Power of urban design on climate

climate change. According to Kofi A Annan (2005) then Secretary General to the United Nations, majority of scientists agree that human activity is having a significant impact on climate. Climate change is unanimously linked to anthropogenic activities. Urban climate is man made climate-man made problem.

Mankind’s increasing levels of social sophistication and technological advancement result in a great deal of unpleasant changes within the urban socio-physical environments. However, a reciprocal relationship exists between urban climate and urban infrastructural design. This means sound urban design can moderate urban climates while the opposite is true. Climate sensitive design of urban trunk infrastructure has for long been noted as a design tool to governing urban climates.

In my previous series I have explored on the role of the business sector, residents, industry among other stakeholders in the urban climate governance framework. Critical stakeholders in this approach include structural engineers, architects, urban planners and local authorities.
Apart from the local authorities, the other group of professionals are concerned with the design aspects, while the local authorities stands in on regulating the infrastructure they receive. Local authorities therefore ought to set parameters within which they say we are not going to approve a proposal unless the developer meet green building parameters.

This implies that local planning authorities have the prerogative of setting minimum design guidelines of structures as relates green design, without which a developer cannot obtain the consent to go on with proposed developments. One way to encourage green design can be by way of incentivising it, through ground tax abetments.
The role of those in the design fraternity will now be to embrace innovation and creativity in design. I mean our urban planners; engineers and architects need to revolutionarise the way they perceive the built environment. Their task is to bring life to buildings than buildings to life. It is high time they design living buildings.

These are green buildings whose design promotes natural lighting, cooling and heating. Consequently, urban designers must strive to mitigate the impact of development on the environment in various ways.
These include, promoting environmentally friendly processes and materials and taking up the challenge to design greener buildings. Buildings should not be consumers of energy, but should produce energy for themselves. It is undisputable that beautiful cities are green cities. Trees, landscaping and flowers play an important role among the elements in urban space.

According to Gehl, trees provide shade in warm summer months, they cool and cleanse the air, define city space and help accentuate important sites.
However, in terms of design it is not an issue of integrating vegetation in skyscrapers alone, of course that’s one way, but, contemporary design is concerned with energy use, thermal footprint among other design considerations. Buildings can be designed with the environment in mind, that is, with a naturally controlled temperature ventilation system. In as much as this has a positive contribution on climate governance, it also cuts on servicing and maintenance costs.

Green design or what I call ecological design it calls for rapid and fundamental reorientation our thinking and design approach with regard to the creating of our built environment. To design in an ecologically responsive way will require a fundamentally different view of man’s relation to and his place within the natural world.

It will require a departure from the limitations of current science, political and economic contexts, which explicitly valorises human enterprise as dominant over and essentially independent of nature. Green design requires the architect to regard and understand the environment as a functioning natural system and to recognise the dependence of the built environment on it.

Ken Yeang in his typology, “The Green Skyscraper: The basis for designing sustainable intensive buildings” noted that green design means applied ecology or practical application of ecology to human intrusion into the natural environment.

The idea is that the designer’s built system and its operations have to make use of the resilience of the natural environment to absorb some of their negative impacts. It means building with minimal environmental impacts and where possible building to achieve the opposite effect, this means creating buildings with positive, reparative and productive consequences for the natural environment, while at the same time integrating the built structure with all aspects of ecological systems of the biosphere over its entire life cycle.

From a design perspective the design and construction of buildings strive to ensure energy efficiency.
It is not something to be added onto a design but is integral to the basic concept of a building. Energy efficient solutions are no more costly than solutions that are energy inefficient. Designs of this nature can give a competitive edge to commercial building owners.

Energy efficiency has to be addressed at both initial stage of overall design (determining the form, orientation and materials) and the detailed design stage (choice of fans, types of finishes and colours, design ducts and controls), and it has to be at the forefront of the minds of the designers, through both the design and construction processes. Furthermore, special fees structures are necessary for innovative design work and must be based on the design input rather than capital cost of the finished product.

Green building can create acceptable internal environments without use of sophisticated and energy intensive air-conditioning, and without compromising budgets or the aesthetics of the buildings, but through using principles of natural heating, cooling and ventilation. According to a 2002 BP Review of World Energy, buildings consume half of the world’s energy.

This should cause us to rethink about the way we design and develop our buildings with a view to reverse the trend noted by BP. However, when buildings are designed with a green thrust they use less than 10 percent of the energy of a conventional building built without consideration of greening.

These efficiencies translate directly to the bottom line even to the maintenance and servicing costs or even to tenants. Outside of being eco-efficient and better for the environment, these savings also trickle down to the tenants whose rents are on record for being 20 percent lower than those of occupants in the surrounding air-conditioned glass tower buildings.