Sustentabilidad Socio-Ambiental de la Actividad Inmobiliaria
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Sostenibilidad ambiental y sociocultural para mejorar el diseño en la arquitectura del paisaje
Sustainable development has been defined by various scholars and practitioners since its initial formal conception in 1987. Authors have written about its necessity, its principles, and the indices that aim to measure its ecological, social, and economic parameters (also known as the three pillars of sustainability or the ‘triple bottom line’). 1 There have also been theoretical and practice-based translations of sustainable development principles into the physical planning and design of urban and rural landscapes.
However, a majority of these focus on individual pillars of sustainability, with environmental aspects taking precedence. Popular initiatives such as Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) use complex environmental models to calculate levels of sustainability based on metabolic parameters of energy, water, transport, and waste. While these are imperative in leading development towards a more environmentally sustainable future, they often result in the creation of parametrically modelled global designs that are socially and culturally inappropriate when applied to local cases. Emphasizing better liveability of urban environments, how can designers combine aspects of sustainability to create solutions that are holistic and comprehensive? This chapter uses this primary question as a premise to present ideas for operationalizing sustainable development by coupling sociocultural and environmental parameters in urban settings. We challenge the alleged difficulty of incorporating social parameters into sustainable design, 2 and ask: how, as designers, can we provide sociocultural and environmental sustainability simultaneously? How can we minimize the negative externalities on social and cultural aspects of designs, especially for residential neighbourhoods, while optimizing environmental performance? How can global sustainability knowledge be transferred and adapted to the specific sociocultural needs of local communities? To explore these questions, we use the example of Emirati residential neighbourhoods in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, in the hyper-arid desert region of the Arabian Peninsula.
Home to native communities that have substantial social and cultural needs associated with the influence of Islamic Shari’a law, this case presents a unique opportunity to couple sociocultural and environmental features to develop a comprehensively sustainable urban form. To do this, we propose a starting point: deriving inspiration from traditional city forms, while understanding underlying values for spatial typologies, and the influence of evolving technologies and increasing globalization. The concept of sustainability The idea of sustainable development was popularized in 1987 by Our Common Future (the Brundtland Report). This report, formulated by the World Commission on Environment and Development, defined sustainable development as that which ‘meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. 3 This broad definition aims to reconcile the needs of communities with the biophysical goals of environmental management. It encompasses the tangible and less tangible necessities for sustaining life. The Agenda 21 report, adopted by the United Nations in 1992 at the UN Conference on Environment and Development, outlines the three spheres of sustainability: ecological, economic, and social. For any development to be sustainable, it must integrate qualities associated with the overlap of these three pillars: it must be equitable, liveable, and viable. 4 In addition, the concept of cultural sustainability became a focus of planning, policy, and design efforts following its definition by the World Commission on Culture and Development in 1995 as ‘inter and intra-generational access to cultural resources’. 5 Scholars and various global and local agencies have developed sets of indicators and indices to measure sustainability. Alberti outlines their necessity by emphasizing that ‘conventional measures of economic performance and urban quality of life are inadequate to capture the interdependence between urban society, economic development, and the environment.’ 6 While these indicators go a step further than the definitions in operationalizing the concept of sustainable development, there is still a considerable disconnect between the principles of sustainability and the actionable steps a designer can take towards creating genuinely sustainable environments. The case study: Abu Dhabi and the Gulf Cooperation Council states on the Arabian Peninsula The countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), located on the southern edge of the Arabian Gulf, are eighty per cent urbanized, and will be home to fifty-three million people by the year 2020. 7 Hyper-aridity, sandy soil, and extremely warm temperatures characterize the region. 8 Due to their high per-capita resource usage rate and annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, many of the GCC countries have recognized the need to develop sustainably, and have initiated efforts to make sustainability central to their urban agendas. The region’s urban history is brief. Spurred by the discovery of oil in the region in the mid-twentieth century, previously nomadic settlements grew into sprawling metropolises at an accelerated pace. Basado en la experiencia de varios autores, nuestras opiniones y recomendaciones se expresarán a continuación (o en otros artículos de esta revista, respecto a sus características y/o su futuro): Due to the small size of local communities, foreign labour was invited to drive growth and construction. 9 With this influx came Western planning and design influences—urban grids, superblocks, and villa typologies. 10 Villa neighbourhoods, initially developed by oil companies to house their employees, soon became the ‘ideal’ and ‘modern’ model of residential development that local communities and governments aspired to. 11 These typologies have now become ingrained in the urban diction of the region, enabled and promoted through building standards and regulations. One example is the requirement of setbacks on all sides of the residential plot, which effectively results in the creation of the detached house (villa) typology. Scholars attribute the introduction of such requirements into local regulations to Western influence. 12 The rapidity of change has resulted in the creation of dichotomies between traditional and modern, new and old, and global and local, presenting an ongoing challenge for urban development in the region. 13 It has left little scope for the natural evolution of climatically responsive and culturally appropriate vernacular typologies. As a result, urbanization here is continually tackling two main socio-environmental challenges—high carbon footprints caused by low resource capacities and high consumption rates, and the influence of globalization and large expatriate populations on the native cultural identity. Abu Dhabi is the capital, and the largest emirate of the seven that form the United Arab Emirates. It is spread over 67,340 square kilometres and has a population of 2.78 million. 14 It comprises the cities of Abu Dhabi and Al Ain, and the Western Gharbia region. Abu Dhabi’s urban development started as recently as the 1960s, when the erstwhile ruler Sheikh Zayed established policies and programmes for urban growth. It included the demolition of all existing structures and the installation of a new layout of arterial streets and superblocks on the island. 15 Since then, the city has grown rapidly, with an average annual growth rate of 9.6 per cent since 1960.
