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Opinion, Others

Making Mumbai a Better Place to Live Dhiru …

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Making Mumbai a Better Place to Live
Dhiru A. Thadani, AIA, CNU
Cities in India are changing every day. Most are becoming worse places to live. There are many intersecting forces for this decline, including, increase in population, failing infrastructure, dependency on the automobile, outward sprawling development, and the inability to provide housing for lower- and middle-income residents.
On a recent visit to Mumbai, I was asked if there were any solutions to alleviate this accelerating decline of Indian cities. What was happening in the West? Why were American cities experiencing a renaissance? Why was the quality of life in cities improving, especially in my second city of choice, Washington DC, while there was a noticeable decline in the city of my birth, Mumbai?

Auto attacks
Auto attacks


Cities are the largest and most complex things that we humans make. Despite evidence to the contrary, the knowledge exists on how to make them well. To the politicians and citizens who want to create a better Mumbai, I humbly offer these 10 suggestions.
1. Streets are for People
What makes a city memorable? For the most part it is a well-defined public realm – public spaces defined by the buildings which enfront them and peopled by a vibrant street life. A successful public realm is one that people can inhabit comfortably on foot. Unfortunately, most Indian cities today, including Mumbai, emphasize automobile movement while disregarding the pedestrian. Sidewalks are non-existent or permanently in disrepair, often having been dug up for utility upgrading. Today being a pedestrian in Mumbai is akin to being a soldier on a battlefield navigating through land mines strewn in one’s path of travel.
Traffic engineers for the most part ignore the real needs of pedestrians. For example, parallel parking, essential to protecting and comforting people on the sidewalk, is often eliminated to speed the traffic. Every aspect of the streetscape, including lane widths, curbs, sidewalks, trees, and lighting can be designed to the needs of either cars or people. Mumbai favors the former.
Mumbai should remove the fence barriers along the edges of streets that enclose pedestrians like cattle. Permit pedestrians to cross streets at grade at all intersections. Whoever designed an elevated pedestrian crosswalk must have been in an automobile. They do not work, and they never will. And you only have to walk through a below grade street crossing once, to realize that it is a bad idea.

Mumbai & Cars
Mumbai & Cars

2. Overrule the Specialists
The city by definition is a general enterprise, and the specialist is the enemy of the city. Engineers are not alone in their quest to shape the city around specialized needs. The modern world is full of experts who are paid to ignore criteria beyond their profession. Cities need generalists to weigh the advice of specialists against the common good.
The traffic engineers in their quest to move traffic from north to south propose building 100 above-ground flyovers, without consideration for what this decision does to the quality-of-life for local residents, who have to look and live with this ugly, noisy monstrosity.
Imagine for a moment if someone was to build a concrete bridge 15 feet from your bedroom window, so that the privileged few could save a few minutes of time driving through your neighborhood in the comfort of their air-conditioned capsule.
While cities such as San Francisco, Milwaukee, and Washington DC, to name a few, are demolishing inner-city highways in the interest of quality-of-life for their residents, Mumbai has embarked on a ludicrous and expensive endeavor to build new inner-city highways.
The department of transportation proposes widening existing roads to ease traffic generated by the very sprawl that they cause. Each of these approaches may be correct in a vacuum, but is wrong in a city. It is a proven fact that expanding street width and capacity on existing streets only leads to more traffic. This in turn leads to an increase in accidents, which causes further delays, nullifying the investment’s goal.
The money earmarked for flyover building should be diverted to improving the train and bus network. Additionally, an efficient water taxi service can service both coastlines. As all world-class cities have come to realize, investment in public transportation is the only solution to alleviate congestion. Imagine ten years into the future, what will be on these streets when the price of petrol doubles? Buses not cars.
3. Mix the Uses
Another key to active street life is creating a city that pulsates at all times of the day, with neighborhoods so diverse in use that they are occupied around the clock. Eating, shopping, working, socializing, recreation – these activities are mutually reinforcing and flourish in each other’s presence.
The best parts of Mumbai, have this diverse mix of uses. Neighborhoods are alive during the day when residents are away at work, because workplace and retail are active. Vice-versa in the evening, when the offices and shops are closed, the residences keep the neighborhood vibrant and safe.
Moreover, many businesses such as restaurants, general stores, and health clubs rely on both daytime and evening traffic to cover their rent. The key is to stop building single use zones, such as Nariman Point and Bandra-Kurla which are predominantly workplaces. These places are unsafe in the evening due to a lack of activity. Similarly, stop approving residential enclaves, which are mono-cultures and eventually become residential ghettos.
4. Hide the Parking Lots
In a city such as Mumbai, 90% of the population is pedestrians. The city is obligated to make pedestrians feel safe, comfortable – and entertained.
As the infatuation with automobiles increases in India, so will the need to house these machines. There is nothing more boring than walking past a parking lot. Whether they are open-air or six-stories tall, parking lots must be banished along any street that is inhabited by pedestrians.
In the hands of a skilled designer, parking lots are easy to hide. It only takes a 25-foot-thick wrapper of housing or offices to block an unsightly parking lot or garage from view. New parking structures can easily be built above street-level shops. Enlightened cities globally are putting this requirement into law.
5. Small is Beautiful
People are small when compared to automobiles, and most world-class walkable cities acknowledge this fact with small blocks, small streets, small buildings, and small increments of investment.
The Fort District owes much of its success to its tiny blocks and fine grain that creates an incredibly porous network of streets. Pedestrians like to criss-cross through the fabric, intelligently looking for the shortest routes between two points.
Unfortunately, most of Mumbai has obscenely large blocks that make the city impenetrable. For example, south of Woodhouse Road there is only one east-west connection, making travel between the two coastlines difficult. This problem also exists in the northern part of the city and land for street rights-of-way need to be acquired to help create a true network of streets.
Although 25% of India’s population resides in urban cities, and this number is rapidly growing, building height is another place for smallness. Today’s building codes prevent the making of Marine Drive, one of the most memorable parts of the city. Additionally, it is illegal to achieve the residential density found between Marine Drive and Churchgate rail lines in six story buildings.
Tall buildings place undue stress on a small land parcel. By concentrating population in a single point within the city all systems are pressured including accessibility, parking, garbage removal, water and utility supply, to name a few. In the long run, this creates an unhealthy, unsustainable living condition. A healthy real-estate development community consists of many players, not just a few giants.
6. Save That Building, and by-the-way Remove that Billboard
How many buildings need to be torn down before a city learns the lesson? Every city deeply regrets and laments the destruction of its historic/heritage structures. As a society that pays homage to its elders, historic preservation may be the best way to respect our ancestors. But, it is also justified on economic terms. Market economies suggest that the differentiated product is one that commands a monetary premium. This is why cities like Savannah and Miami Beach can point to historic preservation as the key ingredient in recent booms. It isn’t always easy to find a productive use for an empty old building, but tearing it down makes that outcome impossible.
Additionally, billboards and hoardings illegally installed on buildings and along the highway must be removed. City officials must enforce the recent court ruling. The city should rise beyond this crass commercialism and the visual assault on the human senses.
7. Build Normal (Affordable) Housing
Affordable housing remains a crisis in Mumbai, and the solution is not to build housing projects in the suburbs, which taxes the poor resident with the longest commute. Rather, to be successful, affordable housing must do two things: be integrated with market rate housing, and look like market-rate housing.
Despite the best-intentioned efforts to provide affordable housing, architects should not be permitted to experiment on the poor, or pioneer new design styles for the poor. Most housing projects that have been built in recent years play geometric games that only their designers can understand and appreciate. Experiment on the rich; they can always move out, but the poor do not have a choice. Housing for the poor should provide smaller-than-standard apartments, but they should be stylistically compatible with their neighbors and the context. There should be no visible stigma attached to living in subsidized housing.
8. Build Green / Grow Green
People have been talking about sustainable architecture for decades. However, given the burgeoning population of Mumbai, it cannot afford to be anything but sustainable. History shows us that as a country becomes more affluent, it becomes dumber, by being more wasteful of its resources, recycling less, creating more solid waste, and increasing its dependency on artificial cooling and lighting. This is absolutely true for Mumbai, as the city increases in wealth the less it seems to care about sustainability.
Architects and developers get lazier when it comes to designing buildings that truly respond to the environmental conditions of place. As children we never relied on air conditioning for comfort because the buildings we occupied passively kept us comfortable. Ceilings were higher, transom windows above doorways permitted air circulation, and windows had deep overhangs that shaded interior spaces as well as provided protection from the heavy monsoon rains.
The city needs to mandate that all new buildings be smart by using less energy than their predecessors. As an example, every residential dwelling in Israel obtains its hot water from roof mounted solar panels. This is a viable technology that can easily be adapted to the Indian context.
There is also a strong correlation between green tree cover and real estate value. The more green there is, the higher the real estate value. The new development at Powai is a perfect case study proving this theory. The city should plant more trees!
9. Question your Codes


