The Green Building Council has been hosting its third annual conference in Cape Town this week and it has been a particularly interesting experience for me, the cynic, to see just how many people are committed to changing the way we build, the way we protect our environment and the way we integrate different ‘green’ elements into our everyday lives.
But first let me dwell on some of the obvious ironies: About 70% of the delegates attending the conference are from Johannesburg (or from other continents), so the carbon footprint to get people here was enormous. The exhibitors’ hall is filled with plastic, whether for displays, pens, hoardings or coffee stalls. Wherever you look there is plastic
Next door to the Green Building Conference in a different auditorium the World Federation of Nuclear Medicine and Biology (hardly what one would refer to as ‘green’) is holding its conference. And both organisations chose Cape Town as its venue where, earlier this week, a number of Eskom employees working at Koeberg where kept under observation having been exposed to Cobalt 58.
Then, just beyond Table Mountain, on the other side of the Peninsula, the squatters in Hout Bay are angry and have staged an illegal protest because they are being thrown off the land that they’ve illegally occupied on a firebreak on the slopes of the Sentinel.
These are the illegal squatters of Hangberg who erected illegal shacks there and were then told to demolish them. They refused to do so, and took to the streets instead, blocking roads, burning tyres and stoning the police, who eventually responded and fired rubber bullets at them.
About 50 people were injured, 15 of them metro police officials, while we sat inside the Cape Town International Convention Centre listening to informed speakers telling us about the way we must build sustainable communities.
And the next irony struck me: it’s all very well dealing with the wholesome goals of sustainable development but what do we do about providing homes for the people who live in appalling conditions on the slopes of Hout Bay, on the badlands of Mitchell’s Plain or in the ghettos of Khayelitsha and Gugulethu?
The keynote speaker at the conference, Joe Van Bellegham, chief executive of a major international company, Lend Lease, that is spending millions of dollars on building self-sustaining communities, extoled the virtues of his amazing project in Victoria, British Columbia known as Dockside Green. It was providing significant savings in terms of energy consumption, sewage treatment, environmental protection and alternative energy too.
And he made the point that at least 10% of each apartment block was built as an affordable home for those people who were not affluent enough to buy one of the prestigious units being offered for sale. The affordable apartments had the same finishes, the same environmental benefits, they were just smaller. So there was no discernible difference except size.
He makes an extremely valid point: that segregation of communities into pockets based on affordability makes no sense at all. Segregation fuels division and works against the principles of sustainability anyway.
Imagine taking this approach in South Africa. Imagine telling the people of Constantia that a 100 hectare RDP development was to be integrated into their leafy suburbs. In concept it’s a wonderful idea: in practice it would be greeted by howls of protest and thousands of applications to the Constitutional Courts (and every other court in this land for that matter).
Personally, I think that Joe Van Bellegham is right – but I doubt that the bulk of South African homeowners would see it that way. Just as I believe that if we, in South Africa, were serious about green buildings and environmentally friendly initiatives then we would start finding ways to adapt the fantastic indigenous housing methods used by the Xhosa in the Transkei, the Sotho in North West or the Zulu in KwaZulu-Natal to create entire townships of affordable wattle-and-daub homes with running water, solar panel heaters and naturally-treated sewage works.
But here in South Africa the locally proven building methods are simply not good enough for our suburban homes. So we use bricks and mortar now, we build RDP houses costing hundreds of thousands of rands for communities but we site them far away from any public transport systems and make sure they are remote from where the residents might find jobs anyway as well.
In fact like brainwashing, we spend hours and hours conning ourselves into believing that we are building for sustainability because we use energy-saving light bulbs. This is nothing more than ‘greenwashing’ and that’s what we do every day of our lives.
And we are actually lying to ourselves aren’t we?
Meanwhile in all the towns of South Africa there are thousands of people living in informal settlements in depraved circumstances that are not only inhumane but are a breeding ground for gangs, drugs, crime and violence.
And we pretend that all is well on the housing front because we used bricks that came from manufacturers within a radius of, say, 100 km.
I have a great deal of respect for the objectives of the Green Building Council and, when it comes to the many office blocks around our cities, I agree that we need to take control of the building methods and start doing things differently when we put up a new head office for a multinational organisation keen to deprive us of our money in Africa.
But when it comes to housing I think that we have got the cow by the bull’s udder. I think our approach is completely skewed because we really do have the ingenuity to be able to adapt the indigenous, proven and tested building techniques that have been practiced by rural folk for hundreds of years.
And I don’t see that kind of ingenuity being displayed anywhere. I don’t see researchers at any of South Africa’s world class research facilities finding ways of adapting the indigenous building methods for the modern-day suburban world.
I don’t see banks looking at ways to fund indigenous building methods and I don’t see companies setting out to develop mass production methods for something as simple and sustainable as the wattle-and-daub houses that dot the hillsides of the Transkei and that can be repaired on a Sunday by a family of four.
To me these indigenous homes represent so much more of the truly ‘green’ challenges than using bricks from a local company, using solar panels that guzzle carbon credits in their manufacture or building mass transportation programmes to bring residents closer to the job markets of industrial and commercial centres.
And meanwhile, over the mountain on the other side of Table Bay, angry squatters are still being shot at, entire communities are still being displacedand being offered no sustainable alternative either.
And, in the comforts of Lynnwood Glen, Waterkloof Park, Houghton, Morningside and Sandton, we object to squatters or bywoners because they will devalue the properties in which we have invested.
Makes you think, doesn’t it?
*Hartdegen writes a regular column for Property24.com. The content of his columns constitutes his personal opinion and doesn’t pretend to be facts or advice. Contact him at paddy@neomail.co.za.
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