Happiness and Well-Being in Housing Design

This is an unusually long post. So make a cup of tea or pour a glass of whisky before starting.

In 2008 the UK Govt Foresight commissioned the New Economic Foundation to investigate well-being. The context was a concern among policy makers that Gross Domestic Product may no longer be the sole measure of success of Government policy. Many surveys have shown that even while GDP rises, happiness and well-being do not rise with it. Money does not buy happiness it seems.

The result of this work was a report called The Five Ways to Well-Being which contained some recommendations for you to follow. You might call them the Five Pillars of Happiness? These are described below. The italic descriptions below are NEF’s attempt to create short versions of the Five Ways that are easily communicated and understood.

This work prompts a question for designers. What does this mean for the design of places for people to live in, and how ought we design them differently if we have well-being in mind. Is Well-Being equated to Happiness and are either of them capable of being designed into a development? Is well-being or happiness so strongly related to an individuals personal circumstances that it is not subject to outside influences and it is unwise for a designer to ever suggest that one can design in happiness or well-being? The NEF research suggests that it is possible for people to influence their own happiness, and that there are objective as well as subjective elements to it, hence the Five Ways. Walt Disney gives it a good try in the various Disneyworlds around the globe, but those are hardly places that can, or should, be duplicated, and in any case, there aren’t enough Mickey Mouse suits to go around.

What is also interesting about this research is that it suggests positive action towards a positive goal, rather than positive actions to prevent negative results. Most regulations are aimed at preventing negative results or outcomes such as fire, accidents, structural failure, lack of space and so on, but what could design become if it aimed at positive outcomes instead? Of course many designs are aimed at positive outcomes, hospitals, schools, and many other building types, but the positive outcomes are usually measured by asking whether the temperature in the building is maintained at a steady level, whether the building uses more or less energy than planned, and whether the maintenance bills are low. While all of these are important, we rarely look at the well-being of people who use or live in them to assess the success of our buildings. Granted this can be difficult to measure, but part of the Office of National Statistics work on Well-Being suggests that it is possible to do, and is already being done in small unconnected ways in different disciplines.

It seems to me that housing and its relationship to well-being has a particular role here, insofar as people spend more than half their time at home, and probably change homes less frequently that they change their jobs. Creating a professional expectation that designers should try to enable well-being in their designs, and crucially, check whether they are succeeding, is likely to lead to better outcomes. I think that this expectation applies particularly to the designers of house types used by the major house-builders, as these will be built many times over, thus repeating the same mistakes over and over again, or improving the lives of occupants over and over again. If we are going to build something many times, lets build the right thing, and not the wrong one.

Reading through the five ‘Ways’, which are intended by NEF to explain to laypeople how to interpret the research, it is possible to link all of them to interventions in the built environment in some way or other. Either through direct interventions, or through the creation of space for something to happen. Some issues can be considered and responded to in parts of buildings or in the public realm between buildings, other issues can be responded to by creating spaces that in turn encourage actions by others who will follow on after the designers work is done. The designers job is to create a stage for the actors to use, an environment where things are more likely to happen than not.

The Five Ways to Well-Being:

Connect

Connect with the people around you. With family,
friends, colleagues and neighbours. At home, work,
school or in your local community. Think of these as
the cornerstones of your life and invest time in
developing them. Building these connections will
support and enrich you every day.

For designers, I think this means creating opportunities for people to meet, to create streets where they can interact, and to bring the activities that stem from entrances and pathways together to create places where the greatest number of people have the best chances of interacting. Making the ground surface the place where it all happens, pedestrians, drivers, bus passengers and cyclists, all merging together and creating possibilities for activity, commercial and social.
This also means enabling people to see each other, to be visible to each other. Places where windows and doors are visible from the street and the street is visible from inside homes.

This means that creating shared spaces is important, where people can mix and meet each other, where children can play and parents can interact, allotments where they can work together and community spaces where they can gather to plan their joint future or knit, play bridge, practice yoga or get married.

This means that high density mixed-use is better than low density monoculture. The more people that are mixed in an area and the more uses, the more likely people there are to meet people like themselves, and make connections, or find appropriate work. This refutes the idea that anyone will find happiness by buying a large plot in suburbia and driving there and back without ever seeing their neighbours.

(See Charles Montgomerys excellent book on Happy Cities for many examples of broken families and difficult lives created by the long commute to and from suburbia.)
Be Active

Go for a walk or run. Step outside. Cycle. Play a game.
Garden. Dance. Exercising makes you feel good. Most
importantly, discover a physical activity you enjoy and
one that suits your level of mobility and fitness.

For the designer this means creating readily available opportunities for exercise. Streets that are designed to be walkable, and enjoyable to walk along. For this to be true, there needs to be variety in the character of the areas, and potential for change so that seasons can be marked in changing colours of leaves and birdsong, as well as the visible changes in family life that goes on in homes. Washing on the line, children’s toys in the garden, bicycles parked in front of houses all give interesting clues to the life being lived inside. Green spaces also need to be provided, and designed so that they can be used as stopping points, or provide opportunities for more active exercise through fixed equipment.

Inside the buildings and houses, the stairs should be designed to be more prominent than the lift and designed to be welcoming rather than forbidding. Landings could have a window seat so that older people can still use the stairs, but have an excuse to stop and rest and enjoy the view.

Inside homes, spaces should be created to enable and encourage exercise. Why create a dining room with fixed furniture that is used once a month, and no exercise space. Put in an exercise bar and a mirror instead and celebrate the idea of exercise without making it seem too obvious. Use the mirror to increase the light in a room to make it more attractive to be in. Put in a wooden floor with underfloor heating so that it is comfortable to use all year around.

