How Tall Buildings Can Shape Sustainable Cities
29/11/24
The decisions around urban planning, particularly how people move within cities, will play a critical role in shaping carbon use and sustainability in the future. Reducing the carbon impact of private transportation is a key factor in building a more sustainable future.
Tall buildings, while structurally demanding, can be more environmentally friendly compared to suburban sprawl. Efficient structural designs in tall buildings help minimise resource use, making them more sustainable.
Roger Ridsdill Smith, Foster + Partners Head of Structural Engineering, examines the relationship between form and function in modern tall building design and their impact on sustainability, especially in terms of carbon emissions.
Form and Function
The most intriguing element of modern tall building design is making form and function work in unison, rather than one verses the other.
When building form is generated by its function, that is when buildings get exciting. They reflect their challenges and constraints, the way they relate to the city, and the way they are linked to the people within them.
Reducing Embodied Carbon
One of the key considerations of tall buildings today, is how people interact with them. The buildings themselves may look visually dramatic, but a tall building is better for the environment than a sprawling suburb.
I think towers have to work structurally quite hard and I think it is valid that we have made the structure as efficient as we possibly can, because we should be minimising our resources in all buildings, but certainly in towers.
Our buildings are a combination of their embodied carbon and their operational carbon use.
What is very interesting is that research in this area is quite consistent around the world and you find that consistently the highest household carbon footprints in cities are in the suburbs.
The greenest parts are the densest parts, they are the areas with the lowest household carbon footprints. The consistent piece of data from other studies shows that the carbon cost of private transport is the defining characteristic.
If you do not look at the transport and you compare a 60-story tower with a three to five-story building, the overall carbon emissions per metre squared over its projected 60-year life, is bigger.
However as soon as you add on travel to and from the building, the picture changes and as soon as you incorporate the fact that private transport is mainly used in those low-density areas, that changes the overall picture.
Conclusion
The decisions we take now about how people move into urban areas and how we live in those areas in the future is going to absolutely be defined by the amount of carbon we are using. These are decisions now which are going to have a huge effect worldwide.
Follow Roger on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/roger-ridsdill-smith-8a5b95191