Historical data from the emirate indicates a ninety-nine-fold population increase between 1960 and 2010. 16 Currently, native Emiratis form only nineteen per cent of the population in Abu Dhabi. 17 However, the urban landscape of the city is dominated by the typical low-rise and low-density villa neighbourhoods that house this Emirati population (approximately fifty-five per cent of the land area consists of villa neighbourhoods, according to initial calculations of geographic information system spatial data). Data Source: Abu Dhabi Municipality. The impacts of climate change, exacerbated by the emission of GHG into the atmosphere, threaten to increase temperatures in the region beyond human physiological tolerance, threatening the very existence of these settlements. 18 Awareness of these factors has led to several recent government initiatives to educate consumers and promote environmentally sustainable building practices. In Abu Dhabi, the Estidama (‘sustainability’ in Arabic) programme, which includes the Pearl Rating System, tackles sustainability through the definition of best practice and minimum requirements for buildings, villas, and communities. 19 This programme, implemented in 2010, aims to create a new urban sustainability framework in the form of a tangible rating system (ranging from one to five Pearls) based on quantitative metrics.
Research has shown that by achieving a one Pearl rating, a villa will reduce energy usage by twenty per cent and water usage by thirty per cent below a baseline of good practice. 20 One of the biggest strengths of this programme is its contextual specificity for the extreme heat and humidity of a coastal desert climate.
However, in many ways the villa typology is itself ill-suited to the sociocultural needs of Emirati communities, as described later in this chapter, limiting these strategies’ impact on addressing sustainability concerns. Emirati villa neighbourhoods The relationship between citizens and government in Abu Dhabi is established on strong principles of welfare. The government is responsible for providing housing, education, and healthcare to all Emiratis. The strength of the welfare system in these states is attributed to their origins as tribal communities, in which tribal leaders were responsible for providing for their communities. 21 The Abu Dhabi Housing Authority (ADHA) provides Emiratis in Abu Dhabi with plots and low-interest loans for construction, or with ready-built homes.
Real-estate developers work with the ADHA to design and construct neighbourhoods in the city. Sites for these are selected based on the citywide ‘Plan Abu Dhabi 2030’, developed by the Abu Dhabi Urban Planning Council. 22 A typical neighbourhood consists of arterial and sub-arterial streets that define neighbourhood blocks, with a central space allotted for a community mosque, small retail, and public open space. In some neighbourhoods, narrow alleys (sikkas) create a void between adjacent plots. Streets are often planted with date palms. Blocks consist of arrays of equally dimensioned plots. They are individually allotted to Emirati families, with the provision of a low-interest loan for construction. Each parcel typically contains a detached, single-family villa unit, surrounded by boundary walls along the edges of the plot. In some cases, if adjoining plots are allotted to members of the same extended family, they are combined to form a larger complex of similar villas, with a single boundary wall along the edge of the combined plot. Alternatively, for ready-built housing neighbourhoods, a similar layout is adopted, but the design vocabulary of individual villas is kept comparably uniform. Generally, villas are extroverted, with all walls exposed to sunlight. They are also relatively large. The open land between the walls of the villa and the outer boundary walls is often vegetated—containing lush and water-intensive plants such as turf and date palms. The floor plans of the villas show clear segregation of semi-private and private spaces. The majlis, a gathering space for men, is located near the entrance to enable a separation between visitors and the private realm of the family. 23 Sociocultural aspects of Emirati neighbourhoods Traditionally, Emirati communities, which are primarily Muslim, have lived according to customs that derive from Shari’a law. 24 These principles, and the resulting cultural needs, have guided socio-spatial relationships, and shaped neighbourhood and urban form. 25 Abu-Lughod summarizes the spatial principles that constitute the ‘deep grammar’ of the Islamic city: (1) residential superblocks enclosing semi-public space, (2) the secondary circulation system of the city, with the exception of major routes to city gates, (3) neighbourly cooperation with regard to property rights and community policing, and (4) a highly fragmented system of property rights. 26 She and other scholars have emphasized the need for a trifold division of space in the Arab-Muslim city, from private to semi-private to public. This relates to the gendering of space that is prevalent in these communities, where the private home is considered the domain of the female members, while the males occupy semi-private and public areas. Contemporary neighbourhoods have often been criticized for not attributing the same level of importance to these needs. 