Review Process
Review Process

The existing building codes that govern new development within the city are made up of incomprehensible statistics like floor area ratios (fsi), setbacks and open space requirements that ignore the differences between pleasant and unbearable urbanism. As mentioned earlier, they make the city’s traditional urban form, the most loved places within the city, illegal to emulate.

 
Codes must be based on a picture of what is desired to be built, not statistical manipulations. Close your eyes and imagine what you want the city to be, and then write a code to achieve it. Around the world a new generation of design ordinances is gaining favor among city planning officials. Referred to as form-based codes, these ordinances regulate what really matters: a building’s height, disposition, location, relationship to the street, and where to place parking. Cities including Arlington, Virginia, and Miami, Florida are adopting form-based codes for their neighborhoods.
10. Don’t Forget Beauty
Joe Riley, Charleston’s Mayor since 1968, reminds us that cities should be places that make the heart sing. For many Mumbai citizens, especially those too poor or infirm to travel, the city is an entire world. For this reason, the city should be proudly maintained, function properly, but also afford moments of beauty.
Yet, the city routinely builds to the lowest denominator, when it comes to building public schools, parks, and government buildings, – the only investments that belong to all the citizens of the city. In the interest of short-term frugality, the city cheats itself out of an honorable public realm and a noble legacy. This was not always the case, and it need not continue.
One only has to look around Mumbai, an incredible city and realize that it contains a handsome portfolio of beautiful buildings, parks, and public spaces. This legacy can and must be continued.