The availability of fresh air for health is important, as is the ability to filter out pollutants. Residents should have both opportunities, together with daylight at different times of the day to ensure that they get sufficient light to read or work by, and enough light to set their daily circadian rhythms.

I learned recently that bungalows produce a condition called ‘Bungalow Knee’ by doctors, where older residents knees seize up through lack of activity. This is the first such condition caused by a building that I have heard of. But it raises an important question about regulation and comfort. Providing ease in the form of level thresholds, ramps and stair free environments may be good for the less able among us, but are we inadvertently designing out the exercise in our environment to solve the problems of a few, and denying the regular exercise that the rest of the population needs? Similar evidence is growing around the provision of overheated environments in care homes where any interruption in the heating system produces a lot of ill-health among residents whose systems have become accustomed to constant temperature and are no longer able to regulate their temperature.

Take Notice

Be curious. Catch sight of the beautiful. Remark on the
unusual. Notice the changing seasons. Savour the moment,
whether you are walking to work, eating lunch or talking to
friends. Be aware of the world around you and what you are
feeling. Reflecting on your experiences will help you
appreciate what matters to you.

For designers this is directly related to the ‘Connect’ and ‘Be Active’ ‘Ways’. Perhaps there is a prompt here for design to be more creative and to design in features that catch the eye, or which change when looked at from different angles. Buildings that have some greater level of detail that is only visible when you get closer, or a roof-level feature that is only visible from far away. The designing of opportunities for public art into a proposal is a potential route to creating places that catch the eye and encourage curiosity. The natural world is also a very interesting and varying thing, so creating opportunities for diversity in planting, and places for birds to live and roost, and bats and animals to live can all contribute to the rich experience that this ‘Way’ calls for.

The aspect of the design of homes that is most relevant here is the design of windows. It would help this ‘Way’ to create windows that provide different kinds of views, to the immediate outside, and to the distant horizon. If there is a tree in the street, a window should frame it. A window with a seat to sit in and to enjoy the view. A picture window that is low enough so that the view can be enjoyed while sitting or lying down. A window positioned to bring sunlight into the bedroom. A rooflight to bring a view of the sky into the middle of the house.

Keep Learning

Try something new. Rediscover an old interest. Sign up for
that course. Take on a different responsibility at work. Fix
a bike. Learn to play an instrument or how to cook your
favourite food. Set a challenge you will enjoy achieving.
Learning new things will make you more confident as
well as being fun.
The response for the designer here is to create spaces where things can happen. Putting seats in the right place on the street so that people can watch the world go by, or take a break in a busy day. Create spaces in residential buildings that can be used for short periods of work so that they can run small businesses from home, and they can learn from our neighbours who can pop in to help them. Make sure that spaces in residential buildings are flexible enough so that if people want to have a hobby, they have space to do it in. Make sure that the building acoustics are good enough for someone to learn to play the drums or bagpipes without annoying the neighbours. Create communal spaces where people can run short courses for their neighbours, or have a party for the residents of the building.

Give

Do something nice for a friend, or a stranger. Thank someone.
Smile. Volunteer your time. Join a community group. Look
out, as well as in. Seeing yourself, and your happiness, linked
to the wider community can be incredibly rewarding and
creates connections with the people around you.

Designers can respond to this idea with a home that creates zero harm by being very energy efficient, sympathetic to nature in its design, manufacture, operation and reuse. It may not be able to ‘give’ directly, but we can design it to ‘take’ as little as possible. We cannot help people to volunteer though, this one is almost out of the hands of the designer. But it can be helped along by creating places in a masterplan where community groups can meet and decide how they want to work together. By creating Community Interest companies that can run a development after the developer has left, and which create opportunities for people to develop skills in managing their local environment in a responsible way.

End

All of the Five Ways resonate with me, as directions that designers should keep in their minds while designing. It is not sufficient to design to meet regulations, there are other responsiblities than the clients direct needs and the regulations imposed by society that a designer should recognise.

In a period where the intention is to design and construct a lot of housing, we would do well to make sure that it is all of the highest quality as it will be there for many years after we have left, affecting the well-being of its residents and through them the success or failure of wider society.

Happy City – a Review

Happy City, a book by Charles Montgomery, should be on the shelf (digital or physical) of everyone interested in the sustainable future of cities. Given that more than half the worlds population now live in them, and that the numbers continue to rise, that should represent a lot of people. For some people, myself among them, the ideas presented in the book are not new. What is new, is the evidence he provides, statistical, personal and independent, that gives new life to those ideas. 

The central theme of the book is that disconnected urban sprawl, the worst kind of supurbia, where people move further and further from major population centres, is bad for the planet, for the people whose lives are spent commuting, and for the rest of us whose taxes go to pay for all the infrastructure that such places need. None of this sounds surprising to me, and I imagine it won’t surprise you either, so why is it that across the world, including here in the UK, we continue to build most of our new homes in exactly these kinds of locations? Far from transport arteries, schools, amenities and services.

Montgomery points out that the appeal of the suburb is based on us lying to ourselves, that we owe it to our children to give them a good life, that crime is lower in the suburbs, and that schools are better. He demolishes these fictions by pointing out that in North America, the value of suburban housing is stagnating, making sprawl a poor investment. Children who grow up in sprawl are more likely to fail in school or end up with a criminal record because their parents are usually absent, working and commuting long hours to pay for the suburban dream, and because new suburbs are particularly bereft of services and activities for children and older people. Instead of the Good Life that buyers imagined, they end up in Breaking Bad. 

I particularly enjoyed the chapter describing how the car manufacturers bought up light rail systems in north America and then dismantled them, as they were a threat to their business. How they introduced the jay-walking laws to criminalise walking when there was a danger that deaths on the road would reduce car sales. When people talk about the dangers of listening only to the private sector, there is a good case study.  The car industry has been a good employer and earner of foreign exchange for a few countries for the last fifty years or so, but look at the legacy it leaves us. We bought the marketing, now we have to live with the consequences.

