City-Level Decoupling-Case Studies

CITY-LEVEL DECOUPLING: URBAN RESOURCE FLOWS AND THE GOVERNANCE OF INFRASTRUCTURE TRANSITIONS

energy consumption. Residents were implicated in community activities from cultivating organic vegetables, to separating wastes and managing the community’s bio-combustion plant. However, their lifestyles remained unquestioned for the most part. Houses were provided with luxurious features including communal facilities such as a swimming pool and a naturally-ventilated squash court, and individual facilities such as complex air conditioning systems for large homes. The project was developed like any other conventional development emerging during the boom, relying on initial capital deposited by prospective buyers and delivering first the more expensive stand-alone houses in the development to finance the rest of the development, which consists of apartments. The project was made possible by the marketing of a niche for green housing by BCIL, and by the commitment of numerous professionals who often committed more time and resources to this project than they would have committed to a conventional one. Being a pilot project, T-Zed faced difficulties such as the negotiation of bureaucratic permits and land disputes. T-Zed also faced issues related to the introduction of bundled innovations, which created additional problems in other parts of the design. These included the practical limitations of the rainwater harvesting system to meet the compounds' demands, as well as organisational problems when sourcing construction professionals capable of dealing with locally sourced materials. BCIL carried out an in-house evaluation to examine the performance of T-Zed in terms of carbon emissions reduction. Although their estimations rely on a series of assumptions, it is reasonable to assume that residents in T-Zed have lower emissions per capita than those in other new gated developments catering for the growing middle class in Bangalore. However, T-Zed does not question the lifestyles which fuel those emissions and which are common both inside and outside T-Zed. BCIL has not been able to compare the emissions per capita in T-Zed with those of the average resident in central Bangalore, where the demands for water, energy and space appear much smaller. Some local NGO representatives blame changing lifestyles and aspirations towards idealized suburban American models for the increased consumption of resources in new developments. These claims are often accompanied by a sense of nostalgia for old and less wasteful living practices, and the conviction that consuming more resources may not necessarily lead to a better quality of life. T-Zed has served as inspiration for other private developers and high-end consumers in Bangalore. The experiment has fostered new green housing projects in three different ways. First, BCIL has become a successful company, and it is now replicating the experiment on a large scale in Bangalore and nearby Mysore. BCIL’s success has inspired the emergence of new developers interested in the same commercial model of green housing. Second, T-Zed provided space for training a new class of professionals interested in sustainable housing who could both develop their dreams of better, greener houses, and demonstrate how to achieve these ideals in practice. These professionals have worked in the growing green housing industry, but many of them have also gone to work elsewhere in the construction industry, incorporating some of the thinking behind T-Zed in mainstream projects. Third, T-Zed has set a model of desirability for high-end consumers who are now demanding green as a value-added feature of their houses. These new demands will contribute to growing interest in green housing as a profitable area of investment.

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