To inform their response to the mayor’s consultation on the Draft London Infrastructure Plan 2050, the London Assembly Planning Committee convened an expert panel on which I joined Lord Andrew Adonis MP, shadow minister for infrastructure, Jerome Frost of Arup, former head of the Olympic Delivery Authority, and Dr. Dominic Hogg, Chairman of Eunomia Consultants. Chaired by Nicky Gavron AM, the public session provided an opportunity for the committee to quiz the panel on London’s long-term infrastructure needs.

The discussion covered a wide range of infrastructure needs, from low-carbon energy through to enabling digital technologies and supporting the development of a circular economy. I was specifically asked to provide input around future water management and the delivery of green infrastructure. Today, we are faced with a number of challenges, including:

• An expected shortfall in water supply of 10% by 2025;
• Demand for an additional 9,000 hectares of accessible green space needed to keep pace with existing standards;
• A need to support strategic investment in sewer capacity with measures that reduce peak surface flows.

Given this context, a strategic planning approach that integrates water cycle management with green infrastructure delivery is essential.

ArchTam developed the UK Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD) Scoping Study for not-for-profit CIRIA. We have also undertaken an innovative cost-benefit analysis using green infrastructure as a major component of water management for regeneration areas in Birmingham and Coventry. This work, The Ripple Effect, showed that WSUD can deliver benefits calculated at 7.5 times the value invested.

Recognising the long lead-in time and lifespan of infrastructure, the extended horizon of the Draft Infrastructure Plan to 2050 provides an unprecedented opportunity to set a vision of what infrastructure is needed to maintain London as a leading global city. This long-term thinking allows for critical appraisal of the shorter-term planning, political and regulatory cycles that can constrain the long-term sustainable vision our communities require.

At £1.4tn, the predicted cost of delivering the required infrastructure upgrades is significant. The challenge is to translate the proposed infrastructure plan into a narrative with meaningful outcomes that both the London and wider electorate can connect with. Similarly, there is a need to align thinking around infrastructure delivery with a spatial plan that takes an equally long view and links with the surrounding London Region.

In support of such a vision, ArchTam have analysed not only growth in the capital’s 33 boroughs, but also the 94 local authorities within a 90km radius of Central London. Andrew Jones, ArchTam’s managing director for Design, Planning + Economics in Europe, Middle East, and Africa, commented: “Limiting the conversation about the housing shortage to the GLA’s borders ignores the 700,000 people commuting into the city every day and the acknowledgment that London is the number one economic driver for the entire South East. To properly manage London’s future growth, we must start looking at London as a metropolis of 20 million people that is economically, socially and culturally connected to the capital. A considered and comprehensive programme of integrated growth strategies from the inner-city through the region will create thriving places and balanced communities, tied together by high-quality environments and efficient, quick transport.”

Along with traditional grey infrastructure, green infrastructure will be a critical thread in this overall fabric. More on the vision for the London Region to come.

Michael Henderson (michael.henderson@archtam.com) is associate director, sustainability, with ArchTam’s Design, Planning + Economics practice in London.

The post Green infrastructure for a growing London appeared first on Blog.

Mayor Johnson spoke about his vision during a recent visit to ArchTam’s Sacramento office. The firm is invovled with many of the projects currently reshaping the city. Johnson said he wants residents, visitors, business, and government to view the city as a ‘can do’ town. He wants to make Sacramento a more business-friendly city through business infrastructure investment, as well as streamlining business and government processes. He spoke about the need for Sacramento to move towards a position in which public safety, culture, multi-modal transit, and technology are the pillars of a new vitality for the city. Lastly the mayor expressed his desire to enhance the Sacramento riverfront to include mixed residential, recreational, retail, and commercial uses.

The development of the Entertainment and Sports Complex (ESC), which broke ground last week, is the cornerstone for reshaping the urban core. The city convinced the NBA to deny an imminent deal to move the Sacramento Kings to Seattle and embrace plans for a new venue that would convert a dilapidated shopping mall into a city icon and year-round zone of activity. ArchTam is designing the arena with a focus not only on setting the next benchmark within the NBA (as it did for the Indiana Pacers’ Bankers Life Fieldhouse and the Brooklyn Nets’ Barclays Center), but also on creating a building, public spaces, and 1.5 million square feet of mixed-use development that inject life into their surroundings. The building will invite the city to view the game from the outside and offer views of the city from the inside. It will open what an SI.com article calls “the world’s largest patio doors” to welcome visitors, create an indoor-outdoor environment, and allow unique summer Delta breezes to cool it, reducing energy demands. For the fans it will offer the next level of technological interactivity. The public spaces have been designed as a productive landscape, with pistachio and walnut trees producing nuts, green walls producing herbs, rain gardens managing stormwater, and other trees providing shade.

Two blocks from the ESC, the Sacramento Commons project would add over 1,300 new housing units, a hotel, and new retail on four city blocks. The Sacramento Housing & Redevelopment Agency also has plans to redevelop an old public housing project in the River District into a new mixed-income neighborhood. ArchTam has been integrally involved in both of these projects.

