This is the first in a series of posts inspired by the book
“Sustainable Infrastructure: Principles into Practice”, written by Charles
Ainger and Richard Fenner from the Centre for Sustainable Development at the
Cambridge University Engineering Department. My fourth year MEng project involved conducting research to develop improved ceramic water filters for use in
developing countries working with the Centre for Sustainable
Development, so I feel a personal connection with the authors as well as the
subject matter.
The question I want to address is this: how do we get the step
change in the infrastructure we need to build and maintain to avoid locking ourselves
into high-carbon, environmentally damaging solutions for the next 50 years?
The
ICE is committed to having a public voice about the infrastructure we need and
influence decision-makers to make the difficult decisions required, because business-as-usual is not adequate for today's needs and severely limits future users as well. Importantly, we also need the public to engage in
debate about the best means to fund and deliver the services we all need,
because without users being involved we will not see deep and lasting change.
How do we make the shift?
We need to start by defining the problem. Sustainable
Infrastructure defines four key principles which inform the design of sustainable
infrastructure. I'll be developing these four principles over the course of the next few posts to draw out the key issues and "putting it into practice" develops how to turn good principles into operational best practices and rules of thumb we can use within our designs. Follow the links to find out more!
We live on a finite planet which means we need to live within the planet's boundaries, for example the amount of land available to grow food, fresh water, concentrations of chemical pollutants, air we can breathe and greenhouse gases destabilising the climate.
As an engineer, I design foundations so that the loads applied to the ground don't exceed the soil's bearing capacity with a reasonable factor of safety to prevent failure (this accounts for uncertainties and the potential for accidental overloads). We need to apply the same principle to ensure we stay within planetary limits.
The purpose of building
infrastructure is to provide the necessary goods and services for a certain
quality of life. This is all the more necessary in a world where one third of people have no safe sanitation and many people struggle due to poor transport connections and access to healthcare.
3. Intergenerational stewardship
- Why "Doing It for the Kids" is not good enough
- Putting it into Practice: Thinking Long Term on the Harrogate Line
We need to ensure that what we build now is fit for the future. This includes the need to plan for the long term and consider all phases of the life cycle, including whole-life costing and resource usage. For example, most buildings use far more energy during their operational life than during construction, and the structure’s use may change over time.
4. Dealing with complex systems
The natural world and the people who live in it create deeply non-linear systems, so it’s not like a simple engineering equation where input X always produces output Y. People rarely behave in the way you expect them to, which means that when you think you’ve solved one problem, three others problems pop up which you may not have even anticipated. This means it’s not good enough for engineers to focus solely on the technical aspects of our work: we must investigate and understand the consequences in order to find the best solution (which may not be the most elegant from an engineering perspective).
The natural world and the people who live in it create deeply non-linear systems, so it’s not like a simple engineering equation where input X always produces output Y. People rarely behave in the way you expect them to, which means that when you think you’ve solved one problem, three others problems pop up which you may not have even anticipated. This means it’s not good enough for engineers to focus solely on the technical aspects of our work: we must investigate and understand the consequences in order to find the best solution (which may not be the most elegant from an engineering perspective).
References:
1.
Sustainable Infrastructure: Principles into
Practice, Charles Ainger and Richard Fenner, ICE Publishing, 2014See also:
No comments:
Post a Comment