By Riza Yehiya
Building boom in Sri Lanka today is primarily seen in the housing sector. This sector has opened up since the end of war, where the State driven housing are mainly for the poor and the private driven are mainly for the rich. Rich or poor, as human beings, their housing needs need to get the social-environmental sustainability basics right, in order to make sustainable societies. Failing which would make Sri Lanka become a much polarized society leading the rich to live in gated communities and the poor in newly built ghettos, segregating one from the other.
Our communities were more socially and environmentally sustainable in the 1940s than now. The many post-independence developments in the sector, which only concentrated on giving a better built environment to the masses, have failed to link them with their environment and society sustainably. This is one of the reasons attributed to influence social polarization. Current development trends seem to exacerbate this with potentials to polarize people based on rich/ poor segmentation without a middle class that cements the two together. The widening rich-poor gap and the thinning of the middle class segment in society can potentially undermine the economy and society altogether. Apart from this, those ‘poor’ who will live in high-rise apartments in the cities, their tendency to link with nature and society will become remote. Consequently, this may drive their stress levels to transform to irritations and then to conflicts in our conurbations. The onset of neoliberal economy in Sri Lanka would make the rich richer and poor poorer; the reflection of this economic model is visible in the emerging developments in Colombo and its suburbs.
Environmental sustainability
Environmental sustainability is the driver influencing development decisions in the country. The government advocates this as one of its stated goals of development in the country. It applies to all aspects of our life to ensure sustainability. Therefore, it is imperative that housing, the basic needs of the people, should be made available in the market with sustainability features that support long term sustainability.
Contrarily, the present market does not seem to supply sustainable housing that ensures social-environmental sustainability that links people with the built environment, nature and society. It seems ‘business as usual’ approach by the market does not recognize the need to connect people with nature and the need for the built environment to form a new ecology to ensure social-environmental sustainability. Instead, what is prevalent is greenwashing and meeting the triple bottom line of the project developer to maximize profit.
The current housing market is ambivalent, which on one hand applies ‘business as usual’ approach without any consideration whatsoever regarding ‘sustainability aspects’ and on the other adds up certain sustainability elements as marketing tools to increase sales. There is a lack of holism to produce sustainable housing to the people. Its supply chain is deficient and deficit in achieving sustainable results in terms of physical, social and environmental sustainability.
The application of Ecologically Sustainable Design (ESD) is usually confined to the design aspects more in the physical sense to achieve bioclimatic goals, but tends to lack holism to integrate the ‘Social’ (cultural, political, economic, psychological, community) and ‘Environmental’ (physical, built, ecological, technological) aspects of sustainability. This is a major deficit that makes the current practice ill equipped to address sustainability holistically. The way ESD is adopted in practice delivers only partial achievement of sustainability goals. Therefore, it often fails to address issues affecting sustainability that lie outside the areas concentrated on by prevailing sustainability practices. This is due to the absence of ecological knowledge and thinking, and an overarching ecological sustainability framework to address bioclimatic, social-environmental and sustainability aspects which link people with nature, built environment and society as constituents of the larger ecology.
The reason for this phenomenon may be the prevailing world view, in particular the ‘capitalist market economy’ that segments and atomizes people to understand them as ‘consumers’ and then target products and services to them to garner better profits. This transaction takes place in a compartmentalized and isolated form and in contradiction to the ecologies of society, economy, nature and the environment. This in turn inevitably affects social-environmental sustainability. Therefore, a paradigm shift that looks at the market from an ecological point of view is an imperative.
Our Common Future
The issues of sustainability are contingent upon ‘satisfying the needs of the present without undermining future needs’ as the Bruntland Commission proposed as a strategy in their report, ‘Our Common Future’ in 1987. Following this report, an array of tools and drivers of Legislative Environmental Controls, Economic Instruments, Environmental Taxes, Building Codes and Rating Systems were developed, culminating in evolving the Earth Charter. These instruments generally cover the gamut of sustainability in terms of: Respect and care for community life, Ecological Integrity, Social and Economic Justice and Democracy, Non-violence and Peace. However, translating these into broader practice is dominated by industry and market forces in terms of establishing sustainability benchmarks and, to a lesser extent, by State regulations that represent the interests of the people. Industry dominance and the influence of market forces have been selective in using sustainability drivers and tools that directly influence market profitability.
In the present housing market, ESD is adopted only as a marketing tool to add value to housing products to enhance sales and maximize profit. That too, only in the housing for the rich, but rarely the ESD is applied in the housing for the poor. The sale of a housing unit has become more like the sale of an automobile which concentrates on the intrinsic features of the product in isolation from the rest of the environment. However, housing as a product has to be fit for purpose, accommodating a human family that is part of the community, society and humanity. It has its ethos, values, cultures, links and connectivity, behaviour patterns dominating its private and public life, in private and public spaces respectively. It is linked to nature: the wider environment, and the built environment and technology that sustain it. Therefore, housing as a product to support basic human needs must satisfy all that is entailed to give the user the desired benefits by providing ‘creature comfort’, resource and economic sustainability, psycho-social sustainability through linking with community, people, nature, environment and society.
