Sharing a planet with 9 million people

In the run up to Copenhagen 09, few talk with as much of a sense of urgency or purpose as Peter Head, named by Time magazine one of the Heroes of the Environment for 2008.

The architectural engineer's passion comes from his role in Arup's attempt to create an eco city at Dongtan in China, as well as from his from his leading experience on the London Sustainable Development Commission where Head has been examining how our cultural spaces can become more sustainable. They are experiences which have left him with a deep belief that institutional change is only going to work hand-in-hand with a more profound social change.

I think it’s basically because the industrial revolution model, which is essentially the model that we use to develop societies, relies on using non-renewable resources to create products, services, infrastructure, cities... and everything else. And rather late in the day we realised that's destroying the environment, so we tried to put an environmental protection system in place around it. But of course that only partly deals with the problem. Modern culture has really fashioned itself around that paradigm. So cultures like Buddhism are in conflict with that paradigm in some ways, because Buddhism does have that sensitivity to maintaining a connection with the natural world. Sikhism has a certain amount of trouble with this cultural model too. And certainly in China the Cultural Revolution disconnected people to some extent from the roots of Confucianism and Taoism. So most places around the world have lost contact with where we came from, which was a much more sustainable way of thinking culturally. So I think there is a genuine disconnect.

How do you begin to change something as massive?

I think most of the experience says that you start with young children. Certainly if you look at what’s happened in San Francisco recently, where they’ve changed the whole waste management regime. They ran acartoon-type programme for young children and got it into being a trendy and exciting sort of area, and they use children a lot in Curitiba when the mayor there was driving change in that city – which is really wonderful actually. A lot of good things have happened there. He started with youngsters as well. And I think that the interesting thing there is that very young children tend to reflect back to their grandparents quite a lot. So you get a dynamic between grandparents and young children that then puts the squeeze back on the parents. And someone asked a question at a conference the other day, “What about Generation Y? That generation is apparently the most consuming people that have ever lived on the planet. They totally believe in consumption.” What I said is you’ve got to wait for them to have children before we get at them, because they’re not going to change until they do. But their grandparents still have connections back to the war.

You believe we need to get a new understanding of urbanism. To what extent is that about learning a new culture, as well?

Yes, it is about culture in a sense. Community empowerment and management of resources at a community level are going to be important. That creates a whole new cultural dynamic in communities. At the moment that doesn’t exist. At the moment we’re all living quite isolated lives connected to centralised systems. But actually starting to share the management of local resources takes you back to the village concept in a real sense, because it’s actually shared issues, and I think that cultural shift has been seen very positive. Wherever I’ve been in the world now, either communities are making things happen for themselves or they’re being helped to make a difference. It has a tremendously beneficial impact. It appears that that self-empowerment does lead to an acceleration of human development. There’s a sense that the two are connected – that people feel more valued and more involved and more purposeful in their lives and they’re more open to development in some ways.

Are we seeing the end of American suburban dream?

I would say so. It’s very interesting in Los Angeles. Los Angeles is probably the extreme archetype of that model. What’s happening now is that individual blocks are being reconverted into mixed use developments. They’re really popular. As soon as they build one people want to live there. I can’t say that’s the whole population wanting to live like that, but certainly there’s enough people wanting to change to drive it. I’ve been doing presentations of the retrofitting of a suburban area in the US and the reaction to it has been very positive. People are now really focussed on how that can be changed. People are genuinely realising you cannot afford to maintain that infrastructure. The lifestyle is wasteful, the amount of you have to spend at a city level and as a community level is very high, and from a community point of view it’s not very successful either. It’s happening particularly in California. The Los Angeles river has been in a concrete culvert; people are now opening it up and greening the river as a green corridor, a bit like they’ve done in Seoul.

Unless something happens very radically in cities like that they’re completely unsustainable, presumably?

They are. They are completely unsustainable. And it is quite likely that cities that are locked into high fossil fuel consumption’s economies will fall over, because oil prices are not going to continue to go down like they are at the moment. So society’s who are caught with that paradigm are going to struggle and may not survive. Places that move quickly to this new paradigm will be the ones that actually are much more sustainable economically. Al Gore did a brilliant interview with the New York Times three or four weeks agosuggesting that the next crash could be that: the economies that haven’t changed quickly enough.

Is there also a role for culture more directly to make urban space more attractive?

Yes there is. I think there is. There’s a massive design issue involved in making places that workculturally for people – that they feel ownership of, that they feel comfortable in, that people feel they can occupy in a relaxed way – and a lot of that is down to design. There’s a lot of realisation that the cultural design element of placemaking hasn’t been strong enough.

