Regenerative Metropolis: High-Performance Carbon Sequestration
The Climate Week event, organized by New York Passive House and Parsons and sponsored by NYSERDA, was chaired by MAP’s Director of Sustainability, Sara Bayer. What follows are her opening remarks.
Graphic: Design by Melinda Beck, courtesy of New York Passive House
Sara Bayer, AIA, CPHC, LEED AP
Associate Principal & Director of Sustainability
Remarks:
I would like to share with you some more details on the origin of the symposium’s title “Regenerative Metropolis”.
Our collective work towards a more sustainable city and addressing our GHG impact, has been impressive in many ways thus far. Even keeping in mind all that we still wish our city to be, we are embracing heat pumps, and steering our energy codes towards a sensible balance of enclosure robustness and mechanical sizes. We’ve improved storm water requirements, birds are protected from hazardous collisions with our buildings, all of our lights are changing to LED, we are tracking our energy use and mandating improvements, and transitioning our grid to be 100% renewable. We are more justly allocating resources to traditionally underserved communities and are about to divert all organic waste towards higher uses than the landfill.
It’s important to appreciate what is possible today, that was only a dream yesterday – if only to give us honest hope that we can achieve our next dreams.
So far, the narrative for this stewardship has been focused on “sustainability” as a catch all for increasing efficiency, and doing a bit less damage to our natural resources, in order to make sure our children have as much as we do now. But what we have now - is damaging to our health (physical and mental), reduces the nutritional value of our food, and is destabilizing the ecosystems we need to survive.
Our collective minds we have therefore been shifting the narrative towards a new vision, that of Regeneration! This means that humanity can actually improve upon the world – that we can intentionally increase life and its abundance, and also repair damage we have already done. Think of a permaculture farm as an example – where the nutrient content of the soil increases year after year, and the amount of life there is astoundingly diverse and abundant.
In the context of a city, this means that we can store carbon in our buildings with emerging technologies, which we will talk about today. It means that we create circular material paths where nothing is thrown somewhere else (for someone else to deal with). And it means we build high performance architecture that uses very little energy. Passive House’s focus on airtightness is the biggest bang for our buck and has matured sufficiently enough for it to be embraced on a metropolis wide scale.
We in fact have more agency to choose this path than we realize. We now have the technology and deeper understanding, that we don’t have to choose prosperity over health – we can have both!
When plastics were emerging in the world, there was great optimism as to the prosperity they would bring. We deserve to have the same optimism today, because of countless human lifetimes of passionate inquiry, we more deeply understand the systems of the natural world, our impact on it, and just how many other choices we have over polluting technologies.
It’s easy to recognize that that so many objects of our modern society are made from polluting fuel and material sources, and we are told we have to give up that way of life if we want healthier options. This is not the case. The problem is, we spent so many years going down one particular scientific line of inquiry, that of petroleum chemistry, that we have ignored so many other options.
New York Passive House board and the conference committee, invite you to envision in detail, the regenerative, abundant metropolis that we can create. As Theodore Hook said in the 1840’s: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
We are looking forward to collaborative and inspiring discussions, which is humanity’s true leverage to getting. things. done!