Happy City is not all about failure, it covers a lot of ground where improvements have been made in enabling cities to deliver a better life for their inhabitants through better public transport systems, cycling lanes, or just more local community life. From Bogota, to Paris, Mexico City to Atlanta, he has drawn on many sources and interviews for evidence of successes and failures. This is a thoroughly researched book, and an enjoyable read. I recommend it!

MMC: Evolution or Revolution?

 I spoke last week at the Residential Construction Network hosted by the RICS in Westminster.

The three speakers were myself, Paul Inch from Innovare and Jean-Marc Bouvier from Nudura Insulated Concrete Formwork.

I introduced the topic by pointing out the continuing and rising gap between housing production in the UK and housing need. See image below. At current levels of construction and demand we will see two million people short of a home by 2030.

 

My view is that offsite construction is needed to fill the gap because the gap is mainly made up of people who cannot afford to buy their own homes at current prices, and are unlikely to ever do so. Affordable housing including shared ownership models needs to be provided for them by Registered Housing Providers(RHP’s) and by the Private Rental Sector(PRS).

There is little or no motivation for the private sector to build more housing than their current capacity to deliver. The hostorical figures show that speculative housing rarely delivers over 150,000 homes per year. They are making good profits with current numbers, so why would they change a formula that is working?

The current housing industry based on speculative housing for sale tends to use traditional construction methods as the average rate of sales on sites is slow and building faster doesn’t actually make much difference to them. What does make a difference is changing labour rates, particularly in a boom which makes their land and construction pricing difficult to predict. The regular boom and bust cycle in UK housing means that they are unlikely to either dramatically change their levels of housing supply or change the way that they build.

A possible solution to the problem is to marry up the large balance sheets of local authorities and RHP’s and use additional borrowing to construct homes offsite. This would require decisions on the part of these large clients to support a new industrial sector, housing manufacturing. A medium sized factory could supply 2,000 homes per year, but investors will only commit to constructing such facilities with a confirmed pipeline of demand. There can be competitive tendering, but between similar factories, and not between factories and site operations. This is not to promote more expensive housing, but to give factories the support they need to get going. Clients need to decide that this is the route to deliver affordable housing and government needs to support them in any way it can.

Ten new factories every year for five years will deliver 50,000 new dwellings that we are currently not building, from finance we are not using. That will go a long way to closing the gap in the housing supply. Once the market in offsite manufacturing is more mature, it can expand to take up the remaining gap and supply products to the sale market. The factories can be distributed across the country to places where there is greatest housing need and staffed by locally trained people. These plants can be set up and be running within a year, particularly if they use timber frame manufacturing. The jobs will be stable long term ones, possibly as many as 100 per factory. Thats 5,000 jobs within five years without counting the site works and the finishing trades on site. Its not wise to construct entire dwellings in factories, some work needs to be done on site to prepare foundations, and to finish the facade and roof on site.

Paul Inch, Business Development Director, Innovare

Innovare are one such factory, constructing homes and schools from their factory in Coventry using Structural Insulated Panels. They have a strong history of building high performing homes and buildings that provide very well-insulated building fabric. This is achieved by constructing using large format panels containing the building structure and insulation. Speed of construction is much faster than traditional methods and the quality of the final building is higher, particularly delivering low levels of air leakage and reducing the heating demand from the finished building.

In Paul’s opinion, RHP’s should use the market to deliver their buildings and not try and go it alone. There is a lot of manufacturing skills in the market and it is best left to the market to provide it rather than try and bring it in-house as some RHP’s have done.

Jean Marc Bouvier Director of International Sales and Business Development

Jean Marc Bouvier from Nudura Corporation, a supplier of Insulated Concrete Formwork products described their system. It provides large insulation panels that fit together much like Lego and are then filled in with poured concrete to form the walls of the design. It is a very rapid form of construction and delivers very high performance buildings. By using large lightweight elements the construciton process is safer and quicker, and because of the pured concrete there are no air gaps in the construction. Another benefit is that it is very resilient to wind effects and is being used to construct storm shelters in the southern regions of the US. Like SiPs it enables a highly productive delivery, with far fewer man-hours required to deliver the finished building compared to traditional building methods.

Testing Daylight and Sunlight in Masterplanning

“The code is more like guidelines than actual rules’  Captain Barbossa

Thus Captain Barbossa enlightens the confused Elizabeth Swann on the difficulties of interpreting the Pirate Code. When is a guideline a rule, and when is it a guideline, and what does it mean when it is treated by some as a rule and treated as a guideline by others. BRE Daylight guidelines are treated by some people like the Pirate Code, to be taken as rules in some cases, and as guidelines by others? Taking one approach or the other can have a significant impact on the design of masterplan, sometime with negative consequences for the urban design.

Most of, if not all of, the recommendations offered in the BRE Publication ‘Site Layout Planning for Daylight and Sunlight: A guide to good practice’ are guidelines and should not be strictly applied. The introduction to the documents even states “The advice given here is not mandatory and the guide should not be seen as an instrument of planning policy: its aim is to help and not constrain the designer. Although it gives numerical guidelines, these should be interpreted flexibly since natural lighting is only one of many factors in site layout design. In special circumstances the developer of planning authority may wish to use different target values. For example, in a historic city centre, or in an area with modern high rise buildings, a higher degree of obstruction may be unavoidable if new developments are to match the height and proportions of existing buildings“.

Yet, in many cases, authorities and even the BRE itself, make these guidelines into rules or targets for planning policy and sustainability appraisals.