27 The extroverted nature of the villa typology provides fenestrations on external walls, creating opportunities for outsiders to peek into the private spaces of the house. As a result, most houses have high boundary walls and keep windows screened through the use of blinds or curtains. Most villas range from one to three storeys tall. Basado en la experiencia de varios autores, nuestras opiniones y recomendaciones se expresarán a continuación (o en otros artículos de esta revista, respecto a sus características y/o su futuro): Differences in the heights of adjacent villas allow visibility into neighbouring plots, thus hindering privacy. This often results in the creation of ad hoc roof-screening mechanisms. 28 The open space between the villa and the surrounding boundary wall, being outside the private area of the home, becomes an underutilized space, only intermittently used by the children for play. Women, who are often confined to enclosed spaces inside the house, lack access to private, open areas for recreation. 29 When describing reasons for the increasing size of villas in Saudi Arabia, Bahammam mentions the duplication of rooms for male and female use.
He attributes this to the fast pace of construction and the lack of user participation in the planning and design process, resulting in families overestimating their spatial needs. Traditionally, the process of home building was incremental, with rooms being added as families grew. The standardized procedure of housing/plot allocation and construction financing has led to families building houses as large as they can afford at the time. Bahammam discusses the influence of neighbours and other social connections, and the potential impact of the idealization of various global contexts.
He also comments on the equation of the largeness of the dwelling with the public display of social status and economic prosperity. 30 Although he is writing about this in the context of Saudi Arabian cities, several of these factors apply to most cities in the region, including Abu Dhabi. Conversations with local real-estate developers confirm these observations. The need for the coupling of sociocultural and environmental sustainability Local communities in this region present a unique opportunity for the development of innovative housing design that caters to environmental specificities such as low biocapacities and high temperatures, as well as to sociocultural specificities such as the need for privacy and the gendering of spaces. To enhance liveability, these factors must be considered on an equal footing. This will allow the origination of designs that lower the carbon footprints of the houses and provide for all of the cultural customs that pertain to daily familial life. As described above, efforts are being made, through the implementation of various environmental programmes and initiatives, to reduce the resource consumption of these low-rise and low-density villa neighbourhoods.
However, the large-scale provision of housing, the cultural embeddedness of typologies imported from Western contexts in the 1960s and 1970s, and the extreme privacy of local Emirati communities create hurdles for the generation of innovative housing design. 31 A large percentage of the urban planning, design, and architecture professionals responsible for designing these neighbourhoods are expatriates. In such cases, it is essential to question not only the alignment of the built form and landscape with principles of sustainability, but also the transfer of knowledge and sensitivity to local traditions, customs, and lifestyles. This makes designing for sociocultural sustainability an even more challenging prospect, thus making academic inquiries increasingly imperative. Deriving inspiration from traditional urban form and landscape Traditional Arab-Muslim cities reflected strong socio-spatial relationships based on the cultural needs of local communities. In his book Urban Form in the Arab World, Bianca describes the influence of Islam on urban form as one that ‘has given birth to a comprehensive and integrated cultural system by totally embedding the religious practice in the daily life of the individual and the society [… and] providing a matrix of behavioral archetypes which, by necessity, generated correlated physical patterns’. 32 Islam emphasizes the family as the essential unit in the community, and neighbourliness as the backbone of the community. 33 Thus, traditional cities exhibited a strong mode of bottom-up community organization. 34 This was reflected in the cellular structure of the Arab-Muslim city, where neighbourhoods were created by the aggregation of residential units around narrow, gated, semi-public paths. 35 These settlements also showed high levels of sensitivity to the environmental context, including the limited access to natural resources and the extreme climatic conditions. The physical translations of these included: (1) courtyard houses with strictly controlled access, (2) semi-private spaces (fina’ and majlis), (3) a network of semi-private and semi-public pathways, and (4) a central community space containing a mosque and market (souq). Introverted houses accommodated privacy while allowing adequate light and ventilation from an interior courtyard. The courtyard, being a cool, shaded, open space within the private realm of the house, provided a safe recreational space for women and children.
