The Eco-City

Some reflections on doing an 'eco-retrofit' of New Zealand cities to make them more resilient, and hence better able to withstand short emergencies, and also the long emergency of water, food, oil and climate crises, which will all intensify in the twenty-first century.

(Re) Building an Eco-Resilient City

What is eco-resilience?

Resilience means being able to adapt quickly and take appropriate action to enhance survival even when conditions change radically. On a city-wide scale it means having a variety of easily- accessible sources of essentials like water and food, distributed rather than centralised networks for supplying essential services, well-connected communities, and a city-wide capacity for household and community self-reliance when needed. To enhance resilience in acute emergencies there should also be back-ups to the back-ups – Plans B and C as well as Plan A.

Eco means ecologically healthy and sustainable.

Eco-resilience means being able to adapt, act and survive in ecologically healthy and sustainable ways. (Is there any other way in which it is worth surviving? )

The physical essentials of eco-resilience

The physical essentials to sustain human life are clean water, food, energy (for warmth and cooking), and shelter. Most people living in New Zealand cities, including Christchurch, are now almost entirely dependent on energy-intensive, large-scale, complex systems for delivering water, food, and energy, and also for removing organic and other wastes. These are especially vulnerable to breakdown during a natural disaster such as an earthquake or an extreme storm. They are also becoming increasingly problematic in a world where the climate is changing, oil supplies have peaked and oil prices are increasing, fresh water is being depleted at unsustainable rates, and the large-scale, oil-dependent food production and distribution systems developed in the last half-century are starting to break down.

Although it has been known for more than thirty years that we are facing this 'long emergency', and numerous books, articles, films and latterly websites have been/are devoted to the subject, and also to how we might – as cities and whole countries – adapt to this huge challenge in a resilient way, successive governments at national level (and most councils at city level) in New Zealand have continued to act as though Plan A (business as usual) will suffice to secure our future.

An acute short emergency like the February earthquake in Christchurch has exposed many of the weaknesses in having only Plan A in the short-term. This emergency has also provided provocative indicators of where we should be setting priorities for Plan B, which will serve us better in short and long emergencies.

The non-resilient city

In the relentless pursuit of economic growth at local and national level most elected representatives, and many citizens, seem to have forgotten that you can't drink, eat or wear money, grow food on it, build houses on it, use it for cooking, or shelter underneath it. The uselessness of having money when it comes to providing any of these things in a natural disaster was very apparent in Christchurch in February. All the supermarkets within a ten kilometre radius of the earthquake epicentre were so badly damaged that none of them re-opened in less than a week, and some are still closed. All-electric houses had no power for cooking and water-heating for hours, days, weeks or even a month. Tens of thousands of houses had no safe water supply, or sewage disposal, for over a week, and thousands were still without it a month later. Life was desperately uncomfortable and inconvenient at best, and unsafe at worst, for thousands of people.

Survival arrangements were very makeshift, and disturbingly relied on long-distance supply chains that could be accessed quickly. For example, within a few days almost everyone had access to a portaloo in the the street (hundreds extra were flown in from the USA) and to a community water tank (many had to be supplied from out-of-town). Various organisations already in the business of feeding large numbers (the Salvation Army, the NZ Army and Navy, Maori groups) began to supply cooked meals to those without power. In the case of the military the food supplies were sourced from far away (and drew down on existing civilian supply). Even with these great efforts, there were many examples of already vulnerable people (the elderly, the ill, the very poor) going without water, food and safe sanitation for dangerously long periods.

Some of these problems were due to the neglect of building community capacity for caring for the most vulnerable, and these need to be addressed after examining the connections between eco-resilience and social resilience. However many of them were an artefact of poor urban design, which for the past fifty years has been based on expanding the Plan A scenario. This scenario assumes that food will always be shipped in to the nearest port and then trucked to large supermarkets, that citizens will always have cars (and usable roads and affordable petrol) to collect that food, that private houses should be large and sections small, that public open spaces should be reserved exclusively for sports and strolling, that piped water and sewage systems can continue expanding indefinitely, and that heavy trucks and huge landfills or incinerators are the best way to dispose of solid waste.

All these assumptions were tested during the February emergency in Christchurch, and found to be problematic in the short-term. They are equally problematic for the long term, as oil supplies dwindle and prices rise, and water and power supplies come to be seen as the precious resources they really are.