In more specific instances, the BRE guidelines also state that ‘In a mews in a historic city centre …a VSC(Vertical Sky Component) of 18% could be used as a target for development in that street if new development is to match the existing layout’. This statement highlights the contrast between homes designed to match the character of historic environments by meeting a threshold value of 18% of Vertical Sky Component, compared to the ‘normal’ recommended threshold of 27% of Vertical Sky Component. This highlights the idea that different daylighting thresholds are appropriate for different types of urban neighbourhood.

In the Code for Sustainable Homes the BRE sets a level of 2% of Average Daylight Factor for kitchens, and 1.5% for living rooms and home offices. The guidance recommends a minimum of 1% for bedrooms. Credit scores are awarded in the Code for homes that meet these guidelines. While there is an acceptance that different rooms could have different light levels, there is no allowance made for differences in design that could mean that some homes may not meet the target at all.

Many local authorities use the BRE guidelines as de facto planning policy, and use them to argue against development that reduces the daylight or sunlight for other existing properties and residents. Unhelpfully, Rights to Light, a legal right to light, is a separate matter and dealt with in a parallel process, sometimes involving the courts. This is usually an issue when new development affects the daylight of an existing building by overshadowing it.

When designing large-scale developments, covering a new urban quarter, current practice guides the designer towards layouts that are partially reminiscent of historical urban quarters containing streets and squares.  It is entirely consistent with the design of modern urban masterplans that there will be areas of high density living and areas of low density living that have different characters, amenity, outlook, density, and property values. Daylight is part of the character of a building and the homes within it. It is part of the character of a street. In London, there is a world of difference between the character of the houses in a Victorian terrace, suburban Barnet, and mansion blocks in Kensington. Each have their own character and value.  Designing homes, streets and squares to all meet a particular daylight threshold may not help to produce an enjoyable and varied urban environment that reflects the variety available in most cities. I think that the BRE guidelines should be treated as guidelines and strict daylighting thresholds should rarely be applied across large scale masterplans.

Some countries apply this type of guidance very strictly, Russia and China particularly enshrine daylight into national regulation. The result is often poor quality urban design resulting in all new buildings facing South and ignoring traditional street layouts. It may deliver the appropriate hours of sunlight on a particular date in March but the impact can be very detrimental to the quality of life in cities.

I think that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to design a high density urban environment without having some units at street level with low daylight amenity, as well as many units at high level that have much higher levels of daylight than guidelines would suggest. Large glazed areas may give apartments a stunning view, but high levels of daylight almost always translate into high levels of solar gains and overheating.

It is important that streets are overlooked at all times by windows and have front doors coming from them at regular intervals. This means that homes on east-west streets will always have facades with a northern aspect and will have low levels of sunlight on that facade. Where streets are aiming for an urban character and are 4-6 stories high on both sides, it is inevitable that the units on the ground floors will have low daylight levels. This does not prevent those units from being attractive and useful. Central London has many basements which are fully occupied and enjoyed by residents and which undoubtedly have low levels of daylight. Their proximity to services and jobs is deemed to be of higher importance by their residents than daylight levels.

The Mayors Standard for Dual-Aspect Homes

London homes are designed to meet the Mayors Standard. This includes Standard 5.2.1 which states that “Developments should avoid single aspect dwellings that are north facing, exposed to noise levels above which significant adverse effects on health and quality of life occur, or contain three or more bedrooms”. The guidance adds “A home with opening windows on at least two sides has many inherent benefits, including better daylight, a greater chance of direct sunlight for longer periods, natural cross ventilation, mitigating pollution, offering a choice of views…..”.

Following this guidance means that even in situations where some elevations of buildings have poor access to daylight or sunlight, the likelihood is that homes within the plan can be designed to gain daylight and sunlight from another elevation, either from a side street or from a courtyard. The detailed design can prioritise the design of single aspect dwellings in areas where there is good daylight/sunlight availability to ensure that every unit has rooms that provide the best level of light available.

External Spaces & Courtyards

BRE guidance would suggest applying a single guideline for external amenity spaces, but the actual use of them may be very different, and may be in different character areas of any masterplan, external spaces should be designed to have different characters. For example, ground floor courtyards may become a first floor podium depending on the parking requirements, making it difficult to test the design at an early stage. Do you test the worst case or the best case, even though the worst case in daylight terms is the best case in urban design terms, as a courtyard on the ground will be a better used space than a courtyard on an upper level. If there are taller building should the roofs be designed as amenity spaces? High level roofs have very good levels of daylight/sunlight amenity, but they can never replace a ground level external space as the best possible common space.

Where courtyards are to be used for doorstep play, sunlight analysis can be used to show where there are places within each courtyard that have good light levels where play equipment can be located. It makes sense to put play spots in a sunny location, even if that location isn’t sunny for long periods.

Public Open Spaces

Daylight for Public spaces is even more difficult to deal with. Does it matter whether an urban square is well lit or not? When most of the activity in the space is transient and the space is largely serving the needs of people moving through the area from outside, it is arguable that the amount of light in the space is largely irrelevant. If the space is not to be used for people to sit, or play, then it is difficult to argue for a particular threshold of light or sunshine. This is not to say that sunlight or sunshine is not going to add enjoyment and character to the space, but that setting a particular threshold value of sunshine or daylight is not a valid approach. If the landscape designer wants to plant the space with trees, then the amount of light available is also a consideration for the types of planting that will thrive there.

Overheating

As the UK climate changes and average annual temperatures continue to rise, the danger of overheating due to solar gains will increase. High levels of daylight will also mean high levels of solar gains, which brings with it the risk of overheating. Currently there are no overheating tests that are required to be carried out by regulations that are sufficiently robust to deal with this problem. Overheating can be mitigated by a number of measures, including external shading, ventilation and occupant management. The people at most risk of heat stress are the older and younger parts of the resident group and particular care should be taken to protect older residents from overheating. There are some advantages to older people being in units at low levels of buildings with lower daylight and sunlight levels as these will be cooler in hot summers than units at high levels.

