Are people the problem or the solution: reflections on the role of people in the buildings and cities
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Keynote from The International Conference on Energy and Sustainable Futures (ICESF) 9-11 September 2019 Nottingham
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Are people the problem or the solution: reflections on the role of people in the buildings and cities
- 1. Are people the problem or the solution? Reflections on the role of people in buildings & cities Professor Richard Bull School of Architecture, Design and the Built Environment
- 2. 2 Sicinius: What is the city but the people? Citizens: True, the people are the city. William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, Act 3, Scene 1
- 4. The challenge of energy & behaviour in non-domestic buildings • Organisations (including commercial, public and industrial) account for between 50% and 60% of energy use worldwide • Buildings (non-dom) constituting 18% of emissions from buildings in the UK and 20% globally • More complex – in terms of building type/agency/control/ethics/organizational culture/hierarchies • Increasing research and interest in digital economy and ICT based solutions, e.g. visualisation of data (feedback/dashboards) and SMART/Intelligent Buildings relating behaviour change
- 6. If ‘they’ have the right information ‘they’ will change behaviour . . . ?
- 7. Three benefits of engagement 1. Democracy is increased as all citizens have a right to participate and be represented in environmental decision making 2. Non-experts are often more attune to the ethical issues of a situation 3. Greater acceptance can often be achieved by involving all those affected by the particular situation B, Sovacool, “What are we doing here? Analyzing fifteen years of energy scholarship and proposing a social science research agenda.” Energy Research & Social Science 1: pp. 1-29 (2014).
- 8. The [SMART] digital economy is more than just controls, feedback & dashboards . . . “Our electronic networks are enabling novel forms of collective action, enabling the creation of collaborative groups that are larger and more distributed than any other time” Clay Shirky
- 9. “When citizens become involved in working out a mutually acceptable solution to a project or problem that affects their community and their personal lives, they mature into responsible democratic citizens and reaffirm democracy” Tom Webler et al . . . & behaviour change is more than information provision . . .
- 10. What does this look like? • Genuine opportunities for engagement: citizens fora, workplace networks • ICT Platforms to actually share information • Creative visualisations • Meaningful data • Rethinking roles and responsibilities
- 15. Nudge Energy feedback Engaging employees at different levels across the organisation participationgap The Participation Gap
- 16. Bridging the participation gap 1. The core strategy of an organisation matters. 2. Engagement [and partnerships] around energy efficiency needs to happen within, and be aligned to, existing organisational capacities. 3. Technical conditions across an organisation’s building portfolio can affect the ways in which buildings are seen, clustered and managed. A “partnership” approach for energy within organisations has implications for the socially ideal level of centralised automation and control, as well as who has access to data displays, both publicly and privately
- 17. Challenges 1. We need innovation in advanced controls AND affordable tools that offer increased engagement and participation 2. Re-shape the effectiveness of public services through changing the relationship between building energy managers and building users. 3. Who’s responsible for our built environment? 4. Do building-users (citizens? want greater control of their buildings (cities?)? . . . ‘just get on with it’?
- 18. Further reading . . . . • Bull, R., Dooley, K., & Mazhar, M. (2019) The Crucial Role of Citizen Involvement in Smart City Development and Operation. Energy and Mobility in Smart Cities. (Eds.) WJ Nuttall, DV Gibson, A Ibarra-Yunez and D Trzmielak Institution of Civil Engineers Publishing. • Bull, R., & Janda, K. (2018). Beyond feedback: introducing the 'participation gap' in organisational energy management. Building Research and Information 46 (3), pp. 200-215. • Bull, R., & Azennoud, M. (2016) Smart participation- social learning: a model of participation. Energy – Proceedings of ICE. http://www.icevirtuallibrary.com/doi/abs/10.1680/jener.15.00030 1-8. • Bull, R., Lemon, M., Everitt, D., & Stuart, G. (2015). Moving beyond feedback: Energy behaviour and local engagement in the United Kingdom. Energy Research & Social Science 8 32-40 • Bull, R., J. Petts, et al. (2008). "Social Learning from Public Engagement: Dreaming the impossible?" Journal of Environmental Management and Planning 51(5): 703-718. Contact: richard.bull@ntu.ac.uk Twitter: @richbull
Editor's Notes
- Majority of World’s pop now live in cities Huge challenges around mobility, energy, water, health and wellbeing Are smart cities – digitally interconnected systems - the solution? We have emerging examples of the role of ICT enabled solutions –energy management systems, smart buildings, travel apps, smart lighting solutions with associated challenges around governance, privacy and security. What about the people who live in the cities – what do they want? Have we asked them? Should we ask them?
- The sense, in both cities and buildings, is that people, are hurdle to overcome . . . Rather than a resource to be utilized. A positive force for good, of knowledge Lost times I’ve heard it said – this building would function perfectly if it wasn’t for the people! Remind who our buildings are for?