Roof heights of adjacent houses were controlled, in the spirit of neighbourly cooperation, to minimize sightlines into neighbours’ houses. External entrances were staggered, and opened onto blank walls and secondary entryways, to protect interior spaces from the gaze of passers-by. Fenestrations on exterior walls were kept to a minimum, which provided privacy and reduced solar heat gain. Any exterior windows were screened with wooden screens (mashrabiyya) for privacy. These also helped to filter out sand particles from incoming breezes.
Housing units clustered and developed incrementally to define pathways which were often gated for protection of the neighbourhood. The widths of paths signalled their level of publicness—narrower streets meant higher levels of privacy—and semi-private streets ended in dead ends. These narrow streets also facilitated wind circulation and shade.
Houses also featured several architectural elements for passive cooling, such as wind towers and thick stone or adobe walls. 36 Concerning landscapes, Shari’a law establishes the role of humans as stewards of the earth. It emphasizes principles of sustainability and resource management, to ensure that current and future generations have access to natural resources and are respectful of them. 37 The common historical narrative of landscape design in Arab-Muslim cities has comprised the geographically sensitive design of oases and Islamic gardens. 38 Makhzoumi, writing about contemporary landscape practice in the Middle East, emphasizes the problematic translation of the Western concept of ‘landscape’ into the Arab-Muslim context. Along with Nassauer and Naveh, Makhzoumi highlights the importance of the local culture in the interpretation of landscape design. 39 These principles outline the traditional customs that are associated with historical Arab-Muslim neighbourhoods. Their vernacular spatial translations exhibit a unique combination of context-specificity and sustainability for environmental and sociocultural needs. They had several years to develop and evolve according to the needs of local communities and their climatic and geographic contexts.
However, cities such as Abu Dhabi have had much shorter development trajectories, which have also in many cases been synthetic and manufactured. 40 Some of the social and cultural conditions that were prevalent in these historic communities remain, while some have evolved with changes in lifestyle, an increased individualism that dominates community life, and technological developments such as private transport and air conditioning. 41 There is significant potential in deriving inspiration from the coupled approach to sociocultural and environmental sensitivity observed in traditional Arab-Muslim settlements. This realization has driven efforts by the Urban Planning Council in Abu Dhabi to incorporate features of the traditional neighbourhood ( fareej ), with narrow, shaded pedestrian streets (sikkas) and shaded private and semi-private courtyards. 42 Engaging the end users, the Emirati communities, especially women, will also provide insights into cultural needs that are often invisible to designers and planners.
Understanding, decoding, and inventorying the spatial vocabulary of these settlements, and the underlying environmental and sociocultural forces that shaped them, will yield an essential starting point for contemporary designers to develop housing schemes that are suited to current conditions in the region. Conclusion Cities in the GCC states, often referred to as ‘manufactured cities’, are developing at a dizzying pace. As a result of globalization, local lifestyles are evolving, creating a tension between the preservation of tradition and the adoption of global ways of living. The rapidity of development, with no long-standing urban typological history to draw from, has resulted in these cities borrowing development ideals from various global contexts, such as Singapore and Vancouver. 43 In many cases, this has resulted in the sociocultural needs of local communities getting lost in translation, in the planning and design not only of the built form but also of the landscape. The specific environmental context, when coupled with the sociocultural complexities of the population in this region, calls for extreme sensitivity in the design process and the designed architecture. For example, the unique affordances of privacy and the gendering of space exemplify the need to rethink conventional landscape practices, expanding the dichotomy of public and private landscapes to accommodate a spectrum between the two. While this chapter explores the combination of environmental and sociocultural parameters for sustainable design by using the case of Emirati neighbourhoods in Abu Dhabi, the concept applies at a global scale. Academic research and design have focused prominently on the environmental aspects of sustainability. Modelling tools such as Envi-Met, Urban Modeling Interface (UMI), Energy Plus, and BEopt are frequently used by designers and engineers to develop environmentally sustainable building and landscape solutions, and to run their cost-benefit analyses.
However, due to the relatively qualitative and intangible nature of social and cultural sustainability, local community needs often get incorporated to a much lesser degree. Masdar City in Abu Dhabi is one such example. It has been applauded for its innovative advancement of technologies to decrease resource consumption, capture energy from renewable sources, and subsequently reduce the carbon footprint of the campus.
However, it has also been sharply criticized for not catering to the social needs of residents and visitors, being over-engineered, being located far away from the urban core and amenities of Abu Dhabi city, and not providing well-designed interior spaces. 44 The primary concept outlined in this chapter is simple—that sustainable development can no longer overlook the social and cultural contexts within which it exists. This is not to discount the emphasis on the reduction of carbon footprints and GHG emissions, but to argue for an increased focus on improving liveability by designing for the nuances of daily customs that drive public and private life in cities. The ideas proposed provide mere starting points for designers to think about social and cultural factors comprehensively and relate them to environmental parameters to create resilient cities that are holistically sustainable.