Tapping in to MUD
Issue 44 - August 08

While organisations are exploring the synergies of "work, live, play" environments in Asia for cross marketing, quality of life and business synergy, there are also a myriad of advantages in clustering utilities when it comes to mixed-use developments..

Governments and the private sector are busy conceiving the cities of the future, mostly motivated by rapid urbanisation, new arrays of technological capacity and an increased interest in sustainability. It is happening in much the same way that human interaction on the internet has progressed. Once we realised that it became possible to talk to anyone anywhere, we reverted to the concept of community and special, interest-based social networking.

The mega-cities of the future that are being built will be formed along similar lines. It is already happening in Asia's growing metropolises, and developers have evolved from "building mixed-use developments" to "creating communities." This community concept is then marketed and positioned towards a particular demographic in a particular geographic region. On the engineering side, it is becoming increasingly obvious that these silo environments can also be built on the platform of a centrally provided infrastructure that is both reliable and sustainable."

Chris Wallbank, Director, National Sustainability & Engineering Services, Jones Lang LaSalle, heads up the department that services both building owners and occupiers to help improve the environmental credentials of their offering. Wallbank points out that during the industrial revolution, governments centralised the provision of water, transportation, electricity and other government services to provide a uniform service and capitalise on the advantages of scale. Nowadays, however, data suggests that centralised services are more wasteful than locally provided utilities equipped with new technology. There has been a u-turn back towards the provision of localised utilities and solutions based around smaller concentrations of buildings. The extreme side of this trend is the zero energy building that neither takes nor wastes energy from the grid, but in many cases gives it back again. On a mixeduse development level, it is already possible for communities to grow in a semi or completely self-sufficient environment.

New eco-cities are popping up regionally, with a number being built from scratch across China, India, and the simply astonishing vision of those working on the Masdar project outside Abu Dhabi. Many, if not most, of these new environments do not rely on centralised energy or services, but have developed their own to deal with issues relating to sustainability, cost and reliability of extant systems. Cities do not need to be built from the ground up for this model to work. Allen Jones, now Chief Development Officer of the London Climate Change Agency, gained fame as the UK's City of Woking's energy services manager. He cut reliance on grid power by localising energy production and cut the city's carbon emissions by 77 percent while saving the town money - making his one of the most stand-out examples of how decentralisation works to everyone's benefit. As Wallbank points out, much energy is lost (some say up to two thirds) before it reaches the consumer and most of the money consumers pay for it does not go to the actual electricity provision at all. For water provision, even in developed areas water wastage increases hugely the further water needs to travel from its source.

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