Cities, People, Planet -- A tale of three cities

From a talk by Herbert Girardet

I first came to Tokyo in 1998 when a TV producer from NHK Television, Jun Furukawa, had initiated a very interesting TV series project, called "The People's Planet." Through his initiative, it became an international co-production, aiming to take a look at the state of the world, between NHK, CNN, Discovery Channel and other broadcasters from around the world. We spent two years filming in 40 countries and making six one-hour programs. I understand that this series was shown on television many times here in Japan, on NHK's various channels, and it was also shown all over the world. At that time it became apparent to me that there is a great deal of work going on in Japan 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 small books called 'Schumacher Briefing s' on environmental issues, several of which have already been published in Japanese. And it came to me when I met Junko Edahiro from the Japan for Sustainability network and newsletter, that it might be interesting for a change to do things the other way around, to take information from Japan, and to publish it in English. Because it is remarkable just how many different types of initiatives by companies and local authorities, to do with waste recycling, energy efficiency, renewable energy and sustainable transport, are happening in this country that 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 the Japan for Sustainability Newsletter. But today I will talk primarily about the issue of cities and sustainability, because that's where 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 finished writing. And the subtitle is "A tale of three cities," because I have, over the last 10 years or so, worked with a number of cities, but the three cities I've done the most work with, are London, Vienna and Adelaide. But before I go into detail, I would like to just give you a very brief background to the issues that I've concerned myself with as a writer, filmmaker and consultant. I am starting with London, which like Edo in the 18 century was the city of about one million people. This is roughly the size to which cities could grow before the Industrial Revolution. 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 making steam engines, ships, railway lines and canons, and many other symbols of political,
-1-

economic, military and industrial power. It grew from 1 million in 1800 to 8.4 million people in 1940. Today, we have over 20 cities of this size all in various parts of the world, and some 400 cities of one million people. Vast cities such as Tokyo or Sao Paulo, with 20 million people or more, would not be possible without the steady supply of electricity to get the people to go up and down in the lifts of buildings, or fossil fuels to transport people within the city, but also supply goods and resources from around the world. So in recent decades urban growth has taken place on an unprecedented scale, but the downside of this growth is that it has caused massive environmental damage, and also massive human deprivation, particularly in countries where the economy of the cities cannot keep pace with the migration of people from rural areas into city, such as in Lagos 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 a result of availability of fossil fuels and we have unprecedented concentrations of urban life 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 accountancy system does reflect, unfortunately, is the fact that in order for that growth to take place, you have to deplete resources somewhere else. In our accountancy system, we only 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 the globe. And of course, these forests also supply timbers to distant cities. But as cities use resources, natural resources are being depleted. You can say that cities literally swallow forests in order to make their growth and lifestyles possible, but the depletion of 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 sustainable world.

-2-

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 company profits and increased government revenue. But the associated story of resource depletion, 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 been drawing attention to the environmental costs and impacts of economic growth and urbanization, including the ever-growing problem of climate change. Problems ask for solutions, and many 'forces for change' have arisen from this. We have scientists researching these matters and journalists reporting them, we have public protests, international conferences such as the Earth Summits the United Nations has been organizing, resulting in national and international regulations and legislations. These initiatives are slowly beginning to change the way we run our cities and our economies.
-3-

London Now I would like to talk a little bit about my own work, and I will start with London and some of the things I've done there. In the 1990s I started to look at London's environmental 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 from somewhere 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 nature become nutrients for future life. For instance, if leaves fall off a tree, they end up on the ground and, within a few years, will be converted back into new soil, and help to generate 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 industrialize worldwide, we are running up against the limits of the planet that supplies us with resources, 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 as London particularly effective, to demonstrate to people the way the linear system that we use at present needs to be challenged. Instead we have to learn from nature's own circular systems and implement a range of measures to this effect. For a sustainable world 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 wastes coming out the other end. When I had completed my figures, I approached one of the television stations in London, Channel 4 and asked whether they would be interested in a documentary about London's metabolism. They said "O.K. Here is a budget. Let's go." So we made a film pointing out that huge quantity of resources going into London and then looking at the London's economy, then looking at the wastes and sewage that coming out of London. And a couple of million people saw this documentary and it had a massive impact on London. Since then a new city authority was created in London, The Greater London Authority, and it has made much effort to develop strategies for turning London into a much more sustainable city. Another, linked analytical methodology that has been developed in recent years to assess the environmental impact of cities is measuring their "Ecological Footprint". These are the land surfaces that are required to supply cities with land-based resources on a day-to-day basis. I did an initial study in 1994 to quantify London's "Ecological
-4-