 
Opinion, Others

India is a place where complexity and chaos …

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India is a place where complexity and chaos are embraced as key ingredients in the warp and weft of the urban fabric.
Indian culture also embraces patience. She has waited, and can wait: the still center around which a whorl of change and continuity, parochialism and vision, the very old and the very new join one another in a cosmic dance.
This center is the Extended Indian Family. The business of the nation is passed from generation to generation within this Family, along with language, tradition, and culture. Indians love their extended family, whether freely or out of obligation. They choose to share the same or adjacent living quarters at every socio-economic stratum. Wisdom is dispensed therein; support is given and empathy is freely available.
The nurturing world view required for the selflessness the Family demands has, besides the patience at its center, a tolerant if not respectful attitude towards others. This has enabled a large number of ethnic, racial, and religious groups to live side by side peacefully.
The Family is a refuge from the limits imposed by society. The caste system was, and is, hereditary. Poverty and wealth are hereditary as well. Even governance, where a Gandhi trumps political opposition generation after generation, has a strong familial element.
Enumerating the requirements of a city built to accommodate this moment and the future India must begin with this building block.
Ironically, Indians are now highly mobile within their own country. The newly educated and rapidly expanding middle class participates in a mass migration towards centers of technology and commerce and the prosperity they offer. What begins to break down is the Family. Parents, siblings, uncles and aunts; grandparents and their families are left behind as millions move to Hyderabad and Bangalore and fifty other cities destined to become decentralized centers in the internet age.
What these people achieve is held in very high esteem. Education, affluence, and professional growth conspire to create wealth and erode the Family at the same time. Across the country workers stagger home from 12-hour work days to new apartment blocks, going from co-workers to the television instead of to a relative for gossip and comfort.
They stay in touch with their family members by phone and computer but the physical proximity of others one takes for granted in Indian families is overtaken by the suspicions the culture encourages towards strangers.
Compound this suspicion with an environment of apartment towers which isolate the nuclear family from the ground and from their neighbors, a sense of alienation can arise.
The only public realm is for shopping. Malls and superstores are the town squares of 20th century America and India is following suit.
Slums, interestingly, have the urban infrastructure of a medieval Mediterranean city. Closed to vehicular traffic, they have narrow lanes where every inhabitant knows his neighbor. Urban infrastructure is improvisational but organized and includes waste removal, fire prevention, shopping, medical care, and restaurants.
This lies behind the squalor others pity or fear. It is fragile, but not ramshackle, chaotic but not lacking in clear hierarchy. When tower blocks are built for displaced slum dwellers, many choose a different slum, renting or just giving up their new quarters.
Still, slums appall for good reason. Squalor is the stuff of poverty, and poverty is the realm of the marginalized, disenfranchised and uneducated. The problems of poverty are innumerable; the solutions as varied and complex.
A good place to start would be education. If every man, woman, and child in India had access to basic literacy training and trade school, it would provide many with ascent from abject poverty.
How ironic that the poor can have a strong sense of community but the middle class may be without it, living in new tower blocks isolated from one another.
Starting out with basic goals for these groups of the population: we could propose places for informal interaction for the middle class and basic skill-driven education for the poor. These could be programmatic elements in a new Urban Infrastructure.
What of the rich? Popular belief is that they can take care of themselves very well. They can afford to live with extended family in the traditional manner, and they work and live along side their relatives. The wealthy also have enclaves for gathering with one anther, preferring other people of means as social companions.
One thing the wealthy do desire is immortality. That is why, in the west, they endow colleges, donate buildings, fund research programs and do other works that will bear their name beyond the limits of their mortal lives. Indians venerate their ancestors and that itself, along with respect for elders still living is itself a noble practice.
Western-style philanthropy seems uncommon among wealthy Indians. Indutopia (encouraged by the civil government, itself led by a cross section of the city population) this type of largess would be celebrated and elevated to the highest level of prestige.
The cultural institutions would have benefactors: theatres, music halls, cricket grounds; but so would the neighborhoods of the poor. This, the most populous part of Indutopia, would have quarters bearing any name their benefactor would choose. And what the benefactor could fund is one of the noblest gestures in the teeming city: transformation of the most poor into a class of workers with simple, but useful skills.
Among the simple masonry midrise apartment buildings that house the poor, there would be a network of open plazas with roofs so they can be used year round. In these, the same lesson of the same class would be taught eight hours each day, so people could manage them with other obligations in their lives.
There could be eight sessions, with attendance taken, with midterm exams, and a final one at 12 weeks with examination at the end and a certificate given to show prospective employers. As many of the attendees will be illiterate, testing methods would accommodate this. The classes themselves would build skill sets as is the custom in ordinary school.
Basic literacy, in Hindi and in English, would always be offered, as reading and writing are the first steps out of desperate poverty.
Graduating students would go on to be mechanics, word processors, domestic staff; hotel housekeeping crews, chauffeurs, and will fill all of the menial jobs with the advantage of training and basic literacy. This gives them an edge up in competition for these positions, and may even result in a slight uptick in wages.
Each plaza and the service it renders could be financed (with plaques and ceremonies documenting the event) by the wealthy or groups of middle class citizens. Largess is at the core of all religions, so the gesture could be viewed as piety as well.
Sell philanthropy to the new India. Its wealth and its capacity to help so many are new. There could be posh benefactor’s club, and opportunities to pay for urban amenities are always plentiful and always a cause for celebration.
For the Middle Class a place to meet informally or just experience the presence of others would help offset loneliness. Idealized streets, with shops and fountains and shade tree, could combine with plazas containing restaurants and night clubs (and produce markets during the day) to provide a forum for the chance encounters that humanity sees to thrive upon. Eventually acquaintances would be made, and then friends for those who want them.
In this quarter of the city one may encounter cinemas, a theatre, monuments to Iconic Indians, and opportunities for the wealthy to share their abundance.
Highrise office buildings could identify the city center, a city with life 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The model for this quarter of the town would be any traditional Mediterranean city. In Italy, the “passagiatta” at day’s end is the time
after the heat of the day when the bourgeoisie stroll through the pedestrian quarters of the city to meet and run into friends and acquaintances. In 21st century India however, the streets and squares are carved out of vast parking structures 6 meters in height and fronted on all sides with shops and other urban amenities.
Light manufacturing or back office space could also occupy these spaces, receiving natural light from above through skylights cut into the roof. Whole zones of this space devoted to noon-polluting activities would be inexpensive to erect and would grow outwards as demand for this space increases.
Atop these gargantuan structures, apartment towers rise in sylvan grace amidst densely planted gardens. Their inhabitants would be living in towers in the park, overlooking a pedestrian city bereft of carbon monoxide and honking horns.
This configuration would inevitably be stratified according to social convention, with shops and housing in synch with the level of its occupants’ affluence.
It would also guarantee consistency as the city grows. Parking and back office space built to accommodate demand would have the structure built into it to support housing that may not be needed at that time. Conversely, housing would have to be built on the garden podium to go up.
A Masterplan free enough to actually be put to use without penalty to developers would have to be enforced for a period of three generations.
A city organized in this way could approach the perfect modern Indian city: largess and opportunity for the poor; an ideal mix of city and garden for the middle and upper classes, and a social order informed in part by philanthropy for all.
