Mitigate, Adapt, Sustain: Emerging Workflows and Design Protocols for Carbon Neutral Subtropical H2 Cities

Worldwide, the level of man-made Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions reached a record high – approximately 31 billion tons in 2012. Members of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claim that this was almost certainly the largest jump in any year since the Industrial Revolution. Coastal regions in hot and humid climate zones are in particular vulnerable to risks imposed by climate change. Sea level rise, storm surge, energy demand increase, land use changes and infrastructure losses, migration, freshwater shortages and water-borne diseases will continue to impact coastal societies. The question is how can we prevent the tendency of climate-induced sea level rise and how can we adapt better to these unstoppable changes? How can we mitigate the impacts and sustain in our built environments? There are some answers for the building sector: the mandatory European Union’s nearly Net-Zero-Energy-Building 2018-2020 regulations for all new public and private owned buildings and the voluntary U.S. American Institute of Architects’ (AIA) 2030 carbon neutral building challenge’ mark a change toward various educational and practice oriented resource tools that address minimizing Greenhouse Gas emissions. All these initiatives try to reverse the negative impact of temperature increase and climate change. However, the general planning perception in the U.S. that efforts to adapt to climate change might reduce the commitment to limiting GHG’s and result in more challenges in the long term in addition to decision-makers’ preference to short-term and low upfront cost options. We know the need for change is crucial despite conflicting goals in developing long-term core tasks for governments, society, and business. Another challenge is that the divide between sea water level rise adaptive planning, real estate losses and re-adaptive infrastructure economics, construction and coastal city retrofitting has resulted in increased policy and master planning delays and costs. Another reason is that the lack of participatory information processes and technology, scenarios modeling with prognostic design coding techniques are not well integrated or are missing completely.This essay explores parallels between computational and performance based developed urban design and nautical engineering practices in the subtropics– here represented by successful projects of leading architecture and engineering firms specialized in sea water level rise adaptable H2 carbon-neutral city design coding and flood mitigation. The essay interprets how the future of computationally developed H2 carbon neutral architecture will affect and assist policy making, life-cycle design and industrial practice through parametric-topological and/or algorithmic ‘What-if” scenario modeling of new coastal cities and buildings. The examples will demonstrate that a paradigm change to view water as a ‘site opportunity’ will help to identify adaptive re-use strategies and will envision how to accommodate adaptable structures for (sub-) tropical living and working within flooding and tidal inundations.The findings suggest that these participatory, ‘what if’ scenario tools offer new visions and workflows in the Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI) with Swarm Intelligence (SI) driven sensor infrastructures and manufacturing systems for designing, producing, assembling, and benchmarking, retrofitted or new, adaptable and subtropical carbon neutral cities.

Volume Editors
Anthony Abbate, Francis Lyn & Rosemary Kennedy

ISBN
978-0-935502-90-9