Beg, Borrow and Share: Leveraging Surplus Capacity

In an effort to create cities for the future - cities that will work for a new era of inhabitants - we can no longer employ the same prescription. A box store here, a school there, a library over there, all connected by automobile-centric roads just isn't going to cut it. These days, a growing number of people are learning to better utilize the surplus capacity present in machines, objects and even our fellow neighbors. Our cities should serve as an ideal training ground for this new wave of innovation that is bringing cost-sharing and lowered environmental impact to the needs of everyday life.

"Surplus capacity" is the difference between the maximum amount of time a machine can be used and the actual amount it is being used. Many machines or products in our lives are severely underutilized, and therefore possess a high amount of surplus capacity. We should be creative about how we can use more of this capacity, thereby reducing costs for individual households and lowering our environmental impact both at the source and at the landfill.

Consider, for a moment, your power drill. How often do you use it? According to Alex Steffen, "The average home power drill is used somewhere between six and 20 minutes in its entire lifetime depending on who you ask. And so what we do is we buy these drills that have a potential capacity of thousands of hours of drill time, use them once or twice to put a hole in the wall and let them sit. Our cities, I would put to you, are stockpiles of these surplus capacities. And while we could try and figure out new ways to use those capacities -- such as cooking or making ice sculptures or even a mafia hit -- what we probably will find is that, in fact, turning those products into services that we have access to when we want them, is a far smarter way to go." View "The Shareable Future of Cities," Alex Steffen's TED talk, here.

The solution to lowering surplus capacity in products we don't use very often, as well as keep a little more of our money in the bank rather than on our shelves, is to engage in collaborative consumption. Collaborative consumption operates on the premise that individuals or households can rent or borrow machines when they need them, rather than purchasing them new. CollaborativeConsumption.com documents the many ways we can share, barter, lend, trade, rent, gift and swap.

Rachel Botsman, co-author of "What's Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption" gave an excellent TED talk about this movement. She talks us through the different arenas of redistribution markets, collaborative lifestyles and product service systems and gives many compelling examples of how collaborative consumption is occurring. View "The Case for Collaborative Consumption," Rachel Botsman's TED talk, here.

Personal vehicle ownership is one arena where collaborative consumption is making an impact. According to RelayRides (via a great infographic on futureofcarsharing.com) "the average car is used for only one hour a day," but "costs $715 a month." We are all familiar with Zipcar and other companies that have created extensive car-sharing programs. RelayRides is a new concept that allows individuals to put their cars up for rent just like zip car (but with 65% of the proceeds going to the car owner, not a corporation). Car-sharing benefits the environment: "In 2009, car sharing diminished global carbon dioxide emissions by 482,170 tons" (Frost & Sullivan).

Food also has surplus value when it is not consumed. Dumpster divers have long understood this, "harvesting" and consuming fresh and processed foods that were tossed by grocery stores for being just over their expiration date. This practice, or the practice of donating excess food to soup kitchens was often stigmatized or fraught with rules and regulations. This is beginning to change, with US Environmental Protection Agency now encouraging and giving tax incentives to businesses that donate surplus food. Other food-related sharing includes a "kitchen tool library" in Portland, Oregon that makes canning and other food preservation equipment available to local residents for week-long rental.

There's also a lighter side to "collaborative consumption." Used clothing has become a lot sexier as friends and neighbors get together for clothing swaps or "swishing parties." Lucy Shea, founder of Swishing.com and CEO of a sustainable communications firm describes swishing in this way: "Save money, save the planet, have a party: swishing effortlessly touches all of these buttons. Swishing parties are for all those women who want to combine glamour, environmental protection and frugality."

Personal skills and talents are surplus capacities as well. See an earlier article on "time banking," a practice in which people can log hours sharing their time or talents with a neighbor and redeem that earned time in a way that is most beneficial to them.

CollaborativeConsumption.com has an extensive list of initiatives that have been launched in cities and countries around the world. These collaborations are an exciting development that should be fostered and implemented on a wider scale.

###

This article was featured April 2, 2012 on the Sustainable Cities Collective site.