Summary.

Applying a single standard of daylight amenity to something as complex as an urban masterplan is not advisable. Different external spaces and streets have different requirements, and different buildings can and should have varying characters to make an interesting city. Daylight and sunlight are very important aspects of that character and should be appraised from the beginning of the design. The design team and planning officers should be aware of the impact of their decisions on the daylight available from the earliest part of the process but not rely solely on numbers to guide their decisions. Quality matters as much as quantity, but is much more difficult to appraise.

The Electric City

WSP Engineering group have carried out some interesting research into the potential of the Electric City. The basic principle is that we should move away from combustion within cities for heating homes, buildings, generating power, cooling or transport, and rely on electrons instead.

The potential benefits are staggering. The future city powered by electricity has a much better environment for its inhabitants with lower emissions and fewer particulates in the air, the air is cleaner because much of our air quality problems stem from combustion in boilers and engines. The city is quieter because electric motors are quieter than combustion engines. The city produces less CO2 emissions because heat pumps are more efficient than boilers and electric cars are more efficient than combustion engines.

WSP calculate that if we aimed to create an all-electric London by 2030 we could have
– reduced NOx levels by 37%
– vehicle noise levels will be reduced by 25-50%
– electricity usage in the capital would double from 40k GWh to 80k GWh per year
– CO2 emissions would drop from 88 MtCO2 to around 8 MTCO2 per year, a drop of around 90%.

SAP, the tool used to assess the compliance of UK housing for Building Regulations, uses a CO2 factor for UK Grid electricity based on a three year average prediction of the Grid emissions. What WSP’s work makes clear is that this is the wrong period to use for predictions. The long term predicted emissions for the UK Grid is for it to be lower than gas, and to reach this point before 2020. Using a ‘dirty’ Grid emissions factor now, means that we are installing gas CHP and gas boilers in the anticipation that they will drive down CO2 emissions. But during the lifetime of these systems the Electricity Grid emission will drop below gas and continue to drop until it is much lower. So installing systems now that have a twenty or thirty year life of predicted emissions is actually likely to raise emissions rather than reduce them.

A major issue for housing in all of this is that currently it is much cheaper to heat a home using gas than electricity, because electricity is three times more expensive. The problem we need to solve is how to reduce heating demand to a point where new homes can be heated by electricity for the same amount of money as other homes on the market can be heated by gas. There are well documented problems where newish homes were heated by heat pumps resulting in higher than average bills because the homes simply weren’t efficient enough. Perhaps we need to look again at dual tariff electricity supplies to new homes using off peak electricity to drive heat pumps?

With cars the picture is different because petrol is so much more expensive than gas, electric driving is a much cheaper option, so it is entirely likely that electric transport will lead the electric revolution faster than the construction industry. Cars have a shorter life than building services, so the replacement rate for cars will mean that technological changes will be introduced more quickly in any case.

Whatever the outcome this is an excellent piece of work, and highlights the benefits of taking a long term view of energy policy and market intervention.

Zero Carbon(2016) Exemption Proposals

The plan to exempt small sites from zero-carbon legislation strikes me as being a total waste of time, energy and money and I cannot fathom why DCLG are wasting their precious time (and mine if it comes to that) with it.

The consultation document can be read here. The main elements are
– The proposal is to exempt small sites from the Allowable Solutions element of the Zero Carbon(2016) proposals. That is, the CO2 offset payment for that CO2 not mitigated on site by the development multiplied by 30 years multiplied by the agreed cost of CO2 per tonne.
– The consultation seeks views on the proposals including
The definition of small sites
Whether the exemption should relate to developers who are small or to any developer developing small sites
Whether the exemption should relate to Allowable Solutions only or whether the exemption should relate to Carbon Compliance as well
How long a time-frame the exemption should last for.

The problem I have with this is: where is the evidence that this is going to promote development? I haven’t seen any. Figures from the consultation document point out that 10% of planning applications in the UK measured by unit number were for single dwellings. That amounted to 24,000 units. So that tells me that there is a lot of activity in this sector and we can expect that to continue.
The Allowable Solutions impact of about £2-3k per plot will act as a small disincentive to development, but since many of those applications (my conjecture) are for the people who will actually live in those homes, the additional costs can be weighed against a lower cost of living for the occupants. The savings in fuel bills over the lifetime of the dwelling will pay for the relatively small additional cost. This is a calculation that many people will be able to do, and probably will realise that if they increase the build specification slightly they will reduce the Allowable Solutions costs and save themselves even more money. This seems to me to be a virtuous circle. People build more efficient homes for themselves, and they save money over and lifetime and there is less CO2 produced. This sounds like a market actually working. So why does the Government think that this is a market they need to interfere in before they actually have it in place?
The likely time frame would be from 2016 until the next issue of the Building Regulations, around 2020. This would allow the costs of the Zero Carbon (2016) to drop and the costs of Allowable Solutions to be absorbed. Again this seems to me to be counter productive. The way to reduce the costs of the Zero Carbon (2016) standard is to have everyone use it as soon as possible. This will bring down the cost of the insulation and window products that are needed to reach the standard, and then they will be available to all and not just the large housebuilders with very cost-effective supply chains. This proposal risks creating a two tier industry with higher costs of smaller builders and lower costs to larger builders.
The problem lies with the speculative nature of so much of our housebuilding. The builder of some of these small plots doesn’t know who the buyer has, and therefore has no interest in how that buyer lives in the home. There is no way for the lower costs of living in a more efficient home to be passed on to the developer in a beneficial way. A developer cannot build a more efficient home and offer it on the market for a small premium, this benefit is simply not recognised in the valuation of a property.
So, can I suggest that a more effective way for the Department to spend its time and mine, would be to investigate ways of making the speculative housing market function as a better market instead of trying to undermine those elements of future legislation that are likely to help it to function as a better market. But in an election year, perhaps that is too much to hope for.

