Page 104 - IJES Special Issues for AIEC2016

4 © Lehmann 2016 | Advocacy for the Compact
become ever more resource-intensive. The
urbanisation process, constantly regenerated,
dramatically affects all energy, water and
material consumption. For these reasons, the
urban perimeter block as housing type has
many advantages: apartments share a circu-
lation system, construction and wall spaces, and According to many experts, the impact of
one can get easily good thermal performance
and save construction materials by building
blocks 3 to 10 storeys high. My research over
the last decade has shown that energy use can
drop by up to 30 per cent if people move from
free-standing suburban houses to inner-city
apartments in perimeter blocks (Lehmann
2010).
Cities are the single largest contributor to
climate change. In the last century, the avail-
ability of cheap fossil fuels has been a driving the ecosystems within their borders can
force for rapid urbanization and the shaping of
urban form. It has also enabled the increase of
urban footprints and the development of car-
dependent suburbs. Today we recognize that, in
order to deal with the new set of challenges, a
shift in scale and ambition is necessary, from
individual-building scale to entire urban pre-
cincts and neighbourhoods, with a renewed
focus on public space. Thus, the challenges vary can provide, but even the reserves of ‘ecological
from region to region: in Europe, the
development task is less about building new,
but rather about improving and upgrading the
existing urban fabric. European cities have been able to provide and how much our infra-
built and their form is deeply rooted in a past
that often freezes it in time and place.
On the other hand, in the US, Canada and
Australia, the issue is to overcome car
dependency and the legacy of sprawl (Hall and
Tewdwr-Jones 2009). The situation is quite
different again in the Asia-Pacific and Middle-
East regions, where building entire new cities
from scratch is an option. For instance, with
China’s rapid urbanisation process, we find new
concepts of city emerging, allowing for radical
new thinking about urban precincts and
architectural group forms and advocating for an
end to context as the all-determining factor.
Here, the future is not about what buildings
look like, but how groups of buildings support
the public realm, perform and interact, and how
they connect with each other to balance their
operational needs (for instance, the energy
Science Target Inc. www.sciencetarget.com
needs, waste water and surplus heat generated
by buildings).
Mega Trends Shaping Our Urban Futures:
New City Typologies Emerging
humanity on the earth is already overshooting
the earth’s capacity to supply humanity’s needs
− exceeding the carrying capacity − which is an
unsustainable position (Rees 2006). As the
Global Footprint Network (2013) points out,
humanity is now using ecological resources and
services at a rate it would take over 1.5 Earths
to renew. We are on track to require the
resources of two Earths well before 2050.
Today, more than 80 per cent of the world’s
population lives in countries that use more than
provide and renew. These ‘ecological debtor’
countries either deplete their own ecological
resources or get them from elsewhere. For
instance, Japan’s residents consume the
ecological resources of 7.1 Japans; it takes 4
Italys to support Italy, while Egypt uses the
ecological resources of 2.4 Egypts. Not all
countries demand more than their ecosystems
creditors’ like Brazil, Indonesia and Sweden are
shrinking over time. We can no longer sustain a
widening gap between what the environment is
structure, economies and lifestyles require. The
need to move to low carbon climate-resilient
city planning is obvious.
In 2007 and 2013, the pivotal IPCC reports
pointed out that human-induced greenhouse
gas emissions are mainly a result of burning
fossil fuels and land-use changes, but that there
are also a range of other indicators impacting
on emission levels (for instance, the link with
population and economic growth, consumption,
energy and water usage, industrial production,
waste management, food supply, land-use plan-
ning, transport patterns and policy decisions,
which are all critical). In the last 20 years
progress in the area of international climate
policy has been modest at best. Annual green-
house gas emissions have increased by over one
third since 1992 and keep rising. Acute conflicts
of interest among industrialized, emerging and