Editorial – Bringing it all back home

by Melanie Thompson
Get Sust

It's great to be here working with NBS, especially as it's September. The start of the new academic year is always a good time for fresh starts and taking a new look at old problems. Even better: it's World Green Building Week – an excellent time to kick-start new ventures, but also a great opportunity for all of us to take a bit of time out to remind ourselves of exactly why sustainability of the built environment is a 'big issue'.

Our main feature, 'Climate change gets a relaunch', not only gives you a quick overview of the recent history of climate change, but also brings you bang up to date after last week's hectic round of press releases, reports and presentations. Al Gore may have needed 24 hours to tell his audience about climate change; we've managed it in 24 paragraphs!

Over the years, Get Sust has often whinged about the slow pace of improvement in the sustainability of buildings, especially homes. So we're delighted to be able to highlight RIBA's HomeWise campaign, launched last week, which pinpoints a problem that anyone who's ever tried to buy or live in a new home will be all too aware of – there just isn't enough space. This has a knock-on effect on people's health and well-being, children's ability to learn, people's performance at work, impact on the economy ... we could go on. It's unsustainable, pure and simple.

We appreciate that developers need to make the most of the land available, especially in the current housing market, but at what price to sustainability? Most new homes are not designed for the way we live NOW, never mind how we may be living in the future. There have been several notable attempts to buck this trend – BedZed and the BRE Innovation Park examples always spring to mind – but the industry's slow uptake of new design ideas, and the public's not entirely misplaced distrust of 'innovative housing', means that we're still building houses and flats whose designs were first on the drawing board ten or more years ago.

The Get Sust office is tucked around the corner from a classic example of insufficiently sustainable development – and there's a lot of it going on around the country. Houses that have plenty of rooms, but not enough 'room' for storing stuff (not just multi-media – where to keep the pots, pans and fresh veggies?); pokey gardens with insufficient solar access to dry washing; inadequate space for storing intermittently collected recycling; and with no public transport link to the nearby mainline train station, despite there being few employment opportunities within walking/cycling distance. All this makes it hard for individuals and families to 'do the right thing' even if they wanted to. So much for sustainability! It remains to be seen whether the ongoing review of Planning Regulations will help to smooth the path for more innovative sustainable development or catapult us off in a dash for quick builds and sales, regardless of the long-term impact.

What's the alternative? Older housing may be more spacious, but eco-minded renovation is costly and occupants are still feeling muddled by the options available and mistrust start-up companies offering green solutions that may not work or deliver the promised benefits, regardless of the feed-in tariff opportunities. The team at Hockerton remains hopeful that solar power, at least, will become a popular option for home renovators; though engineers have found that there's still a 'yuk' factor around water re-use.

Over the past 20 years you will no doubt have read umpteen reports of exemplar sustainable buildings from all sectors, and there remains a place for that. But there's growing evidence that constantly highlighting the massive scale of the problem, or the glamorous solutions that star designers and wealthy clients can dream up, is a massive turn off for the public. As professionals, we know that climate change is a problem that's too large to tackle with one big hit – only drip, drip will do. Come back soon, and we'll help you to make sure the drips are watering the most viable seeds of sustainability.

September 2011