INDUTOPIA: REMARKS ON THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY INDIAN CITY
India is a place where complexity and chaos are embraced as key ingredients in the warp and weft of the urban fabric.
Indian culture also embraces patience. She has waited, and can wait: the still center around which a whorl of change and continuity, parochialism and vision, the very old and the very new join one another in a cosmic dance.
This center is the Extended Indian Family. The business of the nation is passed from generation to generation within this Family, along with language, tradition, and culture. Indians love their extended family, whether freely or out of obligation. They choose to share the same or adjacent living quarters at every socio-economic stratum. Wisdom is dispensed therein; support is given and empathy is freely available.
The nurturing world view required for the selflessness the Family demands has, besides the patience at its center, a tolerant if not respectful attitude towards others. This has enabled a large number of ethnic, racial, and religious groups to live side by side peacefully.
The Family is a refuge from the limits imposed by society. The caste system was, and is, hereditary. Poverty and wealth are hereditary as well. Even governance, where a Gandhi trumps political opposition generation after generation, has a strong familial element.
Enumerating the requirements of a city built to accommodate this moment and the future India must begin with this building block.
Ironically, Indians are now highly mobile within their own country. The newly educated and rapidly expanding middle class participates in a mass migration towards centers of technology and commerce and the prosperity they offer. What begins to break down is the Family. Parents, siblings, uncles and aunts; grandparents and their families are left behind as millions move to Hyderabad and Bangalore and fifty other cities destined to become decentralized centers in the internet age.
What these people achieve is held in very high esteem. Education, affluence, and professional growth conspire to create wealth and erode the Family at the same time. Across the country workers stagger home from 12-hour work days to new apartment blocks, going from co-workers to the television instead of to a relative for gossip and comfort.
They stay in touch with their family members by phone and computer but the physical proximity of others one takes for granted in Indian families is overtaken by the suspicions the culture encourages towards strangers.
Compound this suspicion with an environment of apartment towers which isolate the nuclear family from the ground and from their neighbors, a sense of alienation can arise.
The only public realm is for shopping. Malls and superstores are the town squares of 20th century America and India is following suit.
Slums, interestingly, have the urban infrastructure of a medieval Mediterranean city. Closed to vehicular traffic, they have narrow lanes where every inhabitant knows his neighbor. Urban infrastructure is improvisational but organized and includes waste removal, fire prevention, shopping, medical care, and restaurants.
This lies behind the squalor others pity or fear. It is fragile, but not ramshackle, chaotic but not lacking in clear hierarchy. When tower blocks are built for displaced slum dwellers, many choose a different slum, renting or just giving up their new quarters.
Still, slums appall for good reason. Squalor is the stuff of poverty, and poverty is the realm of the marginalized, disenfranchised and uneducated. The problems of poverty are innumerable; the solutions as varied and complex.
A good place to start would be education. If every man, woman, and child in India had access to basic literacy training and trade school, it would provide many with ascent from abject poverty.
How ironic that the poor can have a strong sense of community but the middle class may be without it, living in new tower blocks isolated from one another.
Starting out with basic goals for these groups of the population: we could propose places for informal interaction for the middle class and basic skill-driven education for the poor. These could be programmatic elements in a new Urban Infrastructure.
What of the rich? Popular belief is that they can take care of themselves very well. They can afford to live with extended family in the traditional manner, and they work and live along side their relatives. The wealthy also have enclaves for gathering with one anther, preferring other people of means as social companions.
One thing the wealthy do desire is immortality. That is why, in the west, they endow colleges, donate buildings, fund research programs and do other works that will bear their name beyond the limits of their mortal lives. Indians venerate their ancestors and that itself, along with respect for elders still living is itself a noble practice.
Western-style philanthropy seems uncommon among wealthy Indians. Indutopia (encouraged by the civil government, itself led by a cross section of the city population) this type of largess would be celebrated and elevated to the highest level of prestige.
The cultural institutions would have benefactors: theatres, music halls, cricket grounds; but so would the neighborhoods of the poor. This, the most populous part of Indutopia, would have quarters bearing any name their benefactor would choose. And what the benefactor could fund is one of the noblest gestures in the teeming city: transformation of the most poor into a class of workers with simple, but useful skills.
Among the simple masonry midrise apartment buildings that house the poor, there would be a network of open plazas with roofs so they can be used year round. In these, the same lesson of the same class would be taught eight hours each day, so people could manage them with other obligations in their lives.
There could be eight sessions, with attendance taken, with midterm exams, and a final one at 12 weeks with examination at the end and a certificate given to show prospective employers. As many of the attendees will be illiterate, testing methods would accommodate this. The classes themselves would build skill sets as is the custom in ordinary school.
Basic literacy, in Hindi and in English, would always be offered, as reading and writing are the first steps out of desperate poverty.
Graduating students would go on to be mechanics, word processors, domestic staff; hotel housekeeping crews, chauffeurs, and will fill all of the menial jobs with the advantage of training and basic literacy. This gives them an edge up in competition for these positions, and may even result in a slight uptick in wages.
Each plaza and the service it renders could be financed (with plaques and ceremonies documenting the event) by the wealthy or groups of middle class citizens. Largess is at the core of all religions, so the gesture could be viewed as piety as well.
Sell philanthropy to the new India. Its wealth and its capacity to help so many are new. There could be posh benefactor’s club, and opportunities to pay for urban amenities are always plentiful and always a cause for celebration.
For the Middle Class a place to meet informally or just experience the presence of others would help offset loneliness. Idealized streets, with shops and fountains and shade tree, could combine with plazas containing restaurants and night clubs (and produce markets during the day) to provide a forum for the chance encounters that humanity sees to thrive upon. Eventually acquaintances would be made, and then friends for those who want them.
In this quarter of the city one may encounter cinemas, a theatre, monuments to Iconic Indians, and opportunities for the wealthy to share their abundance.
Highrise office buildings could identify the city center, a city with life 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The model for this quarter of the town would be any traditional Mediterranean city. In Italy, the “passagiatta” at day’s end is the time
after the heat of the day when the bourgeoisie stroll through the pedestrian quarters of the city to meet and run into friends and acquaintances. In 21st century India however, the streets and squares are carved out of vast parking structures 6 meters in height and fronted on all sides with shops and other urban amenities.
Light manufacturing or back office space could also occupy these spaces, receiving natural light from above through skylights cut into the roof. Whole zones of this space devoted to noon-polluting activities would be inexpensive to erect and would grow outwards as demand for this space increases.
Atop these gargantuan structures, apartment towers rise in sylvan grace amidst densely planted gardens. Their inhabitants would be living in towers in the park, overlooking a pedestrian city bereft of carbon monoxide and honking horns.
This configuration would inevitably be stratified according to social convention, with shops and housing in synch with the level of its occupants’ affluence.
It would also guarantee consistency as the city grows. Parking and back office space built to accommodate demand would have the structure built into it to support housing that may not be needed at that time. Conversely, housing would have to be built on the garden podium to go up.
A Masterplan free enough to actually be put to use without penalty to developers would have to be enforced for a period of three generations.
A city organized in this way could approach the perfect modern Indian city: largess and opportunity for the poor; an ideal mix of city and garden for the middle and upper classes, and a social order informed in part by philanthropy for all.