An eco-resilient retrofit for Christchurch

The sad thing about the discomfort and inconvenience that many people in Christchurch suffered during the February emergency was that a lot of it was unnecessary, and could have been avoided if city politicians and planners had started putting Plan B for the long emergency in place at least ten years ago, when it became glaringly obvious (to all but those that will not see) that it was on the way.

However, it is not too late to start on it now, and the sooner the better. When the next big civil emergency lasting more than a week hits New Zealand we may well no longer have the cheap oil luxury of being able to fly in portaloos from America and chemical toilets from China at a day's notice, let alone receive other energy-intensive forms of aid. That won't matter a bit if we have done an eco-retrofit of all our cities, so that we have back-up systems for supplying safe water, food, energy to cook with, safe waste disposal systems, and temporary shelter and washing systems. We can also enjoy more comfortable (and economical) lives right now if we start retrofitting right away.

Some of the back-up systems we could make good use of now (e.g. rainwater harvesting, solar water heating, grey water systems, solar capture and release building design) should be made mandatory for all new buildings (domestic, public and commercial) and there should be a programme for retro-fitting existing buildings. There are already attractive examples of such buildings in Christchurch, such as the award-winning City South library, which was back in business within a week of being quaked up. Such buildings save money and natural resources now and for the future, while being more comfortable to live and work in than Plan A designs. They are also the best kind of building for a short emergency.

The City South library uses harvested rainwater for flushing its toilets, which is much better than wasting drinking water, but is still vulnerable to sewage pipes malfunctioning somewhere else. Free-standing composting toilets don't have this problem, and the Christchurch City Council already provides and maintains such toilets in places where connection to pipes is difficult to impossible (such as the small beachfront reserves at Charteris Bay, Diamond Harbour and Port Levy). If such toilets were provided for every public park or other open space in the city, they would not only take a load off the existing sewage system (and provide free fertiliser for the trees and shrubs in the park), they would also be a valuable alternative in a short emergency. Relaxing the current restrictions of composting toilets in homes and other buildings (perhaps in conjunction with developing an approved standard and/or particular designs) would also make for a cleaner, safer city (and waterways) at all times, but especially in emergencies.

Fresh water is piped into homes because this is the safest as well as the most convenient way to deliver it, but when the energy to pump it is cut, or it is contaminated by malfunctioning sewage systems, what is Plan B? Home rainwater harvesting is one option, and should be encouraged to save water now in any case. Small back-up water tanks (100 litres) in all homes is another option, and one which might be preferred by those who don't have a use for rainwater in between emergencies. Making one or the other mandatory in new homes, and encouraging them in retrofits, would be a good policy to pursue. So would retrofitting exisiting public wells so that they are easily turned into a safe water supply in emergencies.

This policy would work very well in Christchurch, which is floating on a basin of water (hence the big problem with liquefaction when the earthquakes struck). During the recent emergency most of the residents of east and south Christchurch were within walking distance of safe drinking water coming straight out of the ground, and nowhere near sewage pipes. The drinking fountains in public parks were originally connected to their own wells or springs, and most of them still are. If there were alternative well-heads which could be used in emergencies there would be no need to truck in huge tanks of water, and try and find suitable places to put them.

The well water could also be used for watering community or allotment gardens in every public park. Christchurch City Council currently puts such big hurdles in the way of this happening that its

community gardens policy might as well be called a 'community gardens discouragement' policy.

This is foolish for two reasons. At the level of surviving both short and long emergencies, we need to increase the variety and quality of food sources close to home. The more gardens the better, and if there is not enough private land available for city food gardens then using public land is good public policy. The city has shown it can do it in the past – in the 'long emergency' of World War Two most of the two hectares of Abberley Park in St Albans was given over to the Women's Land Army to grow food for the people of Christchurch. Imagine if every park in Christchurch over two hectares used just one-tenth of that land for food gardening. Everyone living locally would have a chance to grow or buy affordable fresh food, and there would be no delivery issues in an emergency. Parks with gardeners present at any time would also be safer from vandalism than sports parks which are deserted most days of the week, and more importantly (the second reason why it is foolish to discourage gardening on public land) community-owned and run gardens are great at building connections between families living locally, in a way which sports codes can never hope to achieve.