Is There a Need for a Right to Energy?

We have had a Right to Light for a very long time, and good access to daylight in residential buildings is seen as a central issue when designing buildings in many parts of the world. The benefits to well-being and health are well-recognised, even though this can be difficult to assess when it comes to designing buildings in an urban location where it is nearly impossible to build without affecting someones daylight.

But now that we are designing buildings that can be self-sufficient in terms of energy, achieved by using very energy efficient building fabric, passive solar gains and an energy balance achieved with some roof mounted or facade mounted renewable energy production: Do we need a right to the solar energy that such a building is dependent on?

Under Rights to Light legislation a home that suffers a low threshold of light loss has no right to prevent the construction of a building nearby. Taken to its ultimate conclusion, successive buildings can be built around the affected building, each one diminishing the available daylight by a small amount, until the affected building sits in darkness. Call it ‘Darkness by a Thousand Blinds’ instead of ‘Death by a Thousand Cuts’.

In the same way, a self-sustaining building can end up losing its access to solar energy through a gradual encroachment on its surroundings by neighbouring buildings, gradually eroding its access to renewable energy either by casting shade on its solar panels, by preventing solar gains, or by stealing the wind from the blades of a wind turbine.

After 2016 when the zero carbon legislation is enacted, (note I say when, not if) then the use of solar panels will be built into regulation under the Carbon Compliance element of the regulation, and the performance of panels or even solar gains will be an integral element of the performance of the building. Buyers of the building can rightly expect the building to perform in accordance with its energy certificate, and if it doesn’t they have a right to know why not.

How long will it be before neighbours are suing each other for loss of income due to encroachment on one another’s solar gains?

I foresee planning arguments, neighbour disputes and legislation ahead.

World Sustainable Building 2014 (Barcelona)

The Summary:

This was an enormous conference with a concentration of expertise on sustainable buildings unlike any other conference I have attended. The messages from the conference were many, including the following which particularly struck me:

– we have too many different approaches to sustainable buildings across the EU, we need to coordinate approaches to make training and cooperation easier, this does not mean simplify! But there are some elements of different approaches that can be standardised to give a stronger platform for the other areas that need development. For example operational energy calculations could be standardised, but embodied energy tools are too early in their development to do this yet.

– our approaches to sustaianbility are often impenetrable to people outside the confines of specialisms. A result of this is that around 1% of the new buildings in Europe are given a sustainability rating at all. We need to make our language and approaches more comprehensible to the end user and to the market.

– LCA in particular is complex and time consuming, and the results are not always useable. We look forward to the wide use of EPD’s.

 

The Detail

This was my first visit to this conference, there were 1400 delegates  from around the world, many from Spain, a lot from the EU, but also from Hong Kong, China, India, Korea, the US and many more. I was mainly there to attend a meeting of the ActiveHouse Alliance. This is a pan-European alliance of companies and organisations working towards a better definition of sustainable buildings using Comfort, Energy and Environmental scores as a rating system. I am on the Board Advisory Committee which means that I am helping to guide the direction of the standard, having beein involved in the design of the first two homes constructed to meet the standard in the UK.

The conference spanned three days, I attended for the first two.

On the first day we held the ActiveHoues BAC meeting and on the morning of the second day we held an ActiveHouse Symposium, bringing together some of the research that came from the first completed projects across the EU. The sessions included observers and commentators as well as presentations from the projects themselves. I summarise here some of the comments and ideas that struck me particularly, these only represent a tiny fraction of the ideas presented, and the sessions I attended on the two days only represented one sixteenth of the sessions available!

ActiveHouse Symposium

From the ActiveHouse Symposium one particular comment that has stayed with me from this session is from Nils Larsson from IISBE, Canada, who said that ‘individual family homes cannot be described as ‘sustainable’, because a single dwelling cannot cover the breadth of the idea of sustainability. A single family home can be described as ‘energy efficient’ or ‘low energy’ but not ‘sustainable’’. I broadly agree with this, but I think that a single family dwelling can support ‘sustainability’ or ‘promote’ it but it cannot achieve it on its own.

Prof. Dr. Berndt Wegener from Humboldt University of Berlin, spoke about well-being from the perspective of a social scientist. He declared that the factors that lead to well-being can be measured,, but that they cannot be prescribed in advance. We cannot say that by doing ‘x’ we will definitely have ‘y’ benefits in terms of well-being. Pete Halshall, from the Good Homes Alliance, noted that feedback from residents shows that social tenants sometimes feel less ‘well-being’ than private tenants in the same building. There are other factors to well-being than those catered for by the built environment.

Stefan Haglind of Skanska wondered whether we should talk less about our impact on Nature, and more about Natures beneficial impact on us. If we understood better the effect on our sense of well-being and on our productivity of having better daylight, a nice view, comfortable temperatures and control over our environment, we would design better buildings and find it less difficult to have arguments about whether to adopt ‘green design’ or not. Studies, including the recent World Green Building Council report, show that there are considerable financial benefits to productivity from all of these features of well-designed green buildings that far outweigh the cost savings of lower energy use. I agree that we should emphasise the positive impacts of Nature, but I wouldn’t want to remove focus away from the catastrophic damage to our biodiversity.