Opinion, Others

COSTS AND CHALLENGES OF ENERGY TRANSITION Andrew McKillop …

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COSTS AND CHALLENGES OF ENERGY TRANSITION
Andrew McKillop
Former Expert-Programming, Div A-Policy, DG XVII-Energy, European Commission, Brussels
Submission to FINSIA for JASSA journal, Version 3.1, Jan 2009
ABSTRACT
Costs for moving away from fossil fuels, on a worldwide base, can be quantified and estimated in various ways, using different hypotheses on methods, targets, technology and policies to be applied over various periods of forward time. Most scenarios compare existing energy systems and infrastructures, on the upstream, and downstream economic and social energy needs and uses, with hypothetical future supplies, systems, and specific energy needs per unit GDP. To be sure, varying scenarios for GDP growth or change through the forecasting period are also utilised. These include other measures or yardsticks, such as ‘environment wellbeing indices’ incorporating various targets for reduced CO2 emissions, and scenarios for energy demand under ‘constant economic structure’ – which for estimates covering 25 or 30 years forward are necessarily approximate and unsure. Due to the many factors in play, it is therefore difficult to set fixed estimates of the cost for this process of Energy Transition. However, simply taking the case of oil and gas substitution needed due to geological depletion of reserves during the 25-30 years forward period we cover, very approximate Energy Transition investment costs in 2008 US dollar terms may well be as high as, or above 450 Billion USD-per-year, for a total investment amount, also expressed in 2008 USD terms, of about 12 000 Bn USD. This amount can be compared with recent OECD International Energy Agency (IEA) cost estimates for needed global oil and gas sector investment through 2008-2035, of about 26 000 Bn USD in 2008 USD terms.
Rather obviously, these two spending amounts cannot be considered cumulative, generating around 1350 Bn USD-per-year requirements on a ‘straight line’ annual basis, for the simple reason that global energy sector investment, depending on data source and coverage of the estimate, is running at well below 750 Bn USD/yr, including all forms and types of energy, both fossil and ‘alternate and renewable’ (ARE), both upstream and downstream. Of this approximate total, we can note, oil and gas took about 400 Bn USD/yr, in 2006-2007, but will take considerably less in 2008-2009, due to global economic crisis, the collapse of oil and energy prices, and massive falls in investment of all kinds. Using various sources of data (including Thomson-Reuters, Clean Edge, the US IEER and remaining US investment banks such as Goldman Sachs) total economic activity in 2007-2008, in the very loosely defined ‘cleantech and ARE sector’, of which more than 50% concerned asset refinancing, start-ups and IPOs, M&A activity, LBOs, etc., was approximately 150 Bn USD. Estimates for the year forward (2008-2009) suggest a large fall in this ‘cleantech and ARE sector’ investment and spending. Put another way, global investment in the energy sector is falling more rapidly and radically than world energy demand, which in the absence of very serious oil-saving and gas-saving in the economy, will ensure spectacular rebound of energy prices, shortly after any economic recovery starts, if it starts.