For more information:
How 'Collaborative Consumption' is Transforming Startups, Huffington Post

10 Websites for Collaborative Consumption, My Life Scoop
The Gen Y Guide to Collaborative Consumption, Shareable.net

Smart, Sustainable "Insta-Cities": A Korean Prototype

On October 31, the world’s population hit the 7 billion mark. Put another way, the earth gained one billion new inhabitants since 1999 - a mere 12 years! (Jeffrey Sachs, CNN). In an era of rapid population growth and the rapid urbanization of the world (people are moving to cities at a faster rate than to rural areas/suburban), some parts of the world find themselves needing more cities—and FAST. China, for example, is building at a staggering pace – a new city “the equivalent to Rome every few weeks” (Greg Lindsay, Departures Magazine).

So what are developers and the technology industry doing to make these new, almost “pre-fab” cities sustainable?

A rendering of harborview, songdo.com



Enter Korea’s Songdo International Business District. Built in partnership with the Korean Government, developer Gale International and Cisco Systems, this brand new city is unfurling itself on land reclaimed from the Yellow Sea. When completed (in roughly 2016), Songdo will be the size of Boston, ready for one million or more residents. Songdo will be a cutting-edge “smart city” with everything from trunk lines to lighting fixtures wired to collect data that will enable companies and residents to monitor and control virtually every piece of urban infrastructure--including water and electricity. This city is to be a prototype of a “city in a box” that will be replicated twenty times in China and India in the coming years. (Greg Lindsay, Fast Company)

Are “insta-cities” all that they’re cracked up to be? The international urban planning community has mixed feelings about the benefits of new “intelligent” cities.

Artist's rendering, Songdo.com

On the one hand, the ability to monitor utilities and infrastructure is a planner’s dream. They can get data on who is using what amount of water and when. This can help officials plan for future water needs – like using the data to determine appropriate water storage for warmer summer months, for example. Much like a home energy or water audit, residents can also analyze the current trends and create plans for reducing their use or the severity of their impact. For example, they could learn that their daily showers are expending more water than they prefer, or notice that if they wash their laundry at night during off-peak hours they can get a lower rate. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) is partnering with Opower and Facebook to create a smart phone application that will enable residents to analyze their energy usage in real-time (Katherine Tweed, Greentech Media). A wired city could have even greater impacts on our lives. According to the BBC, “Residents will have smart phones they can use to pay their bills, access medical records or just open their doors.”

On the other hand, however, some fear that the “smart city” technology could throw more wrinkles into an already complex urban system than create beneficial returns. Even Gordon Falconer, Director of Innovation at Cisco, stated in an interview that “Possible disadvantages are allowing the “smart” components to over ride everything else.” Presumably he is referring to free will or other social, economic or environmental considerations/priorities that run “counter to the meter,” so to speak. It could also make city infrastructure vulnerable to program viruses or hacking.

Some are concerned that such concentration of information in the hands of the government or, in particular, private corporations, could create a “big brother” effect. Note that during the interview, Mr. Falconer suggests that “Government should be a facilitator, policy maker and a regulator of smart cities while ICT companies and private sector developers/operators should do the actual design and construction and operation” (emphasis added). 

Kaid Benfield, Director of Sustainable Communities and Smart Growth at the Natural Resources Defense Council, cautions against a “gizmo cities” focus – where some superficial ideas like monitoring and manipulating data on underlying urban infrastructure – is misconstrued with the hard work of building holistic, truly sustainable cities (Kaid Benfield, featured on Grist Magazine).

The good news is that Songdo doesn’t seem to be the kind of “gimmicky” project that Benfield decries. The Songdo District has been designed to follow best practices in urban sustainability, and is participating in the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED Neighborhood Design program. For starters, Songdo’s “Third party development land sale agreements will contain language mandating that buildings erected must pursue LEED Certification.” (Songdo website)



Songdo IBD by Flikr user my memory2

Emphasizing six core sustainability areas of open space, transportation, water, energy use, recycling and general operations, Songdo is shaping up to be an impressive exercise in sustainability. For example: it will preserve 40% of its area for natural open space, and the city offers a 100 acre Central Park. With 25 kilometers of bicycle paths, a subway line into Incheon, most of its parking underground and prime parking set aside for electric and low-emissions vehicles, Songdo prioritizes the right kind of transportation. The city will use efficient appliances, reclaimed stormwater, reused greywater and green roofs to minimize its water usage.

Songdo already has 35,000 residents, and progress is steady on a 68-story, 1,001-foot residential tower that will become the tallest building in Korea.

