Transcript Eco-cities and the conventional city: opportunities and challenges Andrew Flynn Cardiff University Presentation to the China (Binhai Tianjin)  International Eco-City Forum September 2010

Eco-cities and the conventional city:
opportunities and challenges
Andrew Flynn
Cardiff University
Presentation to the
China (Binhai Tianjin)  International Eco-City Forum
September 2010
Eco-cities and resource consumption
• Eco-cities an important and innovative way of
seeking to reduce resource use
• Growing popularity
• But what difference will they make to urban
resource consumption?
– What are the numbers of eco-dwellings being built?
– How significant are these new dwellings for existing urban
areas?
• Use Ecological Footprint to compare different types
of housing development
– Example from Cardiff – a small UK city
Ecological Footprint of Cardiff’s housing
•Existing housing
Housing type
stock is responsible
for nearly all of the
Existing housing stock
Ecological Footprint
•New, more ecoefficient housing is not New houses
being built sufficiently
rapidly to change the
profile of existing
housing
•Is it best to invest in
innovative energy
efficient homes or to
retrofit existing
housing stock?
% total housing EF
98.7
1.3
Housing types and energy
consumption
Housing type
Energy consumption pattern
‘Cardiff average’
Cardiff average consumption pattern
‘2002 regulation’
Cardiff average consumption with slightly
reduced energy consumption
‘Eco-home’
Reduced consumption mainly due to
technical efficiency improvements
‘BedZED’
Clearly reduce consumption due to specific
BedZED conditions
Footprint for housing types: buildings and
energy use
Limited impacts
•Based on the local
land use plan 20012016 there is to be an
11.6% increase in
dwellings
•If all new housing in
Cardiff was built using
the BedZED standard
the EF of the total
housing stock would
reduce by 0.99%
Lessons
• Must not be distracted by
eco-city development
– The existing urban structure
makes by far the biggest
contribution to resource use
– Eco-city makes only a modest
contribution to overall
development and to any
individual city’s development
• Need to promote lesson
learning from ecodevelopments to existing
urban infrastructure
– Promote retro-fitting
– Create opportunities for
flexibility and redesign in the
city
Final thoughts
• The Housing Ecological Footprint is only a relatively
small part of the total EcologicalFootprint
• More important factors are
– Food and drink
– Domestic energy
– Travel
• How we live our lives and the buildings in which we live
our lives should be much better related
– Need to link together our homes, how we travel to and from
work, the foods we consume to produce more sustainable
lifestyles
• Living more sustainable lifestyles applies to those who
live in eco-cities and those in live in conventional city