Footprint". These are the areas of land required to feed a city with food, to supply its with forest products including paper and timber; and thirdly, the land surfaces required to absorb their carbon dioxide output, which in the case of London is about 60 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 actual figure is even larger. They've come up with 293 times London's surface area, or 6.63 hectares per person. But globally, each one of us has only about 2 hectares available to all 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 three planets 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 figure would be even higher - we would need five planets. Today people in many different cities, including Londoners, are beginning to take an interest and to try a deal with these issues. A first, important issue is how to deal with the waste stream that comes out of our cities and how to turn as much as organic wastes into new soil, new growing material for plants. And of course, the Japan for Sustainability Newsletter has already given many 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 and more of their wastes, including organic wastes. This is partly driven by new legislation and 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 a highly energy efficient building. The GLA has developed a range of environmental strategies involving many consultants and specialists. The new strategies are concerned with bio-diversity, energy use, waste management, transport and air quality. They can be accessed on the GLA's website and are an example of how a city can rethink itself in sustainability 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's linear, inefficient waste system into a circular, zero waste system over the coming years. We are now waiting for the implementation of these strategies. One significant initiative that has already been implemented is the London Congestion charge, 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 central London. Buses are being used much more and the bus service is much faster than it
-5-

was before the charge was introduced. Energy use is another important issue. Much can be done to create a new energy efficient architecture. At the present time our buildings suck in huge amount of energy from somewhere else and that has to stop in a sustainable world. In London and other European cities we are now seeing new buildings with south facing solar facades which are able to provide a considerable proportion of the energy requirement of the building 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 it which is now available in Japanese. This housing project consists of 80 apartments which 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 circulation system. Another innovative development called Ladbroke Green Village is about to start construction in west London, which will be largely powered by solar panels in the summer months. London has recently announced that by year 2010 it is hoping to provide up to 25of its electricity from wind turbines, placed on the land as well as in the Thames estuary near London. Across Europe, wind power development has been very rapid in recent years. In Germany alone the equivalent of two large nuclear power stations of wind power development was created in 2003. The city of Copenhagen in Denmark already gets 25of its electricity for wind power. Another important subject regarding the development of sustainable cities is urban agriculture, which is becoming quite popular again in different parts of Europe and London is an example of that. It's not only growing local food to be consumed in cities, but also farmers' market to bring people closer to the local food supply. Urban agriculture is now expanding in many parts of the world, particularly in cities in developing countries.

-6-

-7-

Vienna I'd like to talk about another city where I was involved in the mid-1990s, in a process called the 'Vienna International Futures Conference', which went on for three years and 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, which was 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 wonderful buildings, but in the 1990s it was beginning to dawn on people that there is more to a city than the beautiful buildings that the tourists want to see. There are also hundreds of thousands of buildings where ordinary people live, and they were very inefficient in their use of fuel. The city authorities of Vienna decided to initiate a large-scale programme of insulating these buildings to an extraordinary degree. 500,000 apartments across the city have been now insulated with rockwool and other materials, and this has dramatically increased their energy efficiency. And I would say that amongst all the larger cities in Europe, Vienna has made the greatest progress with the energy efficiency of buildings. But it is also exemplary in recycling its wastes, with some 50% of household waste being recycled. Organic waste is composted and used in urban agriculture. Much of the food eaten by patients in Vienna's hospitals is grown using compost from the city's waste stream. But Vienna also had other problems, like car congestion. This was an important issue to deal with. Rapid economic growth has taken place in the cities of the western world including Vienna, but there are strong indications that the satisfaction of people with their lives has not grown in the same degree as that of the increase in Gross National Product. And one reason for this is the problem of traffic congestion. Efficient transport is needed in order to make cities not only a more sustainable, but also more livable. So one traffic analyst in Vienna, Professor Hermann Knoflacher, started to look into the city's congestion problems. So he went around with his students to assess just how much space in the city cars take up. He showed people in the city just how much their dependence on the motorcar is reducing their quality of life. Partly as a result of his initiatives and his influence, there has been a major improvement in public transport systems in Vienna. The interchange between different modes of transport, such as trains and cycling, was greatly improved. People can pick up bikes in the streets free of charge if they haven't got their own bike with them, strategic points across the city and other interesting initiatives of this sort have been taken. Vienna shows what can be done to reduce the reliance on cars, and how public
-8-