In the real business world, people’s wants and what the market supplies are not really matched. More often than not, people are not satisfied with the products that they buy due to their knowledge gap in making the right purchase decision or influence of coercive market strategies stimulating their subliminal force prompting to make a decision. Therefore, in the real transactions, only when purchase decisions are made is when customers realize the follies of their ill informed decision. Customer ignorance is a common denominator in the decision making process. Therefore, to protect them, they need to be availed with better awareness and information of products. Especially with regard to house purchase decisions, customers need awareness and relevant information database and specifications that direct them to make informed decisions about the house of their choice that contribute to long-term sustainability.
Housing Problem
Sri Lankan housing was traditionally taken care of by the vernacular self-builds which transformed to State house building on mass-scale during the 60s and 70s which stagnated due to conflict in the country. Currently, Sri Lanka in the threshold of post-industrial society, the housing industry has transited from vernacular self-builds to centrally planned mass housing to suit the social and economic models of society. This transition not only changed the building design and technology, but also the morphology of towns and cities from natural ecosystem to a new environment requiring a new ecology of its own.
Industrialization, urbanization and the economic models determined the shape of the society to come. The role of the government which represents the people is reduced by the power of the market forces which determine values, cultures, wants and needs of people influenced by consumerism and globalization. These unfettered powers determine price, quality, quantity, supply and demand in the market in which the State has no direct leverage. Artificial demand creations for the purpose of profit maximization and social segmentation to derive market segmentation have unsustainably pushed cost and quality of products being served. Growing population, limited choices for house selection, limits of affordability and social mobility compounded by lack of public housing is causing ‘housing stress’. Housing stress will be felt by people even if there were surplus houses in a given society due to the manipulations of the market forces. We may come across a situation of a mass of empty houses on one hand and on the other a permutation of homeless masses paradoxically.
The way the sustainability agenda is implemented at present is through different tiers in the State. The producers achieve sustainability benchmarks in respect to their product/s more in isolation than by being part of a larger framework of ecological sustainability that the products tend to influence positively or negatively. These are endorsed by State and/or industry-specific institutions that are responsible for implementing the sustainability agenda. Apart from this, there are instruments that govern the sustainability agenda both through industry-specific and State agencies. Most of these agencies implement them more in isolation of the other aspects and limited to areas like environmental pollution, ecological disruption, socio-economic sustainability and so on. For example, it is common sense that development decisions are hinged on economic bottom lines as opposed to sustainability. Any development project whether public or private driven, development decision makers or project proponents and their respective development partners or project approving agencies, their fundamental questions at project formulation are economic feasibility, economic sustainability and profitability. Here, neither the project proponent nor the project approving agencies hinge their decisions on ecological sustainability that is profitable on multiple fronts satisfying all stakeholders in the society.
Legislative environmental
controls
These largely are more focused on controlling pollution through regulatory instruments. These are preventative measures that attempt to control pollution by regulation, setting standards, incentives, solutions and other parametric requirements to comply with pollution prevention. These measures are implemented by State agencies that superintend pollution control directly and indirectly. These are not comprehensive enough as singular preventative tools. History testifies that in the case of most major environmental accidents, preventative measures have failed and the environmental cost of damage is disproportionately higher that the punitive fines imposed on perpetrators. These control systems play only one part in protecting the environment, but are not all-encompassing as a sustainability driver.
Historically, building codes emerged as drivers to ensure public health and safety in buildings and construction. Currently most of the prevailing building codes are outdated, but are applied all over the world as ‘business as usual’ without any major changes to make them relevant to sustainability. For example, most of the developed countries that advocate sustainability are yet to evolve a country specific uniform sustainability building code that encompass not only the energy and resource efficiency factors, but also social-environmental factors enforcing designed response.
Presently, most of the building codes seem to be barriers to sustainable practices. This is particularly seen during project formulation, when potential developers consider complying with building codes as a fundamental requirement for project approval, such as seeking approval for a building plan. The project proponent is confronted by the municipal building regulations which are codified much before sustainability issue came to the forefront of discussion. Therefore, they are forced to comply with the present codes without review to accommodate sustainability. Hence, the status quo does not fully support genuine sustainability goals. This force developer to initiate design process complying with a code based on unsustainable – or not fully sustainable – development practices. Regarding this Professor Joo Bay, (2010) notes in ‘Towards A Fourth Ecology’ that: “For a poor nation, social sustainability may warrant a much higher weighting, but for the rich nations, addressing climate change (with current ESD directions and carbon trading policies) and maintenance of status quo is a bigger issue.”
Will the next generation housing be socially and environmentally sustainable in Sri Lanka?
Source – 09/02/2017.Ceylon Today, See more at – http://www.ceylontoday.lk/print20170101CT20170331.php?id=14825