Learning from the Past: Balancing Preservation and Urbanization

...quit thinking abut decent land-use as solely an economic problem. Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise....This is a plea for the preservation of some tag-ends of wilderness, as museum pieces, for the edification of those who may one day wish to see, feel, or study the origins of their cultural inheritance. (The Land Ethic from A Sand County Almanac, 1949)

Aldo Leopold - US Forest Service

Aldo Leopold, a behemoth of the conservation movement, was born in 1887.  Leopold attended Yale University's School of Forestry and joined the US Forest Service when the Service was just four years old. During his life he advocated for what would become the first designated wilderness area in the world and wrote countless books, such as the famous A Sand County Almanac, about preserving and living in ecological harmony with the land rather than using it merely as a disposable economic resource.

"...I am glad that I shall never be young without wild country to be young in" said Leopold, bemoaning the destruction of nature, however necessary it may have been for America's early settlers. In the 60 years since his death, that trend of destruction has only continued. Many of us have, in fact, grown up in an era where wilderness was only occasionally experienced during a family vacation - a camping trip or a weekend at a rented cabin.

How can we inspire a new generation to care for nature and promote open space?

Urbanization and its discontents

Don't freak out, but...we are overpopulating the world to a severe degree, and urbanization won't save us!

This is the view of Kingsley Davis, a pioneer of historical urban demography and world urbanization, in his 1965 Scientific America piece "The Urbanization of the Human Population." He explains that "urbanization" is a term that describes not merely the growth, in population, of cities--but a relative change between the urban and rural (read: farming) population. Thus, just because a city's population is growing does not mean that more people are migrating from the country into cities (urbanization).

Davis goes over the history of urbanization in Northwest Europe (urbanization began to support trade and economic production) and the "S-curve" theory of urbanization (urbanization starts off slow and then increases rapidly as economic incentives from prospering city industries continue to increase, and then tapers off as overcowding and the availability of automobiles and other conveniences encourages people to move into suburban areas).

Davis also addresses the misplaced anxiety of leaders in underdeveloped nations that a severe rural-urban migration is underway. While it is true that developing countries are becoming urbanized at a slightly faster rate than those of the 19th century (about 5%), the overall growth of their cities can't be predominantly explained by urbanization.



Greenberg, Seattle Post Intelligence, 1994

 Rather, absolute population growth via births and increased life expectancy in these countries is causing a steep increase in both urban AND rural populations. This puts countries between a rock and a hard place. Davis states that "If they do not substantially step up the exodous from rural areas, these areas will be swamped with underemployed farmers. If they do step up the exodous, cities will grow at a disasterous rate."

His final warning, or thesis statement, is stern: "It seems plain that the only way to stop urban crowding and to solve most of the urban problems besetting both the developed and underdeveloped nations is to reduce the overall rate of population growth...Urban planners continue to treat population growth as something to be planned for, not something to be itself planned."

Retrofitting "Trashed" Land into Benefical Community Space

Oasis appears
Decay now gives way to growth
Nature rejoices
-Louis J. Lombardo[1]

On a hot day last month, my husband and I happened upon a hidden oasis in Daegu, Korea: the Daegu Arboretum. We strolled through the park, which featured 230,000 square meters of gardens and greenhouses, including a cactus greenhouse, a bog garden, an herb garden and a picnic area. It was bustling with children and adults alike, all enjoying the space and their ability to connect more closely with nature.

Map of Daegu Arboretum. Photo by Jace Lee.

The arboretum, while a splendid refuge for city residents, also holds a deeper significance: the park is built on a large landfill that was in operation from 1986-1990. It was converted into civic space by city government. This project, which opened in 2002, is part of a growing trend in cities across the world.


You don’t have to go far from Daegu to see other successful landfill retrofits. Once known for its flowers and as a site to grow vegetables, the small island of Najido in the Han River near Seoul became a landfill site in the 1970s. As the repository for the trash coming from a growing city, the site quickly expanded into a mountain of trash said to be 34 times the size of the Pyramids of Giza. After the landfill was closed in 1993, the City of Seoul installed 100 methane gas extraction wells to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help power the city. The 2002 World Cup brought renewed interest in redesigning Najido into an eco-friendly island. 2.8 million Square meters of former landfill were transformed into five differently themed parks. Today, the successful World Cup Park sees 9.8 million visitors a year.