a systemic problem in a way we operate our modern, urban,

industrial society that we need to be addressed. As we urbanize and industrializeworldwide, we are running up against the limits of the planet that supplies us withresources, and has to absorb our wastes, and this is becoming an urgent issue.

In my work, I found this approach of looking at the metabolism of cities such asLondon particularly effective, to demonstrate to people the way the linear system thatwe use at present needs to be challenged. Instead we have to learn from nature's owncircular systems and implement a range of measures to this effect. For a sustainableworld we need to redesign cities to make much more efficient use of resources than

they do at present.

10 years ago, I did a study quantifying the resources going into London and the wastescoming out the other end. When I had completed my figures, I approached one of thetelevision stations in London, Channel 4 and asked whether they would be interested ina documentary about London's metabolism. They said "O.K. Here is a budget. Let'sgo."

So we made a film pointing out that huge quantity of resources going into London andthen looking at the London's economy, then looking at the wastes and sewage thatcoming out of London. And a couple of million people saw this documentary and ithad a massive impact on London. Since then a new city authority was created inLondon, The Greater London Authority, and it has made much effort to developstrategies for turning London into a much more sustainable city.

Another, linked analytical methodology that has been developed in recent years toassess the environmental impact of cities is measuring their "Ecological Footprint".

These are the land surfaces that are required to supply cities with land-based resourceson a day-to-day basis. I did an initial study in 1994 to quantify London's "Ecological


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Footprint". These are the areas of land required to feed a city with food, to supply itswith forest products including paper and timber; and thirdly, the land surfacesrequired to absorb their carbon dioxide output, which in the case of London is about60 million tons a year.

I quantified London's footprint as 125 times London's surface area. But colleges of mine have recently done a new, much more detailed study, which shows that the actualfigure is even larger. They've come up with 293 times London's surface area, or 6.63hectares per person. But globally, each one of us has only about 2 hectares available toall 6.4 billion people alive today, as an equal share of the world's productive land. So,if everybody all over the world lived like Londoners, we would need more than threeplanets to live our lives.

Similar figures apply to Hong Kong where I've just been. And I expect probably

similar figures apply to Tokyo as well. If you would live like New Yorkers the figurewould be even higher - we would need five planets. Today people in many differentcities, including Londoners, are beginning to take an interest and to try a deal withthese issues.

A first, important issue is how to deal with the waste stream that comes out of ourcities and how to turn as much as organic wastes into new soil, new growing materialfor plants. And of course, the Japan for Sustainability Newsletter has already givenmany different examples of how this is being done in various Japanese cities. Today in

London and in many other European cities, people are beginning to recycle more andmore of their wastes, including organic wastes. This is partly driven by new legislationand regulations that assure that cities find easy to make much more efficient use of resources.

The headquarters of the new Greater London Authority (the GLA) are an example of ahighly energy efficient building. The GLA has developed a range of environmentalstrategies involving many consultants and specialists. The new strategies are concernedwith bio-diversity, energy use, waste management, transport and air quality. They canbe accessed on the GLA's website and are an example of how a city can rethink itself insustainability terms. I worked as a consultant in the development of these strategies.We are now waiting to see how much political will there is in London to turn the city'slinear, inefficient waste system into a circular, zero waste system over the comingyears. We are now waiting for the implementation of these strategies.

One significant initiative that has already been implemented is the London Congestioncharge, forcing cars driving into the center of the city to pay a 5 charge, and this

initiative has dramatically reduced air pollution as well as the congestion within centralLondon. Buses are being used much more and the bus service is much faster than it


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was before the charge was introduced.

Energy use is another important issue. Much can be done to create a new energyefficient architecture. At the present time our buildings suck in huge amount of energyfrom somewhere else and that has to stop in a sustainable world. In London and otherEuropean cities we are now seeing new buildings with south facing solar facades whichare able to provide a considerable proportion of the energy requirement of thebuilding even in the winter months, and which are also highly energy efficient,reducing their energy needs by up to 70 %.

The Greater London Authority has supported a very innovative project called"Beddington Zero Energy Development", and I have published a short book about itwhich is now available in Japanese. This housing project consists of 80 apartmentswhich demonstrate how one can minimize the amount of energy use through the use of

'intelligent' solar facades, 30 centimeters of insulation and a zero energy air circulationsystem. Another innovative development called Ladbroke Green Village is about tostart construction in west London, which will be largely powered by solar panels in thesummer months.

London has recently announced that by year 2010 it is hoping to provide up to 25 of its electricity from wind turbines, placed on the land as well as in the Thames estuarynear London. Across Europe, wind power development has been very rapid in recentyears. In Germany alone the equivalent of two large nuclear power stations of windpower development was created in 2003. The city of Copenhagen in Denmark alreadygets 25 of its electricity for wind power.