Now the nearby Sacramento Railyards is joining the downtown transformation under the leadership of LDK Ventures. On their behalf, ArchTam is creating a new masterplan for most of this 240-acre redevelopment area, one of the largest urban regeneration projects in the U.S. today. Sports and employment center facilities are proposed to anchor the project, including a possible Major League Soccer stadium that could draw a resident team. With the adjacent Amtrak station and planned California High-Speed Rail (HSR) terminus, the Railyards could become an iconic example of transportation-oriented development nationally and globally.

The Sacramento Railyards depot is the seventh busiest train station in the country and will only get busier with planned transportation developments. A 13-mile rail extension, the “Green Line,” will link downtown with South and North Natomas and the Sacramento International Airport, reducing congestion and emissions along I-5. ArchTam is working with the Sacramento Regional Transit District to deliver it. The proposed HSR system would connect Sacramento, San Francisco, and San Jose via two lines that converge in Fresno, and then travel south through Bakersfield to Los Angeles and San Diego. With California’s Central Valley in greatest need of economic development, the Merced to Fresno section will be the first segment delivered in a project that could spur a high-speed rail revolution across the United States. ArchTam has had primary responsibility for the planning and environmental analysis of the HSR Central Valley corridor since its initial phases in the late 1990s. The Merced to Fresno section is the only segment to date that has received its environmental clearances and permits.

Sacramento International Airport has already completed a new 19-gate, $288-million concourse and $408-million, 400,000-square-foot terminal building. ArchTam led one of the two construction management teams that delivered the project four months ahead of schedule and $60 million under budget.

Sacramento sits within the 53,000-acre Natomas Basin floodplain, which contains 83,000 residents and $8.2 billion in damageable property, protected by 40 miles of levees. Since 2006, ArchTam has been working with the Sacramento Area Flood Control Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on the Natomas Levee Improvement Program, which will protect the metropolitan area for the next 200 years. This work has included multiple, phased and overlapping environmental impact statements, reports, regulatory permitting, as well as ecological restoration, cultural resources conservation, public outreach and construction monitoring. Current work includes ongoing environmental monitoring in the Natomas Basin and engineering design and EIR preparation for additional flood risk reduction as part of the North Sacramento Streams, Sacramento River East Levee, Lower American River, and Related Flood Improvements Project.

Mayor Johnson’s city certainly looks like a can-do town, and it will be exciting to see how far Sacramento has come just a few years from now.

Jake Herson (jacob.herson@archtam.com) is managing editor for ArchTam’s Connected Cities blog.

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Last summer disastrous floods caused by heavy rains hit both Calgary and Toronto, two of Canada’s largest cities, within a matter of weeks of one another.

Media coverage of the events at the time provided Canadians an arresting split image that captured the impact of extreme weather on urban environments.

Calgary’s Saddledome, home to the city’s NHL team, was flooded, along with the grounds of the iconic Calgary Stampede. In Toronto, thousands of commuters were left stranded at rush-hour as water inundated the city’s subway system and washed out major roads like the Don Valley Parkway.

A year onwards, a new book, Flood Forecast: Climate Risk and Resiliency in Canada (Rocky Mountain Books), incorporates eye-witness accounts and personal narratives of these events along with expert analysis and commentary to look at what cities need to do to act on climate change.

The authors, Robert William Sandford and Kerry Freek, discuss their new book and why cities need to better understand and respond to climate risks.

Your work looks at the larger relation of climate change to the water cycle in terms of understanding why extreme weather events are increasing. With a warmer climate why will we see more flood conditions?

(Sandford): The fundamental laws of atmospheric physics decree that a warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapour. The Clausius-Clapyron Relation provides that for each degree Celsius the temperature of the atmosphere warms, it will hold seven percent more water vapour. Established principles of fluid dynamics also decree that if you put energy into a fluid system it becomes more turbulent.

It appears also that the loss of Arctic sea ice is altering the behaviour of the Northern Hemisphere jet stream, slowing west winds, causing the jet stream to be wavier and to move more slowly, allowing weather systems to persist in places longer.

Add it all up and you have more water vapour available in the atmosphere to fuel bigger storms of greater intensity and longer duration. Expect this trend to continue as the global atmosphere continues to warm.

What were the hydro-climatic circumstances behind the flooding in Calgary and southern Alberta, and what can we learn from them to be better prepared?

(Sandford): In order to be better prepared for extreme weather events of greater intensity and longer duration we first have to accept that the global hydrological cycle has been affected by changes in the composition of the atmosphere.

Water now moves more energetically through that cycle, marking the end of a period of relative climate stability that we have enjoyed over the past two centuries. This means that the math we have used to date in the design of our built environment is not adequate to the new range of conditions that are emerging.

As the climatic circumstances to which we have become accustomed are not going to return during the lifetimes of anyone alive today, we have to learn to adapt to greater extremes. We do that by reducing further impacts on the hydrological cycle through wiser land-use management and by minimizing further human effects on the composition of the atmosphere by controlling harmful emissions.

We will also have to design infrastructure to higher standards, rethink our cities, and in some cases move out of harm’s way.