The Goals and tasks of Energy Transition
Energy intensity (average demand per capita): The main goal of Energy Transition is reducing fossil energy intensity of the economy and society in OECD countries, developing all feasible sources of renewable, non-fossil energy to substitute oil and gas, and eliminating or reducing CO2 and other greenhouse gases (GHG) produced by current fossil fuel burning, and future, probably increased dependence on coal and lignite. This last point, to be sure, is already ‘controversial’ due to the absence of economically-viable clean coal, carbon capture and sequestration technologies and methods (CCT, CCS), but increased dependence on coal and lignite is probably certain, due to their larger remaining world reserves, relative to oil and gas. At present, about 55% of world electricity is coal-based, and only about 11% of world electricity, or 6%-7% of world commercial energy is renewable hydropower based, using US EIA data indicating about 1.8 PWh of world total hydroelectric production, and total electric power demand of about 16 PWh in 2007. Electricity accounts for about 20%-40% of final commercial energy demand, depending on country and economic structure.
Energy Economic structure: Due to extreme high growth rates for electricity consumption in many countries, specially the Emerging Economies, with around 55% electric power demand growth in the Mid East region, and 100% growth for Vietnamese, 110% for Chinese, and 120% growth for Thai electricity consumption in 1998-2005 (UN source data), renewable hydroelectricity’s part of global commercial electricity, and therefore global energy demand has in fact tended to decline in recent years. Other renewables, specially the ‘new renewables’ such as fast-growing wind electric power, and emerging solar thermal and photovoltaic account only for another 1.25% of world total commercial energy, in 2008, according to the OECD’s IEA. One major problem with substituting the approximate 55% of world electricity presently supplied by coal burning (more than 75% of Chinese electricity, 2008), by non-coal or non-fossil primary energy sources, is electric power demand growth. This is very closely linked with GDP growth. The ‘electricity coefficient’, or percent growth of power demand per unit GDP growth, for current structure economic growth, is well above unity ( 1 ) in many countries, while oil and gas coefficients are much lower, and in recession can even turn negative, that is GDP can weakly grow in some quarterly periods, while oil and gas demand continue to fall. The steady and long-term shift to higher electricity intensity of the economy on a worldwide basis presents as many problems, as solutions– for example the claimed advantage of electricity-dependent economic growth for developing the ARE, because many renewable energy sources are converted only to electricty, as the final commercial energy output. Study by this author of relatively electricity intensive, versus less electricity intensive OECD economies during and after the 1980s economic recession (France and Germany versus Japan and Italy) clearly shows that electricity demand in the economy operates a kind of ‘ratchet effect’, increasing overall or total commercial energy dependence of the economy, coming out of recession. As recent (2005-2007) global economic growth trends clearly revealed, conventional economic growth is obligatorily oil-intensive, suggesting energy economic structural change is needed to reduce this dependence. Quantities of fossil fuels to be substituted : Taking the fossil fuels of oil, coal and natural gas it is sometimes not understood that coal and lignite, which have the highest ‘carbon footprint’, that is CO2 and other greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and heavy metals, radionuclides and particulate emissions per unit commercial energy delivered, have demand growth profiles far higher than oil. Also due to simple cost difference – natural gas is ‘historically’ cheaper than oil – global natural gas demand has grown much faster than oil. Gas demand more than tripled (to about 2800 M tons oil equivalent, including losses) through 1969-2008, but oil demand ‘only’ doubled (to about 31.9 Bn barrels, including losses) in the same period.Only during recession, we can note, is oil intensity reduced, with a contraction of global oil demand of about 9.6% through the 3 most-intense years of economic recession in the 1980s (1980-1982). Conversely, due to price, world gas demand showed no contraction at all in the same period ! Coal and lignite, which are even cheaper than gas, now supply about 28.5% of world commercial energy demand, and demand for these fossil fuels, at least until the onset of global economic recession in late 2008 was growing fast. In approximate terms and excluding the petrochemicals and coal-based or gas-based chemicals, the weight of energy hydrocarbons burnt each year is around 11 Billion tons, roughly 5.5 Bn tons for coal and lignite, 3.5 for oil, and 2.5 for natural gas. About 1.4% of world energy is also supplied by capital intensive nuclear power, using non-renewable uranium, thorium and other rare minerals, with unknown “end of cycle” or decommissioning costs, and ultimate (ie. permanent) waste disposal risks and costs.
Climate change mitigation : CO2 and other GHG emissions from fossil fuel burning and release of unburnt methane (natural gas), probably total about 28 Bn tons annual. These emissions are vastly higher than all natural volcanic, tectonic, seismic and geological sources of GHG, which likely total less than 0.5 Bn tons annual. This estimate, of around 28 Bn tons CO2 equivalent, annual, is certainly underestimated for one reason because of massive natural gas losses throughout the chain “from well to final user”. At least 10% of world nameplate natural gas capacity is simply vented and flared into the sky, or lost in transmission along the world’s estimated 175 000 kilometres of gas pipelines, needing gas-fueled compressor stations at regular intervals along each line. These gas losses are rivaled, in sheer resource wastage and climate change impact, by loss, venting, and flaring of ‘associated gas’ in oil production. This was estimated by the World Bank at around 160 Bn cubic meters in 2006, equivalent to world total LNG trade the same year. Equally intense in climate change impact, coal production and transport losses, worldwide, total at least 90 – 150 M tons-per-year, much of it lost in underground fires, in abandoned mines, with inevitable and massive CO2 emissions. While having less impact on the world’s climate, but massively polluting the world’s oceans, and some land areas, at least 1.4 Million barrels-per-day (Md) of oil is lost “from well to wheel”, and this rate is increasing much faster than production, due to extreme depth offshore production, tar sand based ‘syn crude’ production, and production in what are called ‘hostile or extreme’ environments. Few persons, economic or consumer interest groups, or political parties today still reject the link between fossil fuel burning and climate change – although it has taken at least 16 years since the 1992 Rio conference to arrive at this open acknowledgment. Despite this “late awakening”, the reality of near-unlimited risks and economic damage from runaway climate change has now penetrated public opinion and political decision making, usually concerned only with attempts at increasing personal consumption and economic growth.
Reliance on ‘Free Market’ mechanisms: Reports such as the 2006 report by Lord Stern (UK) present various economic methodologies, and costing for not avoiding, or not mitigating climate change sufficiently, or in a relatively rapid forward timeframe. One of Lord Stern’s scenarios suggests that economic losses due to insufficient or absent climate change mitigation, could climb to around 50 000 Bn USD/year (2006 USD value), by around 2040, this being approximately equivalent to world total GNP in 2007. This ‘avoidable cost’ could be utilised for estimating rational spending and investment targets for ARE and non-fossil energy through the next 30 years. However the Stern report, like others, gives major prominence to what is the only present and market-based process for supposedly ‘reducing or limiting’ GHG emissions. This process, it is implied, will lead to ‘spontaneous’ or ‘market induced’ growth of the ARE or non-fossil energy supplies and systems, under various cost and time horizon scenarios. This ‘market-based process’ is the European ETS (emissions trading scheme), which apart from being a very small market, relative to other markets such as equities, currencies, government paper, raw materials, etc, is remarkable by its opacity and volatility. Operating since 2005, the European ETS has manifestly had zero impact on fossil energy consumption in Europe, with many EU ratifying countries ‘robustly’ increasing their oil, gas and coal burn through the 2005-2007 period of fast economic growth, and only trimming their fossil energy demand with the near collapse of their banking systems and entry to global economic recession, from 2007-2008 ! One clear impact of European ETS, we can suggest, has been to accelerate the construction of gas-fueled power plants, as well as wind electric plants, making the ETS a process for increasing gas demand and developing one major ARE, in a context of growing electricity demand and consumption, often accompanied by growing total commercial energy demand.