Stefan pointed out that, for workplace productivity, the benefits from green buildings tend to be worth 100 times the value of energy savings. I wonder if there is a similar metric for the homes we live in? I can see a straightforward connection through home-working, our productivity at home is worth even more to an employer since the workplace is usually given for nothing. We can extend this benefit to the health service if we say that the home either promotes better health by being well-designed, or being sufficiently adaptable to enable residents to recover, or to be cared for, at home rather than requiring an expensive hospital bed.

Renata Hammer and Peter Holzer from Vienna provided some useful feedback from a small project where they had used the ActiveHouse tools for a small project with a private client. Their comments included:

-using primary energy as an indicator suggests that PV can compensate for other failings, and while this may be true for energy, it is not true for other environmental impacts. In this particular situation PV was inappropriate due to the heritage nature of the surroundings, and there was a lot of overshadowing, so in some situations this compensation is not even available.

-carrying out LifeCycle Assessments is a nightmarish process, and expensive in terms of the time taken to do so. (This was a recurring theme in the conference, with some speakers hoping that a production of many EPD’s over the next couple of years leading to a much easier set of data for designers and less technical people to use in their decision-making)

 

New Envelopes for Zero Energy Buildings

In a later session on ‘New Envelopers for Zero Energy Buildings’ there was a series of investigations into the LCA’s of different wall types. Erin Moore made some interesting points about the embodied energy of our buildings:

-that our current understanding of the relative amounts of embodied energy in our buildings is limited. Some studies put the amount of embodied energy as high as 50%, or as low as 10% of the total CO2 emissions of the building over its lifetime. She noted that the definition of ‘lifetime’ makes a big difference to the calculation, and that this figures varies widely around the world’.

-that the mitigation of emissions from embodied energy is more difficult than it appears. For example, can we claim that the embodied CO2 emissions from a home in the UK can be mitigated by putting PV on the roof? If the original emissions were from a country with a higher CO2 factor in the Grid, or if the original emissions were partially in China, how can we mitigate the damage in the UK? If some of the impacts are not CO2 related, but relate to a biodiversity loss, how can we deal with this where materials move from country to country?

 

 

 

Building on the Green Belt

Paul Cheshire of the London School of Economics came to HTA last month and presented his thoughts on Building on the Green Belt. It was at once appalling and fascinating. I think it is worthwhile to explore ideas that are superficially appalling to analyse why they affect us in this way and whether our sensitivity to them is real or something we have learned without really absorbing the rationale behind it. The history of civilisation is full of bad ideas that were once held to be good ideas but which we now find appalling. By we, I largely mean Western civilisation. By bad ideas I mean racism, fascism, UKIP, factory farming…those sorts of ideas. What seems obvious to one generation can often appal the next one. Think about 70’s fashion!

Building on the Green Belt(BoGB) has come to attract the same strong reactions as some of those ideas above, whether one is for or against, there is no real middle ground. The cause against BoGB is is largely emotional and visceral, its ‘green’ land, the reasoning goes, so it must be nice, its surely full of woodland and trees, it harbours the last vestige of medieval connectivity with the ‘land’ that feeds us. We will all choke to death on the fumes of cars and buildings if we allow this to continue, etc., etc.,We are carpeting over England’s green and pleasant land and we mustn’t allow it to continue, or even think about allowing it to continue. Is any of this true?

The problem with all of this is that there is enough truth in it to make it believable to the average voter, and therefore completely toxic to our current crop of rather spineless politicians. Were BoGB to happen it will inevitably destroy some areas of land that have some ecological value, and will inevitably carpet over some of the ‘green and pleasant’ land. But the argument is more complex than this. By not BoGB we are curtailing the supply of land for housing in a way that was not envisaged when the legislation was enacted. We are in a period of chronic under-supply of homes and young people have little chance of getting an affordable home to live in unless we act to increase supply. London in particular is being constrained to the point where housing ownership is becoming impossible for young people on a normal wage.

To change the housing market we need to be building many more homes that we are currently building, this appears to be generally accepted. Some of these can be delivered in dense new apartment developments close to jobs in city centres. But high density development is slow to bring through the planning system and often controversial. On its own it won’t be enough.

I dislike the idea of BoGB as much, and possibly more than most, I prefer to design dense environments for people to live in, as I believe that high density living brings with it high-quality services. If I had my way we would all live in terraces or apartments and the suburban semi would be banned. Fortunately there are a lot of people who disagree with me and who want to live in the suburbs in a semi and they should have what they want. Shouldn’t they? Is owning an environmentally damaging house with four cars and garden in the suburbs an ‘inalienable human right’ or should it be classified as something that previous generations longed for and could afford, but which we cannot? Do we recognise that the costs of allowing everyone to own their own patch of grass two hours commute from where they work is neither good for them nor good for society as a whole?

To look at the figures dispassionately, 13% of land in the UK is Green Belt land. Audacity.org have produced a nice map illustrating the many designations of land used in England to prevent development. Their research demonstrates that we have built on approximately 10% of our land, leaving the remaining 90%, much of which is unavailable for development. The illustration of Green Belts around the main population centres demonstrates that they are doing their job of curtailing the growth of those centres, and putting pressure on nearby smaller towns to grow instead.

Unfortunately this land use planning strategy is not matched by an economic strategy that is helping to create jobs in those smaller towns. The result is a working population in the cities that must commute long distances to work and puts increasing pressure on the transport system. See here for statistics showing that a decade ago about one third of London’s working population commuted into London. One of the results of this has been the construction of more roads through the Green Belt, which has further degraded it, on top of the highly industrialised agriculture practised in most of the Green Belt which has denuded it of trees and wildlife. It may be green in colour, but much of it is grey in environmental terms, ecologically poor, with sparse areas of ecology poisoned by pesticides and curtailed by the machinery of the supermarket supply chain. Is it really worth protecting? Are we being realistic by calling it the Green Belt? Are we using the right yardstick to measure it against? Should we call it an Environmental Zone or Green Zone instead.

