Simon Guy

Reinterpreting Sustainable Architecture: The Place of Technology

Abstract This paper examines the relationships between diverse technical design strategies and competing conceptions of ecological place making. It highlights the conceptual challenges involved in defining what we mean by calling a building “green” and outlines a social constructivist perspective on the development of sustainable architecture. The paper identifies six alternative logics of ecological design which have their roots in competing conceptions of environmentalism, and explores the ways in which each logic prefigures technological strategies and alternative visions of sustainable places. Finally, the paper discusses the implications of the contested nature of ecological design for architectural education, practice, and research.

Designing Urban Knowledge: Competing Perspectives on Energy and Buildings

The author engages with debates about buildings, energy efficiency, and the innovation process—issues that are of great significance for urban sustainability because buildings are such an important constituent of urban energy consumption. Within this context, the author explores what it might mean to develop an interdisciplinary understanding of technical change. Questioning conventional accounts, he develops a sociotechnical perspective on competing energy knowledges and contexts of design, development, and consumption. It is argued that energy research and policy-making for the built environment is underpinned by a common understanding of technical change, which fails to take account of the contextual nature of energy-related choice. Describing cultural, organisational, and commercial factors shaping technological innovation, the author explores how more-or-less energy-efficient choices influencing urban development are made in response to changing opportunities and practices which sometimes favor energy efficiency, sometimes not. The author draws upon sociological accounts of technical change and illustrates both a sociotechnical perspective on energy and buildings and a key role for sociologists in the field of architecture, energy, and environmental studies.

STS and the City Politics and Practices of Hope

Many recent studies on network technologies and cities share an alarmist view of the impact of technological or regulatory change in utility sectors on the social and spatial fabric of cities, pointing to growing discrimination and inequalities, alienation, enhanced social exclusion and urban “splintering” on a universal scale. A science and technology study (STS) perspective on these matters is helpful in moving beyond this “universal alarmism” by emphasizing the ambivalence inherent to all technologies, the significant potential of contestation of, and resistance, to technology-supported forms of discrimination, and the deeply contingent nature of the process of appropriation of new technologies and, as a consequence, of the social “effects” of technologies. Adopting this perspective would mean actively searching for and exploring these context-dependent and often conflictive appropriation processes. For it is in these spaces that we might begin to identify urban technological politics that break free from an intellectually and politically disabling technological pessimism.

Pathways of smart metering development: shaping environmental innovation

Utility meters are being transformed from simple measurement devices to complex socio-technical systems, enhanced by the addition of new informational and communication capacities. In this paper, we examine how there are multiple opportunities for the development of environmental applications within smarter metering systems. These include improving the efficiency of generation and distribution networks by more imaginative and customer-specific load and tariff control packages or providing customers with cost and environmental messages through user displays. The take-up of these potentials is strongly framed by the competing commercial priorities established by privatisation and liberalisation. Identifying four distinct metering technical development pathways (TDPs), the paper shows how the insertion of environmental functionalities into different smart meters is only partly a technological issue. Each TDP is designed to structure relations between users and the utilities. Different types of environmental opportunities exist within each TDP, but these potentials are often squeezed out by competing priorities. Implementing these environmental applications would require a powerful shift in regulatory and institutional frameworks within which utilities and manufacturers configure the functionalities of smart meters. It is only in this way that the flexible approach needed to recognise and reinstate environmental objectives into the development of smart meters could be realised and maintained.

The rise of the eco-preneur and the messy world of environmental innovation

Abstract Media and academic debates about the environment have increasingly made reference to the so-called ‘eco-preneur’ (‘green entrepreneur’ or ‘environmental entrepreneur’). These discussions encourage us to see the potential of such figures to act as drivers of environmental innovation. Their combination of entrepreneurial zeal and green motivations is seen as providing them with the ability to transcend the usual tensions between business and the environment. In academic circles a new literature is beginning to emerge around this perspective, ‘eco-preneurship’. In this paper we investigate the usefulness of eco-preneurship for understanding environmental innovation. In particular we ask where this literature, supported by popular images in the media, fixes our gaze when we think about environmental innovation in society. And, crucially, what might we be missing by concentrating our attention on these eco-preneurs? The paper concludes by suggesting that environmental innovation is better understood as an inherently messy and complex institutional process, which cannot be reduced to the psychology of entrepreneurial personalities.

