Reassess land use to cut energy consumption

It’s a daunting task to figure out what to do about the climate threat. It’s much easier to talk about what others, including governments, should do.

The main cause of climate change is the combustion of fossil fuels, which are used to warm buildings, and move people and goods around. Both of these are affected by municipal governments. Planning departments determine where housing and other buildings can be built. They stipulate the intensity of the land use. They establish the local roads and all the infrastructure contained within the road allowance.

Lastly, they have, for the previous 70 years, intentionally separated the various land uses so that residential areas are removed from employment, institutional, recreational and shopping areas. The characteristics of low intensity and separated land uses require excessive energy consumption and therefore require reassessment.

Planning departments decide the proportion of housing types in new developments. There is a strong bias to allocate a large segment to single-family houses partly because large-scale builders want to build and profit from this form of housing. Looking through a climate lens, this type of housing requires the most materials per housing unit.

It requires the most infrastructure and land per unit and more importantly, it requires more energy to keep the occupants comfortable because it has the greatest external surface area exposed to the cold. The standard of building is dictated by the province, but the Ontario Building Code is a minimum standard. There continues to be resistance to enforcing a climate-sensitive, green building code even though independent, innovative builders have demonstrated the significant energy savings of adopting a modified approach.

Now that we need to drastically reduce energy consumption, we need to reconsider not just new growth, but existing development. A typical single-family house on a separate lot presents a number of energyrelated pressures and possibilities.

The most obvious response is to do an energy retrofit, but in isolation of other objectives, this is costly. To improve the efficiency of the land use and the efficiency of the existing infrastructure, the planning department could promote the expansion of the building with the goal of creating a duplex and generating more revenue to support the underfunded infrastructure. If this new unit was built to minimum, present-day standards, it would slightly reduce the energy needs of the existing home since one of the five surfaces would be warm on both sides. If the province moved to establish a green building code, the energy savings could easily reduce the total energy consumption for heating and cooling by 50 per cent. Either way, the municipality could promote greener buildings by giving them priority, reducing permit and administration fees and offering incentives.

The problem caused by separating residential areas from other land uses is more difficult to overcome. Presently, “residential uses” have small allowances for “home occupations” and “home industries.” These need to be broadened. Large, extensive “power centres” could evolve into complete, diversified and walkable neighbourhoods.

The preoccupation of planning departments with restrictions must be reduced and replaced with a view to encouraging and allowing diversity in uses while preserving reasonable standards. Demographics, technology and common interests have evolved substantially in the last half a century, but our pattern of city building has remained static, expensive and threatening to our future.