- My research has focused here . . . More complex than residential Many of these approaches still rely on a ‘information deficit’ model whereby the building users are a hurdle to be overcome rather than a resource to be utilised – Though some excellent recent papers coming out starting to indentify the organisational barriers around hierarchies in organisations, cost of enegry and culture (Andrews and Johnston 2016, ) and the need to move beyond feedback towards engagement.
- Why behaviour change? Invisibility of energy, like our waste and recycling behaviours they are out of sight and out of mind. Because most people are unaware of the environmental impacts of their life choices – we ‘ve lost that connection. Which is why we’re interested in novel forms of visualization and the role of public engagement
- Proponents of both social media and public participation theory Social media has emerged as a worldwide phenomenon with applications like Facebook and Twitter credited with everything from Obama’s 2008 election victory (Zhang, Johnson et al. 2009), to the Arab Spring (Ghonin, 2012). Devised on the principles of Web 2.0 – user-generated content and collaboration –sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter have witnessed incredible success and popularity. At its core, Web 2.0 and social media is about participation and it is here that the link between social media and theories of public engagement emerge. These twin attributes of the digital economy find their home in the public engagement literature which in-turn has evolved out of risk communication (Fischoff 1995), theories of deliberative democracy (Habermas 1979; Dryzek 2000) and citizen science (Irwin 1995). Increasingly, links are made between public engagement and behaviour change (Webler et al. 1995, Bull, Petts et al. 2008). The parallels are clear then between the risk communication/public engagement schools of thought and the social media gurus: people (lay and expert) talking and working together can generate new forms of knowledge and contribute to more effective governance. But can this approach work in non-domestic buildings?
- Arnstein’s ladder of participation An increasingly popular model for conceptualising empowerment is Shelly Arnstein’s Ladder of Participation. In her model Arnstein argued that citizen involvement is a fairer way of distributing power in our society, especially within the planning context. At the bottom of the ladder are one-dimensional forms of communication that act as a substitute for more authentic types of interaction. Arnstein believed that “citizen control” should be the top of the ladder thus signifying a redistribution of power to those who are often excluded from the decision-making processes within society [43]. This model has been successfully applied to a range of disciplines, most recently energy behaviours in buildings and organisations [44].
- The EDI-Net system is a powerful analysis tool that enables monitoring of the entire building portfolio from a single dashboard (https://dashboard.edi-net.eu). Consumption data is automatically imported into the system and then analysed on the EDI-Net server so that the results are updated daily and displayed in near real time. The dashboard helps with your day to day energy and water management. Easy to understand performance indicators are key though - these smiley faces [CLICK] show how metered consumption compares to the expected level. Green smiley faces show low consumption, red sad faces show high consumption. Public league tables allow energy managers to communicate energy performance to building users in a user-friendly manner [CLICK]. More detailed graphs are available for those who want to look more closely [CLICK).
- Alongside easy to understand performance indicators, user-engagement has been a hallmark of EDI-Net. The EDI-Net online discussion forum enables structured communication and dialogue between users in order for knowledge, experience and advice to be obtained. The EDI-Net Forum is also an instrument which you can use as part of an integrated awareness campaigns and training package for your employees, because only the joint cooperation of all parties involved can help to reduce the energy consumption of your buildings and save money. The forum also allows participants to share their experiences, promote their successes and discuss their challenges. Everybody is welcome to register and contribute to the discussion [CLICK]
- With a colleague at UCL We’ve been comparing our case studies in the non-domestic sector as we’ve explored increasing participation in organisations. We’ve identified this participation gap . . .
- Firstly, the core strategy of an organisation matters. Thus engagement around energy efficiency needs to happen within, and be aligned to, existing relationships, roles and teams. Further research is needed into how different internal organisational cultures frame employee duties, behaviours, and expectations, particularly with regard to data, analytics, and feedback. This also applies to how budgets are managed and financial targets are set for organisations. If energy efficiency targets are going to compete with core business activities and profitability then there will be only one winner. Second, we need to move beyond the ‘them and us’ culture and ‘information-deficit’ approach intrinsic in the narrow interpretation of energy efficiency as dashboards and feedback. Employee engagement should be framed in a way that acknowledges the positive contribution they can make to energy efficiency, rather than treating them as a ‘problem to be solved’ or another management project. Finally, the challenge of organizing and achieving greater participation in the workplace is ever-present and the technical challenges that exist for smaller organisations, around both accessing the energy data via metering and makings sense of the data once its received, should not be dismissed. Relationships take time, trust and technical competency.
- Original conceptions of smart or intelligent buildings envisaged buildings that would take into account the preferences and experiences of the building-users, yet a techno-centric approach has tended to dominate – It is neither desirable nor democratic for the large ICT players to shape our cities without the clear engagement and involvement of the people who live in them, especially given legitimate concerns around data privacy and security, as these new data-sharing platforms, from smart meters to sharing platforms, harvest personal information.