5.2 Redesigning space for sustainability

As organisations review the use of space and services they provide, sustainability should be at the heart of planning. The three sustainability pillars – People/Social, Planet/Environment, and Profit/Economic – are fundamental to good use of space, meeting the needs of users and ensuring organisations can implement change.

As organisations have a commitment to reach net zero by 2050, they need to consider how this will be monitored to provide data that shows the reduction in their carbon footprint. While reducing energy consumption is perhaps one of the biggest challenges for organisations, focusing on sustainability also requires understanding your organisation, how it operates, and its culture and values.

Designing space needs to focus on integration of sustainability, and long-term prevention in your approach as a HEI. Planning needs to not just focus on physical space, but also on how the space is used, the services its users require, their inclusion and wellbeing, and the infrastructure required to operate.

Activity 16: Carbon within your buildings

Timing: 20 minutes

Watch the video in which Dr Alice Moncaster – Senior Lecturer in Sustainable Built Environment at The Open University – explains what organisations need to consider when redesigning physical space. Then read Dr Alice Moncaster’s article Climate change and the built environment [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .

Download this video clip.Video player: hyb_1_2022_sep120_buildings_reuse_of_space_alice_moncaster_compressed.mp4

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Transcript

ALICE MONCASTER:

Yeah, so I think this is really interesting. And I think certainly how the pandemic has changed how we see the space and use of buildings was really dramatic when we first went into lockdown. I think a lot of us suddenly realised that we could work from home. A lot of businesses suddenly realised that people could work from home. And suddenly, you had a huge number of empty office buildings.

Of course, that hasn't stayed completely. So I did just look up some ONS statistics. And, apparently, I think there's about 50% of people who are in the office and another 20% of people who work on site or work in transport, so they don't usually have a fixed workplace. So the rest of us, the remaining 35%, are actually still doing hybrid working or mainly working from home or entirely working from home.

So there has been some shift, but there hasn't been as much of a shift as there was right at the start of the pandemic. But I think even this small shift has meant that there's a lot of places that have empty rooms. And I notice that higher education is one of the institutions, one of the sectors, which has embraced this, if you like, the most.

So there's the use of homeworking and hybrid working in higher education is much, much more prevalent than it was before 2020, before the pandemic. So this is obviously going to have a huge impact on what we do with our estate, what we do with our buildings. So what we need to do with our empty buildings, I suppose, is the real question, if the buildings are empty.

And I think there have been a number of interesting ideas. And some of them are quite innovative understandings of how we could repurpose those buildings into, perhaps, low-cost housing, affordable housing. I think there are a lot of difficulties with doing this, and there are a lot of negative press about rabbit hutch housing, where offices have been maladapted into small housing units, and it hasn't worked very well.

But I think this is a whole new branch in which architects might become really interested. It's a real technical and social problem, which we might be able to explore more interestingly. It's certainly better than-- from a carbon emissions, greenhouse gas emissions perspective, it's better to retain your buildings and repurpose them than to demolish them and build new.

So that's a definite. It's about 50% less carbon emissions to retain a building and majorly retrofit it up to current energy efficiency standards than to demolish it. But that's not necessarily going to be the case for all buildings. Not all buildings are going to be able to be transferred into housing, and that might not be the best thing to do with them.

So other ideas are looking at supporting start-ups, innovative companies. That's something that particularly higher education is interested in because a lot of academics and students are interested in spinout companies and need an incubation space where they can get support and colleagues to work alongside them in a small, supported office incubation environment.

And another potential use, I suppose, is people who aren't actually now traveling into their own workplaces but live nearby are looking for shared workspaces because we miss the social interaction. So you might want somewhere nearby where you can go in for one day a week and just meet other people. So those are the three top ideas. But I think it's going to be quite an interesting time ahead for the built environment.

Yeah, well the OU, like a huge number of businesses and higher education institutes across the country and across Europe, indeed, has got all these buildings from the '70s, '80s, and '90s, which are very poorly insulated, baking hot in this heat, and quite uncomfortable buildings to work in. So there's actually an issue with making the buildings better even if we were staying working exactly as we were.

And so retrofit is a really important issue at the moment. We really need to retrofit all our buildings to reduce the energy use in them. We need to retrofit them to cope with increasing heat. So I know in Cambridge next week, we're predicted 37 degrees, which is something that people in the UK are just not used to coping with and our buildings are not used to coping with. So we need to retrofit our buildings.

This has really got to be a priority for the government, for all governments, I think, at the moment, both to reduce energy use and carbon emissions, but also to make buildings habitable for future environments. And with use of buildings, I think it's really interesting-- and I know the Open University is trying a few different things at the moment. I really can't say what I think most people would want to do.

I think there will be an element of hybrid working. I think the ONS survey, actually, was really interesting. It said that people have improved work-life balance, improved satisfaction through hybrid working. And it said that employers are-- sorry-- employees are also finding this. They're finding that their staff satisfaction and productivity are two main reasons that they're encouraging hybrid working, with a subsequent secondary one being reduction of overheads, so I presume reduced energy use for the higher education institute or the business for the employer.

So, yeah, I'm not quite sure, really, what we will do with our buildings, but I think it's a really interesting issue. And I think that the more people we talk to about what we could do, the more the answer will kind of unfold as we all get used to this new way of working.

End transcript

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You will note in the article that it is estimated:

‘39% of all global greenhouse gas (‘carbon’) emissions. 28% of this is due to the operational carbon from heating, lighting and cooling our existing buildings, while the substantial remainder of the 11% comes from the embodied carbon of constructing new buildings each year.’

Then browse this article, which focuses on the built environment in Wales:

Delivering on the decarbonisation agenda in the built environment in Wales

Take some time to list the factors that might need to be considered when developing a plan to reduce the carbon footprint of buildings now and for the future. What might the key challenges be for your organisation / HEI?

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