You’re involved in giant experiments into what the future is going to be, building eco cities in China. Is there a single thing you’ve learned from that experience?

One thing? [laughs] I think the single biggest thing we’ve learned – and that’s what the paper Entering the ecological age: the engineer's role is about – is that we do believe it is possible to live on the planet with 9 billion people in 2050 if we adopt the eco city principles we’ve been developing in China, and we retrofit exisiting cities. We’ve done the metrics and we believe it’s possible. But it’s very radical in terms of the design and delivery and it does require a refashioning of the delivery systems and the planning systems, and the way technical systems work together. It’s a massive change. And all of that change is really tough. Designing it is one thing. Implementing it is really hard. 

… and given that the IPCC has created this target of an 80% reduction of carbon emissions by 2050, where do you estimate we are now?

Nothing’s happened yet. There’s lots of talk. Well, it’s a bit crude to say nothing has happened, but given the scale of the global challenge it’s tiny, tiny, tiny steps that have been taken. And I think it just gets more challenging every day because the problem seems to get worse all the time and the rate of delivery is just not matching it. If you take the London Climate Change Action Plan, the dramatic drop in emissions on their graph starts just after the Olympics in about 2013. So you do wonder how we are going to get all the measures in place to make that happen. Some good things are happening but they’re not even happing at the speed to level off the rate of emissions growth yet, let alone get them dropping. Every six months that goes by the challenge becomes more difficult.

We’re going to have to get serious extremely soon?

I think so. That’s the lead up to Copenhagen. It’s going to be called “The Last Chance for the World” - that’s the title the Danish government have given it. It does seem that process of learning and education is something the whole population has to go through. And it almost feels to me that that message is not being delivered. I don’t know why. There’s a sense that it’s gone very quiet in the press recently. Partly it’s because the recession story has become so big. People aren’t going to get it unless art and culture infect every avenue of life. When people go to the theatre or a movie they should be experiencing this in my point of view.

The recession is an opportunity as well as a challenge, presumably.

Yes it is. We’ve been talking a lot about that. It has a real virtuous cycle because it means that people can actually spend less on more expensive resources as time goes by. And also you can pull in that investment money that’s looking for a guaranteed return. By actually reducing resource consumption, some of that reduction can go back to the investor as a return.

A lot of activist and environmental groups have become quite cynical about the United Nations Climate Change process after Bush’s snubbing of Kyoto. Are they wrong to be?

The biggest problem that people have identified is that the processes  but nobody has really talked about what the solution is. That was a particular criticism of Bali. I think that’s why people have become cynical. Trading seems like a way of raising taxes, rather than a way of actually solving the problem. I think it was extraordinary at Bali why there was no emphasis on developing solutions. Here at Arup that’s why we felt that Copenhagen is really important. There’s a great deal of EU investment in Eastern Europe, for example, yet that investment still isn’t largely being driven by these parameters. It’s still happening in the way that Ireland, Spain and Greece were driven – by building roads and things that drive up emissions. There’s still that disconnect. And that’s because this statement about what is the right investment to be making hasn’t yet been put on the table.And hopefully there is a way in which events around Copenhagen can help those ideas filter into society...

If artists and cultural institutions are going to be in any position to affect culture they have to be very aware of their own practice. You’re often talking about cash-strapped organisations with very little money to spare.

I agree with you there. But my thinking’s moved on a little bit. We’re now thinking that the speed with which this has got to happen has got to be on a regional scale. So it’s not down to one theatre, an opera house and a railways station struggling to change, it’s a matter of taking on a region of a city and creating a fund that transforms that whole area. What I think is probably the right way forward now is a coming together of those interests to share the opportunities to improve and deal with energy water and waste in a shared way so the cost spread and efficiency is greater. On the South Bank there’s an opportunity for that whole complex – not individual buildings. That’s where we’re thinking now.

Finally, tricky one, is there a piece of art which has ever drew you to think at this level?

[Laughs.] I was asked that the other day. It’s interesting. When I was young, about 12, I got hooked on Sibelius symphonies. I was listening to a radio programme when I was listening to another environmentalist talking about influences and she mentioned Sibelius and that connection with the natural world. That is the only thing I can pin down in my life. Because it’s quite unusual for a 12-year-old to get hooked on Sibelius. But I did. I got really passionately involved in it. Bu tit is about forests and the whole connection with human life, which of course is very strong in Scandanavia anyway. And if any region of the world has moved the most it is Scandinavia. There is that cultural root still there.  

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