Stephen O’Malley, CEO and Founding Director of Civic Engineers, advocates for sustainable, proximity-based urban design to address climate challenges and enhance wellbeing.

The realities of climate change are no longer contestable. Our precious ecosystems are being overwhelmed by energy-hungry lifestyle choices and carbon-intensive industrial methods. Engineers have played a huge role in creating these systems. Fortunately, by applying these long-established technical skills with greater emotional intelligence, we also possess the reframed ability to adapt them to provide sustainable and regenerative options.

 

We need a new way to live. The spatial arrangement, and the mix of uses, of our neighbourhoods has a profound impact on how they function, how we move around them and how they work with the lie of the land. The best examples are those that work in harmony with the landscape, heritage and local distinctiveness.

 

The recent suite of societal changes we’ve experienced have caused us to rethink our built environment. We can now seamlessly glide from a medical appointment to a university lecture, renew our car insurance, arrange grocery home delivery, check-up on our elderly aunt via Teams from the convenience of our kitchen table.

 

Reducing our need to physically travel provides the freedom to achieve more by travelling less. This sea change in lifestyle patterns brings the concept of proximity into sharp focus. It’s about placing the services of our everyday in a way that shortens the distances we journey and therefore making it more likely that these trips will be undertaken by active travel means.

 

How these neighbourhoods and their uses are clustered, and their functionality in concert becomes ever more important: especially when we recognise the enduring value rooted in the geography and architectural character of these evolved districts. Creating infrastructure and places that work in harmony with the natural landscape increases their climatic resilience and attractiveness, and ensures sustainable futures for the communities that occupy them. 

 

Getting the public onboard is about hearts and minds. It does require regulation and ‘sticks’’ like the Mayor of London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone. Introduced in 2019, mandatory policies like this are necessary to shepherd us all towards behaviours that will, in time, be depoliticised.

 

Shifting from car oriented movement in these increasingly dense neighbourhoods is not just a practical recognition that more of us living in closer proximity leads to a gridlocked highway network. We can tighten the street geometry to liberate space for other uses. These other uses include safer pavements for pedestrians. Also social squares, parks and public realm, complete with integrated cycling routes and, critically, space for Nature-based Solutions. The positive benefits of these measures is evidenced through the LTN programme rolled out across the capital. The performance data highlights improved sociability and public health, amongst other metrics. 

 

For new forms of infrastructure to be sustainable, we also need to think about the new financial models. Climate resilient urban infrastructure, if designed well, reduces the risk of flooding, protects properties, businesses and people. At Civic, we have developed the idea of EcoBIDS which would see local stakeholders, the value beneficiaries of these choices, put money in a collective pot, which could be redistributed to fund these micro-interventions as part of a borough wide and local watercourse catchment system, to keep them thriving. After all, we all have something to gain from cities that are nurturing, attractive to live in and synchronised with our natural environment.