Sustain, maintain.

02 Feb, 2025

Character will be neither here nor there on an uninhabitable planet, and such an abstraction might seem an indulgence unaffordable on a planet heading for disaster anyway: expression, identity, meaning and beauty be damned when the crisis is existential.

What if though the paths to continued habitability and rich & meaningful character ran alongside each other, even if one's load be as footpath to the other's highway? What if the means to one end augmented the means to the other?

Sustainability is a word with a meaning, weight and baggage gained over these last number of decades in light of ongoing environmental emergency. It has prevailed and persisted as the key popular term in respect of related energy use imperatives. Maintainability is a word that carries no such weight: it means what it means and no more.

In purely literal terms, sustainable means capable of being sustained or sustaining, with sustenance both the means employed and the acts undertaken to sustain. The like distinctions apply to maintain. The concern here is somewhat semantic, but definition serves to clarify. To sustain is essentially to bear or support, and to maintain is essentially to preserve. Though not exact synonyms then they have an obvious relationship. The important distinction between the two in respect of their usual contemporary usage may be somewhat so stated: sustain will generally relate to resource, maintain to facility.

There is little meaningful difference between sustaining life and maintaining it. The sustainable built environment and the maintainable one do though suggest different qualities. Part of this difference lies in their respective common usages. Sustainable in its contemporary usage will most often relate to energy use, so to resource. The 'sustainable' building will be understood as one that is efficient in its energy use in construction and operation. The maintainable one will be understood as one for which the necessary actions to preserve the required level of order and operation are easily performed, the facility. In each is degree, the more or less.

Though there is a distinction between the definitions of these two, the sustainable and the maintainable built environments, in what they are, how they are understood, and how they may be achieved, the qualities that would define each are complementary, mutually reinforcing and often entirely the same.

The sustainable built environment is one capable of sustaining, or persisting, just as much as it is one capable of being sustained. In respect of sustenance and resource, this is of course a well-recognised feature: destructive convulsive change in the built environment involves the waste of both the embodied energy within the existing building and that required to construct the new. Another cost though of this type of change, not generally a primary consideration in a measure of 'Sustainability' as ecological imperative, is in the destruction of established character, of that special quality unique to any place, that's hard-earned and easily squandered.

The approaches proposed to achieve sustainability in building have generally tended to relate to resource use in construction and operation, such as in this very non-exhaustive list: at the scale of the building, in fabric and orientation that regulates environmental heating and cooling such that the need for additional related energy inputs are minimised, in locally generated energy for these purposes, in the source and use of material procured and transported without undue ecological cost; at an urban scale, in a density of development that limits the need for motorised transport and offers an efficiency in the use and distribution of locally generated energy.

In respect of preventing convulsive change and the consequent squander of both embodied energy and established character, the more often employed means are the development control tools available through the planning system. A feature of these tools is of course that they are entirely political, drafted and administered by civil servants but ultimately manipulable at the discretion of politicians, who are too often manipulable in turn by those who control capital. Those who control capital have never shown themselves troubled by squander of the common wealth, either the planet's resource or humanity's character, if doing so might mean a couple of quid. Of course no such cynicism, even if well informed by precedent, should prevent the pursuit of the better in respect of a political system or the built environment.

There is though no action so wasteful of energy and character and so damaging to the general good that it is unconscionable to capital. The only action guaranteed effective against such squander is public, whether via the coercive power of the state or that of number. The best means of preventing destructive and convulsive change is to make it so politically difficult that it can't or won't be undertaken. Informed public opinion is sometimes enough, but the weight and wall of red- and blue-tops ranged against such informed opinion is formidable. One would have thought by now that the negative ecological effect of convulsive change would be well recognised, but it is unwise to rely alone upon wisdom or better nature.

The foregoing of course assumes that this convulsive change is entirely a matter of choice, borne of a desire for profit over a true need. It often is, and there is genuinely no state of a building so irredeemable that remediation couldn't retrieve it. There may though be a degree of required remediation that would push the scales such that demolition & construction might actually be the ecologically sound choice. Notwithstanding what should probably be the first consideration in respect of any potential constructional act, which, as suggested by Cedric Price some decades ago, is the consideration of performing no act, there may very well be good arguments to make for demolition, construction or both. There may be a price to pay to avoid convulsive change. And there may be those buildings of an inherent character that precludes incremental change, that strangles any such related initiative or opportunity.

Ultimately, stasis within built environments is untenable. Populations grow, needs change. Contemporary modes of growth though, wherein the growth is the entire point, are untenable too. For this type of growth the untenable must be maintained. The built environment is low-hanging fruit for the committed capitalist - profit in other fields will sometimes require at least some measure of invention or quality, but with buildings no such requirement seems to apply. The state of much contemporary mass housing in London for example certainly seems to suggest that anything can be chucked up and it'll find a buyer. Whether or not it'll find an occupant is apparently neither here nor there.

What this means of course is that good arguments are of limited use when there is no agreement on what is actually valuable, and when the values of those with executive power seem so at odds with those one might presume if not universal than at least shared by a not insignificant number. The case for ecological sustainability is an existential one, yet struggles for universal acceptance and appropriate response. Character will be neither here nor there on an uninhabitable planet, but if we are to have an inhabitable planet, it would seem right to intend for our built places to be good ones. To argue for a sustainable approach when the alternative is to continue towards ecological collapse would seem easy. To be able to offer along with the hope of survival an environment of rich and meaningful character would seem a slam dunk. To argue in the hope of persuasion though is to assume a start point of some shared understanding, and this is often assumption too far.

Sustainability as energy imperative and sustainability as persistence are both inherent in design. In each is degree, and in building design is each to a greater or lesser extent. The design approaches to the energy imperative are touched on above, and as discussed are those most often associated with sustainability in design. Sustainability in the sense of persistence, in the avoidance of the need for convulsive or otherwise destructive or extensive change, and in the accommodation of the essential incremental change inherent in any functioning urban field, is in maintainability too, to such an extent that they are for this purpose synonymous. Maintainability too is a quality inherent in the form of a building, and can and should too be a designed one.

Urban environment that sustains, and urban environment that maintains, is urban environment that bears change readily, that gains character from that change, that evolves within itself over time a rich texture of space and fabric. It is an environment within which is wielded an incidental transformatory energy, within which takes place an energy spend incidental to the daily processes and transformational acts, conscious and unconscious, of all of its inhabitants, both plant and animal, in the mere course of their living. Within it, energy use is local, targeted, and efficient. That wasteful spend that comes with convulsive change has no use here, 'til wielded by those who would come to destroy.

Though the concern here is, as stated, somewhat semantic, the point is actually to argue for the greatest measure of sustainability and maintainability in building design possible, and to argue that expanding the range of means available to sustainable design to include for maintenance and maintainability will not only help with the ecological imperatives but will allow for an environment, built and unbuilt, of a richness and character the occupants of an inhabitable planet deserve.