Dimensions of the Problem
Substituting oil, then natural gas, and preferably coal and lignite, presents huge challenges including massive, long-term financial mobilization and global-scale effort to achieve Energy Transition without catastrophic economic impacts, or further geopolitical conflict, specially in the Middle East, central Asia and Africa. Adding the pressing need to quickly develop, and utilise CCT and CCS (“clean coal”) to reduce impacts from coal and lignite burning worldwide, the rising problem of world car fleet energy and fuel supply, and very serious challenges for at least maintaining, if not increasing world food supply, the immense challenge of Energy Transition becomes clearer.
Unfortunately, the current financial mechanisms to achieve this end remain vague, volatile, speculative and insubstantial. To date in early 2009, speculative ‘investment’, that is asset creation and trading, and ‘financial engineering’ activities including private venture start-up and debt refinancing of alternate energy companies, M&A activity, LBOs, etc, has already led to collapse of the so-called ‘biofuels boom’. Financial instruments linked to carbon finance trading, mainly European ETS CO2 credits and derived instruments, and CDM (clean development mechanism) operations in Associated Countries (mostly nonOECD), are all typified by extreme price volatility, highly speculative and opaque trading, and very small market size. Due in part to the ‘success’ of European ETS, to high electricity prices in Europe, and early investor enthusiasm for wind power, this has helped create a large and growing overcapacity of wind electric installations in several European countries, followed by a sharp fall-off in new orders. Efficiently using wind energy resources will necessitate large infrastructure spending on electric power grid interconnexion, sometimes called ‘smart grids’. Featured in the 825 Bn USD Obama program to restore US economic growth, grid interconnexion investment on a huge scale is unlikely, to say the least, by speculative free market ‘players’ seeking a quick rand large return on their play. The potential for a similar free market ‘boom-and-slump’ with solar PV (photovoltaic) electric power production is now also growing quite rapidly. World effort to develop renewable, and low-carbon energy sources and systems are currently concentrated in the OECD countries, despite the very large resource potentials in low-latitude countries. As noted above, the ‘boom-and-slump’ sequences that have already taken place, with biofuels, with wind electric power development, specially in Europe, and probably soon with emerging solar photovoltaic electric power, current global investment in alternate and renewable energy is hostage to the whims of private market players, and victim to their very classic financial, short-term oriented, profit-maximising behavior. This strongly suggests the need for urgent attention to creating automatically funded multilateral frameworks, with adequate planning, regulation, and control, in a truly global and necessarily long-term process. This requirement for state intervention, and state funding can be compared with the vast ‘injections’ of public money into the world banking and finance system, to limit the catastrophic economic damage resulting from ‘exuberant’ free market trading.
CONCLUSIONS
Various data sources, including the IEA and ASPO suggest that due to oil and gas depletion, potential
continued energy demand increase, rising costs of ‘new oil and gas’, climate change mitigation, and other factors such as increased environment protection, imply that about 25 Mbd, oil equivalent of ARE or alternate and renewable energy supplies may be needed by 2035-2040. Again using IEA estimates, the cost of its projected ca. 63 Mbd of “new, replacement or additional” oil supply capacity needed by about 2035 comes to about 26 000 Billion US dollars, 2008 value. Assuming similar costs for alternate energy, and perhaps only 25%-40% of this oil equivalent energy supply being derived from the ARE, this would suggest total financing needs for the “alternatives” at about 12 000 Billion US dollars, 2008 value in the period of about 2009-2037. On a “straight line” annual basis, in 2008 dollars, this would amount to about 400 – 450 Bn USD/year. The above ‘modest contribution’ from the ARE, not attempting to project complete transition to the ARE over the period to around 2037, will necessarily assume very large energy savings being made, mostly in the OECD countries. Using data and forecasts from sources such as McKinsey & Co, world energy saving or ‘Negawatts not Megawatts’ could or might represent a new industry with spending and turnover attaining about 30 to 40 Bn USDper- year by the period 2025-2030. At that time, oil, gas and coal substitution due to energy saving may in fact reduce world total energy consumption relative to today – unlike IEA and other forecasts assuming continued, if slower growth. However, costing what is in effect a massive Energy Transition effort, far bigger than changes in world energy in the previous 30 years, encounters the difficulty of integrating a myriad of decisions that will be made, at all levels from final users to government deciders, concerning energy saving versus energy supply substitution, and the type of energy used to substute present demand.
Under any hypothesis, however, it is necessary to assume that large energy savings, or demand side management will occur. In an economic and social context where “only the market will decide”, as we have found through 2005-2008, outright and massive economic recession is the sole guaranteed way to obtain real cuts in oil and energy demand !
Using a reference target of 25 Mbdoe of ARE for oil, coal and gas energy substitution by about 2035, and comparing this with recent performance in the world oil and gas industry (outside the OPEC NOCs and Russia) we find that about 400 Billion USD/year of investment delivered supply increments of about 2.1 Mbd oil equivalent/year (about 1.1 Mbd oil, and 1 Mbdoe gas in 2006 and 2007). This suggests an apparently lower cost for ARE fossil energy substitution, than 12 000 Bn USD to 2035, perhaps less than 6000 Bn USD through the period – but these investment costs relate to oil and gas supplies with a far lower cost per unit delivered energy, than the ARE. Performance in substituting 25 Mbdoe of oil and gas energy, we can at this stage conclude, would rather conservatively imply a spending need of up to, or more than 400 Bn USD per year in the period 2009-2035. Expecting that current financial structures and systems, and operating methods can cope with long-term Energy Transition is at best foolish, and at worst disingenuous or cynical. For this reason it is wise to start,
very quickly, to consider multilateral frameworks and mechanisms for energy transition. To this end, this author has made numerous proposals. These address the central questions of targeting a fast but orderly reduction in the oil and gas intensity (average consumption per capita) of the OECD countries, and the worldwide, automatically financed, transparent and regulated development of all alternate and renewable energy sources and systems, using an Energy Levy on multilaterally controlled oil and gas supplies and their pricing.
Copyright Andrew McKillop and FINSIA,