You describe Toronto’s flooding as a moment where the city came to understand its “flawed urban composition.” What have our efforts in planning and designing the built environment, especially in the last 100 years, overlooked or simply just got wrong when it comes to water?

(Freek): To say we have a flawed urban composition, I think, doesn’t necessarily infer mistakes were made. The people who designed cities 100 years ago couldn’t have predicted the extreme weather we’re having today. They designed the built environment with the knowledge they had at the time. A hundred years ago, combined sewers seemed like a good idea. What is it they say about hindsight?

Things have changed incredibly since that time. Cities are growing at a rapid rate. We’ve been told to expect more frequent and extreme wet weather. Urban growth plans have to take this knowledge into meaningful consideration.

But it’s certainly not that easy. Not only do cities have to face the reality of a changing climate and a growing demand on existing systems, they must contend with massive municipal infrastructure deficits, sunk costs in legacy systems, and the politics of development.

This combination of challenges can make moving toward resiliency a very, very slow process.

One of the experts you quote describes the flood Toronto experienced as only “dodging a bullet.” If cities are in need of becoming more resilient to future and increasingly more costly extreme wet weather events, how do they do it? How do you define resiliency? 

(Freek): We may be seeing costly damage from extreme and frequent wet weather events, but the truth is flooding is a natural phenomenon — it’s part of the cycle. Simply put, when we interrupt the natural flow of water by building cities and other “human systems” in its path, that’s when we have a problem. In the past few months, Canadians have seen incredible loss.

A truly resilient city is one that works with, rather than against, nature. Resiliency doesn’t mean we can’t have buildings and structures. We must, however, have respect for water when we’re deciding where to build. It means taking into account the laws of nature and listening to our scientists. Future urban design will incorporate ways to be resilient — that is, adapt to new circumstances — and give floods a place to happen.

Flood Forecast: Climate Risk and Resiliency in Canada by Robert William Sanford and Kerry Freek. Rocky Mountain Books, 2014.

Micheal Fountain (micheal.fountain@archtam.com) is a communications manager with ArchTam.

The post A tale of two flooded cities appeared first on Blog.

The questions of how we can find a sustainable balance between society and nature and how we design and manage our cities are of course very closely linked. As we at ArchTam thought about Earth Day for 2014, we decided that to achieve the most productive results, the former question could use some re-framing in the way that it often manifests in the popular dialogue.

We have seen the limits of the argument asserting that we need to act forcefully to protect nature. As one who personally feels a strong sense of connection to this argument, it was difficult to admit that this position lacks universal appeal and to accept the necessity of seeking a broader coalition to achieve the same ends. But the fact is that human society typically only mobilizes to effect change in its own economic, social and cultural interests. And we don’t need to see anything wrong with this. Because the other fact is that advancing those interests within the parameters of our planet will inherently involve finding a better balance with nature. It’s first a question of how we frame the objective, who our audience is, and what we are offering as the proposed benefits of action. It’s second a matter of understanding what progress looks like and the extent to which we can currently see it.

So on this Earth Day, despite our recognition of the magnitude of environmental challenges, we found reason for optimism, and despite our species’ propensity to accidentally destroy while we create, we found reason to celebrate human ingenuity. See what we mean in this presentation of Ideas and Innovations toward a Better Future.

Jake Herson (jacob.herson@archtam.com) is managing editor of the Connected Cities blog.

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UK cities faced surging flood waters over the winter. The answer to future resilience lies largely with green infrastructure. That’s according to Matthew Jones, regional director, ArchTam, and Michael Henderson, associate director of sustainability, ArchTam, in recent articles for Water Briefing and Civil Service World, respectively.

“While the flooding has taken place over an unusually long duration this year, it is part of an apparently increasing trend of events oscillating between periods of inundation and periods of water shortage in some parts of the country,” said Jones. He pointed out that “While emergency response plans and flood defences are an important part of protecting life, infrastructure and farmland, it is clear that to manage flood risk effectively and to reduce water shortages in the summer, water needs to be treated less as a national annoyance and more as a precious resource. A more holistic approach is required where land practices contributing to flooding, such as deforestation, land drainage and urban creep, are gradually and proactively reversed.”

We need our natural spaces for practical reasons, in other words. It’s not just ecology; it’s ecological infrastructure, as critical to society as engineered infrastructure. Within developed areas, even small green interventions make a functional difference. When water passes through planted soil, some pollutants picked up from city streets are filtered out. This is the principle behind the practice variously called water sensitive urban design, sustainable urban drainage, and low-impact development.

Henderson said, “For a start, the cleaner the water is, the lower the energy cost of treating it for local reuse or discharge into our rivers. Moreover, if the UK can clean up its waterways, it will be liable for fewer fines under the EU Water Framework Directive, bringing another financial incentive to pursue this strategy. In addition, there is evidence to show that productivity increases when people look out over a green area, and other benefits like improved health and wellbeing are also detected. Finally, property prices tend to be stronger in more aesthetically pleasing surroundings, giving a helpful stimulus to the local economy.”

Jake Herson (jacob.herson@archtam.com) is managing editor of the Connected Cities blog.

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