Re-interpreting Regulations: Architects as Intermediaries for Low-carbon Buildings

Regulations are highly influential in shaping urban places and architectural form. This paper investigates the impact of changing regulation on the working practices of architects. First, it outlines how the building regulations have grown in scope and complexity, especially with regard to energy regulations. Secondly, the relationship of regulation and design is explored, showing a shift from a dialectic of constraint and autonomy to one of interpretation of pathways. This is partly linked to performance-based regulation and weak state enforcement. Thirdly, the response of architects to this emerging mode of design is identified. The division of labour in the design process changes, with the architect focusing increasingly on intermediation. Finally, opportunities and threats to architects and their role are examined.

Transforming Urban Infrastructure Provision: The Emerging logic of Demand Side Management

Abstract The provision of electricity, water and transportation forms a vital underpinning to urban development. Despite this importance, the mode by which infrastructure services are provided has been largely taken for granted and has attracted relatively little interest from urban studies and policy‐ making communities. This paper, based on the results of an 18 month ESRC Global Environmental Change programme project, reconnects urban policy to infrastructure management by highlighting how the adoption of supply‐led or more demand‐responsive modes of infrastructure provision critically shapes the intensity, and so the relative environmental impact, of networked services in contemporary cities. The paper highlights how DSM initiatives create a ‘new context’ within which infrastructure providers and users form a shared interest in the tailoring of supply and demand providing a powerful impetus to energy and water efficiency measures and more integrated transport packages. The paper argues that local polic...

Sustainable Architecture and the Pluralist Imagination

Abstract In our review of the literature concerning sustainable architecture, we find a remarkably diverse constellation of ideas that defy simple categorization. But rather than lament the apparent inability to standardize a singular approach to degraded environmental and social conditions, we celebrate pluralism as a means to contest technological and scientific certainty. At the same time, we reject epistemological and moral relativism. These twin points of departure lead us to propose a research agenda for an architecture of reflective engagement that is sympathetic to the pragmatist tradition.

Infrastructure Provision, Development Processes and the Co-production of Environmental Value

This paper argues that the current debate about developer contributions in relation to infrastructure networks is blinding us to radical shifts emerging in the relationship between infrastructure providers and developers. Moreover, we suggest that conventional planning discourse about infrastructure charges, standardised service fees and impact assessment could actually hamper the emergence of this new logic. The paper illustrates how a new logic of network provision is subtly, yet profoundly, shifting the context within which the bargaining process unfolds by highlighting the proactive role of infrastructure providers in shaping the location, form and specification of three new developments. We argue that if debate is not extended to take account of these new infrastructure practices then planners will miss a significant new opportunity for promoting new communities of interest between actors who have conventionally been seen as adversarial and thereby encouraging environmentally sensitive development activity that may provide wider community benefits.

Disconnected policy: The shaping of local energy management

Around half of all the CO2 emissions relate to the energy consumed in buildings. Management of energy demand is, therefore, a central concern of environmental policymakers. But how does local environmental policy actually shape local energy-management practices? Rather than analysing how the intensity of energy flows are shaped by institutions and regulatory forces, makers of local environmental policy have tended to adopt a ‘rational’ modelling approach, increasingly divorced from the operational realities of the restructured energy sector. Such an approach misses the way in which privatised utility companies are now reaching ‘beyond the meter’ in order to manage local energy consumption actively. In this way privatised utilities are emerging as important regulators of energy flows in the territories they serve. Local environmental policy is largely bypassed in this process. Policymakers therefore need to acknowledge the role of regional energy companies as key energy managers and to coordinate local energy policy accordingly.