Opinion, Others

Heritage is a deep sense of values. And, …

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Heritage is a deep sense of values. And, for those values to set in there must have been a time tested process-by which human beings have over time a deep sense of respect for each other. That respect for one another is expressed through a bond. This bond which is spiritual involves human mind and sets a pattern. The spiritual is something one feels as a bond together because of certain values or a sense of achievement. It essentially echo’s the human spirit. This “spiritual” is achieved by a ritual-a manner of repetition to give strength and permanency to those spiritual values. This “spiritual” permanency of human thought and action can be frozen and experienced by the realm of architecture-in its built form. Therefore it is the ultimate stage where the process becomes a product which is acclaimed, celebrated and accepted.

Heritage reflects a society or community that has sustained certain values over a period of time for it to have become significant enough to be turned from spiritual to ritualistic. Ritual stimulates emotion but the spiritual is linked to a reason. But a reason in the ritual brings about a new platform. This reason is intended for justifying rather than understanding. As a result, wisdom looses meaning in ritual over a period of time.

When ritual originates, the initial reason for the setting in of the ritual was the spiritual. But in due course when the culture changes, people evolve and time elapses the spiritual is forgotten and the ritual alone becomes important that’s when decadence sets in. That’s because when values are repeated time and again the meaning not only changes but it becomes mundane. When certain values are passed down through generation-we don’t have the patience to pass on the truth but we have the patience to pass on the rituals or obedience. That’s when the degeneration starts. Decay sets in when human spirit of achievement and heroism dies. It happens when the human being does not understand the true reason behind the ritual or he does it out of force rather than a conviction. When the phenomenon only becomes a ritual and looses the spiritual, then the true values disappear. Decadence sets in. A new set of ethos is born and the change happens. The “same” is no longer the same. This metamorphic change over time becomes today’s modernism which should decay in time.
In modernism, the sheer pleasure of technology becomes important. But in truth, Technology can only enhance the value of the past. The past always tried to touch edge of technology. But technology is not a deterrent of the past. The deterrent is our inability to comprehend to use the present technology to its edge. Furthermore, today Architecture seems to be directly derived from technology. Art has been set aside. Art isn’t able to comprehend technology. Art should always be beyond technology. Philosophy comes ahead of technology. At present in modernism heritage is lost because it does not even in the sense of symbolic value to the past. It doesn’t give an attendance to the past and it doesn’t even give a presence to the past.-it simply cuts it off. In essence, at the moment “modernism” follows the heritage of the rationalization: a belief in the logical method, a notion that there is a truth that can be determined by applying data and the scientific method. On the other hand, when art pretends to follow values, the values made by the ritual rather than the spiritual- it’s another web of pretense. Heritage or values of the past is a consensus and a complete collection of memories. But the imperative point is that you should understand the memories and not get drowned in it. You must be able to use the memories to create new ideas. The true responsibility of tradition is not the acquiring the past, but the ensuring of a future. Only when we know how the story has run to this point can we responsibly decide how the plot might unfold.