transport and cycling can be strongly encouraged. It is very important for cyclists to have dedicated cycling lanes. So we are seeing significant improvement in that part of the non-motorised transport system. Pedestrianisation is also spreading to more and more parts of the city. But looking ahead to the future, fuel cell technology, using hydrogen as a fuel, is a really important further step in the development of better and more sustainable urban transport, providing the hydrogen is produced from renewable energy sources. Of course, Toyota and Honda and Nissan in Japan are world leaders in fuel cell technology. Adelaide I would now like to move on to a third city, the last city that I want to talk about in this lecture, which is Adelaide. In 2003 I was invited by the prime minister of South Australia to be a 'thinker in residence' in Adelaide, to help the people of the city with new perspectives on sustainability. Adelaide was built in the 19th century, surrounded by a beautiful area of parkland. Metropolitan Adelaide has since developed into a large, sprawling low-density city of 1.1 million people, with extensive suburbs, and only high-rise buildings in the center. Adelaide is incredibly energy inefficient as far as transport is concerned. So the combination of heavy reliance on private transport and very badly insulated buildings has resulted in the people of Adelaide discharging about 24 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere compared with, for instance, about 9 tons for people of London.

-9-

But the primary concern in Adelaide has actually been water. Much of the city's water comes from the Murray River, which runs all the way from New South Wales to the Adelaide area. And of course water from rivers is used as tap water in bathrooms and kitchens, and for flushing toilets, and so on. So the initial concern about sustainability in 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 and tram 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 lowdensity 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 that higher 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 the major initiatives that's now underway in Adelaide.
- 10 -

Another thing that Adelaide City Council started doing was tree planting on a very substantial scale to turn the land on the edge of the city from barren, eroding and degrading land into new forest areas. This is another example of driving sustainability forward. It is of crucial importance for the people of a city to be aware of sustainability issues, to be told how recycling waste paper and timber can reduce the number of trees that have to be cut down in order to supply paper and timber materials within the city. During my nine weeks in Adelaide I wrote a report called 'Creating a sustainable Adelaide' which deals with a variety of issues I have already raised in context of London and Vienna, particularly energy efficiency, solar energy, water security, zero waste, sustainable transport, nature in the city and green business. A key aspect of the report is that active measures dealing with these issues can create a great many new jobs in the city, as well as making it more environmentally sustainable. After I left Adelaide in July 2003, the Premier's Office of South Australia created a commission to examine the proposals for sustainability contained in my report and recently published their results and a wide range of measures are now being implemented in the direction of making Adelaide much more sustainable. And these measures include the rain water collection for all new buildings because of the concern about water shortages, new energy ratings for buildings, financial support for all-solar hot water systems, and a massive expansion of the program for solar PV panels to be put on the roofs of buildings, initially public buildings for schools and then apartment buildings. The city's tree planting project is also being greatly expanded, dramatically exceeding what is already being done. Adelaide has also decided to work to reduce its ecological footprint and to create new jobs and from localizing its energy system and from recycling its waste and those types of key issues and sustainability. I found that Adelaide as many jobs from sustainability initiatives as currently exist in the city's car industry - a total of 9,000 jobs! One of the really significant beneficial effects of sustainability is localizing job creation and this has been found in many cities, particularly across Europe in countries such as Germany where today there are as many jobs in the sustainability industries as in the car industry. What I am trying to do in my work is to point out that environmental sustainability should be the starting point for other important considerations. The benefits of reducing the environmental impacts of urban life can also be felt socially, as well as economically. In our urbanizing world we need factor 4 reductions of resource use. These proposals came out of work by Ernst von Weizsaecker in Germany and Amory Lovins in America and we should make them into key components in urban policy in
- 11 -

the coming years. Perhaps the most important single aspect of creating sustainable cities in the years to come 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 at present every year we are burning a million years of fossil fuels to make our current urban lifestyles possible. The real breakthrough that has already occurred is in the field of wind power. It was the Danish government that helped to make wind power electricity cost competitive though deliberate support of this technology. The Danish government for years supported wind turbine companies and this resulted in the real breakthrough in the technology. The same is now happening with solar electricity. In cloudy 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 cost competitive, if a few governments in the world actively support the further development of solar technology. And this is happening in couple of countries, particularly in Germany. Significant government support is very important. In Germany the government introduced 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 the electricity 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 Spain and this has now resulted in a substantial increase in demand for PV cells, and also a significant decrease in the price of PV cells. Hopefully we can get lots more governments to helps cities become sustainable in resource use. I believe that sustainable urban development is one of the most important issues 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 world urbanizes more and more, we need cities to become showcases for sustainability. A start has been made, but much, much more needs to be done.
copyright(c)2004 Japan for Sustainability All Rights Reserved.

- 12 -