Decarbonising buildings: what if nature was cities’ best chief construction?
Municipalities are exploring possibilities to implement a low-tech approach towards more space for nature. Could cities start looking like nature?
Fossil-free citiesClimate change is irreversibly damaging our environment. Adaptation, even though an essential aspect of nature, has limits – and we keep coming closer to them. Conditions on Earth have already been altered, we overshot several planet boundaries, many species are endangered, if not extinguished… Our impact on nature as humans has been terrible over the years. Is it not time now to stop wanting to become “masters and possessors of nature” and look at what nature can teach us? If we want to save the planet (and ourselves), it is urgent to change perspectives, and this starts with(in) municipalities.
From deifying technology to actually mastering it
We often hide behind the reassuring belief that a providential technology will save us: in the meantime, it is business as usual. Technology is everywhere in our daily lives, answering needs we sometimes did not even know we had. However, are all these answered needs equally ranked? How sound is a system when it entirely relies on technologies which are not infallible? As Florian Laboulais, from the Labo de l’ESS, a French think tank, puts it: “Technologies should be agile, frugal in the use of resources and energy, accessible to as many people as possible so that they do not hinder their autonomy”. The analyst identifies four key needs to be constantly covered for everyone: housing, mobility, access to everyday goods and services, producing and working. That is where the low-tech comes into the picture.
Being low-tech does not mean being anti-technology. It means changing your mindset and consciously look where technology really brings added value and where it is less useful, while considering its environmental impact. If we focus on housing, there are three main impacts: the production of waste, the spatial occupation, and the artificialisation of soils. Municipalities have started reflecting on this issue, looking at different uses of buildings through temporary occupation of spaces, or exploring Sylvain Grisot’s concept of circular urbanism. In France, six large urban areas (the metropolises of Bordeaux, Lille, Lyon, Paris, Poitiers, and Strasbourg) have decided to carry out experiments on how to further deploy a low-tech approach to tackle this issue. In Bordeaux, they are running an experiment, La Fumainerie, with 50 families who accepted to install composting toilets in their homes. Beyond reducing water consumption, the idea is also to look for partnerships to reuse faeces afterwards for local agriculture. In Paris, the Bellastock initiative stores material from demolished buildings and tries and find construction sites in a defined perimeter which could reuse some of those elements.
From innovation to regeneration
Low-tech is only in its early stages, but municipalities are already exploring different possibilities to implement this approach towards more space for nature. What if cities started looking more and more like nature?
Biomimicry is an interdisciplinary approach that uses nature as a model to address the challenges of sustainable development. In a word, biological models are transposed for innovation serving a sustainable transition. CEEBIOS, a French research centre and network in biomimicry, goes even further: each biomimicry project needs to be regenerative, creating a positive impact on nature and society. And there are already some good examples, in Europe and beyond! Architects get inspired by termites’ mounds for thermal inertia and regulation, flower opening and closing according to the sun and the heat, algae regulating light and producing energy… Nature is very resourceful!
However, there is still a main obstacle to the acceleration of biomimicry concepts in municipalities: being an interdisciplinary approach, biomimicry implies the involvement of many stakeholders. Architects, environmental professionals, biologists – a great variety of actors who do not necessarily speak the same language. To overcome this problem, projects are increasingly using the services of facilitators to improve the collaboration between each team, and some architectural schools start offering biomimicry programmes.
Local governments can kick in to foster this multistakeholder approach to transform all projects into regenerative ones. Within the calls for proposals, local governments should already set the goal so that it is considered at the very start of the works. Remains the question of costs. Since this is a very recent approach, there is no consolidated data available. Eduardo Blanco, from CEEBIOS, recognises that there is usually extra cost since you have to add at least one facilitator to the team to favour exchanges between stakeholders. However, when looking at the whole lifecycle, biomimicry implies less consumption of materials and energy, which could be a way to balance the investment.
Provided that the right support schemes are put in place, municipalities can be accelerators to urban spaces’ regeneration, considering housing in a more nature-friendly and nature-inspired approach. In this fight against climate change, coming back to a more local approach echoes the need for more nature. It is time to let nature back into our cities and see how it can support municipalities in achieving a sustainable transition.
