Piers points the way to the city’s sustainable future
HUNDREDS of the region’s top property professionals came together to hear about how the sector can address the issues of sustainability and climate change at the 2019 M.E.N. Property Lunch.
Held at the Hilton Deansgate, the annual event was sponsored by leading social impact developers Capital & Centric, specialist lender Together and Airport City Manchester.
The editor-in-chief of the Manchester Evening News, Darren Thwaites, gave the opening address reflecting on how the city’s skyline has continued to change.
“Manchester has long established itself as one of Europe’s fastest growing cities,” he said. “It continues to lead the way in catering for an increasing metropolitan population.
“Entire new neighbourhoods are in development redefining the parameters of the city centre as it pushes outwards and upwards driving record levels of construction.”
Keynote speaker for the event, Piers Taylor, a renowned awardwinning architect, broadcaster and academic, reflected on how the property sector can tackle sustainability.
Liverpool-born Taylor has been called ‘one of the brightest architects in the profession’ and has designed a number of seminal buildings, including the RIBA Award-winning Room 13 and the house Moonshine, which won the AJ Small Project Award. Laying out where we are, in terms of the built environment, Mr Taylor said: “This is the most interesting time to be involved in property, in construction, in buildings and the making of the build environment. “The reason for that is in our lifetime we’re seeing the greatest rate of change we’ve ever seen. Firstly, the environmental change is huge and it’s an issue we are going to have to deal with and, in a way, I hope it’s an opportunity to do things slightly differently, which is really exciting.
“What is really interesting is the way we’ve gone about understanding issues of climate change, but that hasn’t really drip fed down into what construction needs to do. “We’ve tried all these things, we’ve been told we need to address climate change but all of these targets have been abandoned. At one point we had an ambition by 2050 we would already be producing zerocarbon buildings but the built environment we are going to have in 2050 already exists. “So, this is the future we’re going to have to wake up to.”
Mr Taylor said as town and cities become urbanised, living in a dense city is about the most ‘efficient thing we can do’ to tackle sustainability.
He said: “We can do things in a much more efficient way.
“Transport is more efficient, buildings are effortlessly sustainable, we use less lighting, less infrastructure, but critically we take pressure off the land, so the land remains green.
“By taking pressure off the land, we allow it to become re-forested.
“When I was growing up, cities were thought of as a fat, polluting, dirty, smelly places and when my uncle moved to New York in 1976, he moved to Manhattan and it was incredibly cheap to live in Manhattan because everyone wanted to live in the suburbs.
“The big realisation for people is the greatest contribution to sustainability has been the invention of the city. That is it, that is the only thing that has really made a difference to anything in terms of sustainability – it is the city.
“Why is that? When we become urbanised the population growth rate drops as people have fewer children and we take pressure off the land.
“So, the question is of course what type of cities do we need to have and the simple answer is we need cities, if not quite like New York, we need dense cities”
He added: “So although people talk endlessly about consuming their way out of the environmental crisis by going shopping less frequently, actually, living in cities or living in a town is the best thing you can do.
“If we can live densely, have more green spaces in the middle we can all share, that is an extraordinary model of sustainability.
“This is a really interesting way to think about buildings because some of the buildings that already exist in our cities are eco-houses, they’re built cheaply and efficiently and with local materials that have aged incredibly well, they’re resilient buildings that could be used for hotels, for apartments, for houses for offices, for hospitals, for schools.
“There are two up two down houses in Manchester, which are efficient and are eco-houses.
“Often a friend will phone me up and say can you design me an ecohouse in the countryside and I say no, you could do it yourself by moving into the city, it’ll actually be much better, they probably use less energy than living in a sparse part of the country.”
Mr Taylor went on to say how Manchester and the wider north west region was doing an ‘impressive’ job of growing its city centres. He added: “Its amazing to see that the places growing the most in the UK are in the north west, such as Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds, and Bradford.
“It’s amazing to see how these city centres are growing and I see just how different Manchester is compared to when I was in the city back in the 80s.
“And again, people think living in the centre is a strange thing but it’s something that we all need to do because of climate change, but also quality of life.”
When we become urbanised the population growth rate drops as people have fewer children and we take pressure off the land Piers Taylor