Another important subject regarding the development of sustainable cities is urbanagriculture, which is becoming quite popular again in different parts of Europe andLondon is an example of that. It's not only growing local food to be consumed incities, but also farmers' market to bring people closer to the local food supply. Urbanagriculture is now expanding in many parts of the world, particularly in cities in

developing countries.


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ViennaI'd like to talk about another city where I was involved in the mid-1990s, in a processcalled the 'Vienna International Futures Conference', which went on for three yearsand involved many people from the city, and also consultants from outside Vienna,such as myself. Its main purpose was similar to what we've just seen in London, whichwas to look at the city with new eyes, from the perspective of sustainability.

Vienna is a city of 1.6 million people. It is grand old city with many wonderfulbuildings, but in the 1990s it was beginning to dawn on people that there is more to acity than the beautiful buildings that the tourists want to see. There are also hundredsof thousands of buildings where ordinary people live, and they were very inefficient intheir use of fuel. The city authorities of Vienna decided to initiate a large-scaleprogramme of insulating these buildings to an extraordinary degree. 500,000apartments across the city have been now insulated with rockwool and other materials,

and this has dramatically increased their energy efficiency. And I would say thatamongst all the larger cities in Europe, Vienna has made the greatest progress with theenergy efficiency of buildings.

But it is also exemplary in recycling its wastes, with some 50% of household wastebeing recycled. Organic waste is composted and used in urban agriculture. Much of thefood eaten by patients in Vienna's hospitals is grown using compost from the city'swaste stream.

But Vienna also had other problems, like car congestion. This was an important issueto deal with. Rapid economic growth has taken place in the cities of the western worldincluding Vienna, but there are strong indications that the satisfaction of people withtheir lives has not grown in the same degree as that of the increase in Gross NationalProduct. And one reason for this is the problem of traffic congestion. Efficienttransport is needed in order to make cities not only a more sustainable, but also morelivable.

So one traffic analyst in Vienna, Professor Hermann Knoflacher, started to look intothe city's congestion problems. So he went around with his students to assess just howmuch space in the city cars take up. He showed people in the city just how much theirdependence on the motorcar is reducing their quality of life. Partly as a result of hisinitiatives and his influence, there has been a major improvement in public transportsystems in Vienna. The interchange between different modes of transport, such astrains and cycling, was greatly improved. People can pick up bikes in the streets freeof charge if they haven't got their own bike with them, strategic points across the cityand other interesting initiatives of this sort have been taken.

Vienna shows what can be done to reduce the reliance on cars, and how public


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But the primary concern in Adelaide has actually been water. Much of the city's watercomes from the Murray River, which runs all the way from New South Wales to theAdelaide area. And of course water from rivers is used as tap water in bathrooms andkitchens, and for flushing toilets, and so on. So the initial concern about sustainabilityin Adelaide city was the worry that the city would run out of water.

But another problem is the use of motorcars. Adelaide aims to introduce more bus andtram systems within the city and existing lines are now being extended. But this type of technology only works well in relatively high-density cities. If you have very low-density suburban sprawl, it is much harder to make public transport systems work.And of course cycling, too, needs to be upgraded a lot. In Adelaide it was found thathigher density inner city living in the central areas could help people to live close to

where their schools, their jobs and their entertainment were, and this is one of themajor initiatives that's now underway in Adelaide.


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the coming years.

Perhaps the most important single aspect of creating sustainable cities in the years tocome is to wean them of fossil fuels.

The cost of renewable energy is still higher compared to fossil fuel energy.Nevertheless, it is very important to move away from fossil fuel energy because atpresent every year we are burning a million years of fossil fuels to make our currenturban lifestyles possible. The real breakthrough that has already occurred is in thefield of wind power. It was the Danish government that helped to make wind powerelectricity cost competitive though deliberate support of this technology. The Danishgovernment for years supported wind turbine companies and this resulted in the realbreakthrough in the technology. The same is now happening with solar electricity. Incloudy countries like in Germany and Britain this is still about eight times more

expensive than conventional electricity. But the prospect is that it will become costcompetitive, if a few governments in the world actively support the furtherdevelopment of solar technology. And this is happening in couple of countries,particularly in Germany.

Significant government support is very important. In Germany the governmentintroduced legislation to provide 50% grants for PV installations on 100,000 buildings.And people in Germany who install a 'solar power station' on their house can sell theelectricity back to the grid at a price four times higher than a conventional power

station. Similar supportive measures are now being taken in Austria France and Spainand this has now resulted in a substantial increase in demand for PV cells, and also asignificant decrease in the price of PV cells.

Hopefully we can get lots more governments to helps cities become sustainable inresource use. I believe that sustainable urban development is one of the most importantissues in the 21st century. Cities, located on two per cent of the world's land surface,use 75% of its resources and discharge similar amounts of waste. As the worldurbanizes more and more, we need cities to become showcases for sustainability. Astart has been made, but much, much more needs to be done.

copyright(c)2004 Japan for Sustainability All Rights Reserved.

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Cities, People, Planet. Talk