The Long Way to Sustainable Housing Areas

In the late 1980s the Brundtland report (WCED, 1987) introduced the concept of `sustainable development', which was enthusiastically embraced by many countries including the Netherlands. Indeed, the Dutch government gave sustainability a central place in its influential National Environmental Policy Plan (Ministry of Housing, 1989). Environmental problems are caused not only by the construction process itself, but by all aspects of space usage. Developing sites, constructing buildings, altering them, and eventually demolishing them can seriously harm the quality of the environment. The use of the built environment involves many flows, such as those of energy, materials, and water. To give the reader some sense of the contribution made by the built environment to the total environmental problems in the Netherlands, we present some figures relating to these flows within the housing sector. The housing sector accounts for 18% of the total energy consumption in the Netherlands (Ministry of Housing, 1997). Housebuilding uses a great deal of material (Blaauw, 2001; Klunder, 2000), which is evident from its major contribution to the waste problem. Of the total waste flow in the Netherlands 19%, some 3110 000 tonnes a year, comes from housebuilding activities (Priemus, 2002). In 1998 a household used an average of 320 litres of water a day (Novem and Boom, 2000), half of which came from groundwater springs. This is not all. The development of housing sites claims a substantial amount of the already scarce space in the Netherlands, in many cases harming valuable scenic elements. Housing sites also generate traffic flows, which are an environmental hazard. This warrants the conclusion that spatial planning and building are major causes of environmental problems and that making the use of space and building more sustainable could contribute substantially to sustainability in general. These considerations, together with the great appeal engendered by the concept of `sustainability', caused it to be embraced by many politicians. Moreover, many marketing people discovered that `sustainable' was a very effective sales slogan. The construction industry requiredöand still requiresöa term which would reassure both the government and the consumer. In many countries, including the Netherlands, the term `sustainable construction' was introduced as an indication of good intentions. Now, several years later, it is time to review the situation. In this theme issue we do so with particular regard to Dutch practice and with the emphasis on housing environments. However, it seems likely that the findings will apply equally to the construction of offices, industrial premises, schools, and shopping centres. A recent thesis (Van den Dobbelsteen, 2004) concludes that office construction is no more environmentally friendly today than it was several decades ago. Indeed, in these well-insulated buildings, the use of air-conditioning systems during the warm summer months obviates any overall environmental improvement. (It is interesting to note that the Californian energy crisis of a few years ago did not occur in the depths of winter, but during the hot summer.) In recent years the environmental performance of residential buildings has remained under pressure because of a number of autonomous developments. Since the early 1990s there has been a marked shift in the nature of new-build production, with the smaller, austere properties intended for rental giving way to larger, Guest editorial Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 2005, volume 32, pages 1 ^ 3