The decades-old principle of home ownership will soon be at an end unless these conflicting strategies are resolved. Land use designations including the Green Belt have become an inconvenient sacred cow that is preventing our cities from expanding. Growth is being pushed out to smaller dormitory towns, and pushing up the price of land outside the Green Belts to levels where starter homes require subsidy to be affordable. The policies discussed in the recent round of conferences include subsidies for first time buyers is a direct result of a set of planning policies that limit the opportunities for development.

I suspect that the Green Belt could be made smaller, more environmentally beneficial, and much more meaningful in real terms by being ‘masterplanned’ and ‘activated’ more thoroughly. The reality is that most Green Belt land currently performs little useful function other than to curtail development. Given that our wildlife population continues to plummet, we cannot argue that Green Belts have fulfilled a function of protecting wildlife. To live up to its designation Green Belts need to be transformed into places where nature can thrive and also be enjoyed by the urban population they are intended to support. A series of Environmental Zones surrounding our cities which contain leisure activities as well as a proportion of responsible farming, new woodlands, wind turbines, biodiverse places rich in ecology and protected by future generations and bounded by dense high quality homes seems to me to engender the best of both worlds. The costs of these changes would be borne by the sale of a proportion of the land for new housing.

Since many of these areas are already well-served by public transport little new infrastructure would be needed. The existing infrastructure is currently under-used as these outlying areas have not been able to expand since the transport network was installed decades ago. By creating jobs in these locations we would also reduce the need for expansion in the transport network and balance the current concentration of jobs in the centres of our cities with a new set of suburban desirable locations for people to live and work. The Green Belt was a good idea and it has left us a legacy of potential that we can use, but on its own it is not enough to guarantee a positive future for our major cities.

Assessing Microclimate in Urban Environments

“People, life and vitality are the biggest attractions in a city. We see it in the choice of peoples seating, where the most populated benches are located, how people choose to sit on sidewalk cafes facing the people walking by rather than the buildings behind them.
The biggest quality of a sidewalk café is simply the interaction with other people. Do you have a choice between walking through a deserted, empty street and a street with other people walking, people will choose the liveliest street that provides them with more experiences, visual variety and a feeling of safety.” Jan Gehl 2002

This quotation from Jan Gehl, and many others like it, have brought home to the design professions how much we had moved away from a human-centric design philosophy to a building-centric and car-centric design philosophy for much of the 20th Century. Even now we are still living with many of the mistakes made in those decades, a car dominated lifestyle, buildings that don’t address the street, housing with high level access walkways, large highways that unsympathetically cut through historic urban fabric, the list is a long one.

Considering the human impact of buildings and the quality of spaces between them means that we should spend much more time considering, drawing and analysing these spaces than we previously did. The tools are now more available to analyse these spaces than ever before, now we just need to use them more often. Here are some examples of the tools available and where to use them.

1. One can use tools like IES to assess the Wind Microclimate between buildings. The tool uses historic weather data to predict the wind conditions between buildings by calculating how the shape of the buildings that are there already and that are in our proposals will affect the wind speeds throughout the year. This calculation is usually carried out at pedestrian level because that is where the pedestrians are, as well as at higher levels where people might sit on balconies or on roof terraces. The results are compared against the Lawson criteria for pedestrian comfort, a scale that compares the type of activity with the prevailing wind speed. Activities such as sitting outside cafes and window shopping are suggested to be best places where the Beaufort Level 3 ‘Gentle Breeze’ is not exceeded for more than 1% of the time in a simulation. It is a notable failing in the Lawson Criteria that it doesn’t adequately deal with cycling and ‘windiness’. Cycling and wind are are particular problem as this combination presents a risk to life where cyclists can be blown into traffic by sudden gusts of wind, a problem not normally faced by pedestrians. Any suggestions by readers as to what an appropriate criterion would be are welcome.

2. IES can also be used to assess the solar irradiation on roofs to highlight locations for renewable energy systems, helpful in determining whether some buildings overshade others or whether some roofs will get ehough solar insolaton to make it worthwhile putting renewable systems there art all.

3. One can use ENVI-met to carry out a similar assessment, but with the additional sophistication of assessing the impact of planting and street trees on the local environment.

4. We can use ECOTECT to evaluate the solar incidence on the facades of buildings to tell us whether the cafe will be in sunshine for long periods of the year and whether people will get too hot sitting there and whether we should provide an awning. Ecotect is useful for many other type of analysis as well, but its imagery for this type of use is particularly helpful.

5. We can use simple tools like SketchUp to look at shadows cast by our designs at a early stage to assess the impact of one design versus another by comparing the impact at the equinoxes and solstices. This is paricularly helpful as it can be done easily and quickly by the designer in the tool that they are woring on (assuming that they are using SketchUp for early stage designs) and gives them immedate feedback. The other tools used here are for more specialist use and are typically used by consultants who specialise in this type of analysis.

6. There is a substantial piece of work being carried out at MIT to develop a suite of tools for urban design analysis based on the Rhino modelling software. This suite is intended to include tools for early daylight, energy and embodied energy analysis. It is still a work in progress but highlights the level of ambition made possible by readily available computing power. An example of the progress to date is the DAYSIM engine used for modelling daylight in and around buildings.

These are just some examples of the tools available to investigate whether the spaces we are creating between and around our buildings are going to be fit for purpose and enjoyable to use. Here is an example from the Kings Cross masterplan of a very successful intervention, a set of sout-facing steps connecting to the canal. It was popular before the astroturf was added, being a sheltered and sunny place to sit and chat, drink a coffee or eat lunch, now it is both sunny, and more comfortable to sit on.

 

Sitting in the Sun: Kings Cross