One of the ways they do it is by hosting community events such as harvest festivals and community dinners. If there are open air cooking facilities provided near the garden, so much the better for the community at these events – and in an emergency when power to homes is cut. At present cooking facilities are only provided in a few very large parks, well away from sports fields. Retrofitting public parks with a community well-head, garden, cooking facilities and composting toilets would be very inexpensive compared to trying to make all private buildings and households emergency-proof, and would have the added benefit of enhancing community cohesion and capacity in the medium term, making each community more resilient in an emergency.

There are a few more other things that could be done to improve urban eco-resilience without costing much money or using much energy, which are itemised in the checklist below. They cost no more in the short term than carrying on with Plan A (and may even cost less), and in the long term they are much better value for money. They don't require more expertise or resources than we currently have now, or are ever likely to get. They simply require that we keep focused on the goal, which is the provision of the essentials of life, in sufficent quantity and of sufficient quality to all, by the most ecologically-sustainable and economical means.

In the past thirty years New Zealand has lost sight of that goal, as successive governments have put in place a series of policies and programmes which have diminished and degraded our natural resource base, and diminished and degraded social equity and capacity. But the Canterbury earthquake shows that New Zealanders haven't lost sight of the goal, as they pulled out all stops to make sure that their fellow citizens had the essentials of life restored as quickly as possible, and lots of loving care and attention as well. If we can re-align what people naturally want to do for and with each other with the capacity of local and national government to use public resources to enhance the public good, then the trauma of the February earthquake will have had at least one good result.

A checklist of eco-resilience essentials

Fresh water resilience

Current city system – piped water pumped from centralised sources.

Short emergency downsides - vulnerable to rupture of pipes and reservoirs , pollution or siltation of pipes, loss of energy sources for pumping and/or loss of pumping sites.

Long emergency downsides – in most reticulated water systems, no conservation messages or incentives (except price, which can be inequitable).

Eco-Resilient Water Alternatives

• on/under house rain water collection
• back-up home water tanks
• community wells within walking distance (in local parks and reserves)

Waste resilience

(grey water, human wastes, other wastes)

Current city system – pipe away grey water and human wastes; truck away solid wastes.

Short emergency downsides - vulnerable to rupture of pipes and lack of energy for pumping; or lack of energy, vehicles, roads for trucks to operate.

Long emergency downsides – waste of potable water to flush away human wastes and water plants; loss of nutrients from human and other organic wastes to the land and resulting over-fertilisation and chemical contamination of the sea and rivers, and/or concentration of pollution in dump sites; too much energy required to pump and filter waste water; no incentives to reduce waste; huge heavy transport and disposal infrastructure needed for solid wastes.

Eco-Resilient Waste Alternatives

• home composting of organic wastes
• home composting of human wastes
• all public toilets in open spaces converted to composting toilets
• community garden composting of organic wastes
• re-use/recycling facilities in every community
• zero-waste policies
• use of grey water for other purposes on site (e.g. garden watering)

Food resilience

(fresh food, basic foods)

Current system – most people source fresh and all other basic foods from supermarkets.

Short emergency downsides – supermarket buildings (and staff) are also vulnerable to earthquakes, floods, etc.; essential stock quickly runs out; re-stocking may be disrupted by the emergency event, and will usually have to come from a long way away in any case; private motor vehicles are usually used for supermarket shopping and petrol may be in short supply/unavailable.

Long emergency downsides – most 'fresh' food in supermarkets is already transported long distances, at great eco-cost; the bulk of a supermarket's food stock consists of non-essential, not very nutritious processed foods

Eco-Resilient Food Alternatives

• home gardens
• community/allotment gardens and orchards
• small neighbourhood grocers, greengrocers, butchers, etc. selling basic foods
• food co-operatives
• farmers' markets

Domestic energy resilience

(home heating, water heating, cooking, lighting, home appliance operation)

Current system – mainly reticulated electricity, coming long distances and distributed from large sub-stations.

Short emergency downsides – vulnerable to disruption/destruction of pylons and sub-stations by earthquakes, big storms, floods and heavy snowfalls; fallen lines can be directly dangerous.

Long emergency downsides – mainly significant if the electricity is generated by burning fossil fuels and hence contributing to climate change, or from nuclear generation (which can also create extreme dangers in the short-term), although rivers that can (or should) be dammed for hydro power are also a limited resource to be carefully husbanded.

Eco-Resilient Energy Alternatives

• domestic solar and wind power generation
• domestic solar water heating
• community wind power generation
• wind-up and solar-powered appliances and lighting sources
• well-insulated buildings
• solar capture (and release) building designs