As far as buildings go, on a global scale they are one of the main culprits in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. Architects are generally not inclined to think about energy efficiency, and many public buildings in particular would be uninhabitable steel and glass hells, without vast air-conditioning and heating systems. Speculative builders, driven by the profit motive, have in the UK and elsewhere, created housing stock that is largely unable to function as effective shelter without significant oil inputs, here mostly for heating, elsewhere also for cooling (e.g most of the southern US states)
One probable consequence of this is that our existing UK housing stock in its present form, is not sustainable. In addition, particularly in the post-war period there has been an increasing tendency to use materials of high embodied energy that cannot be worked locally or with simple hand tools.
There are also arguments to suggest that much of it is in the wrong place.
As food, shelter and transport are among the key sustainability issues, the question arises of how to regenerate our buildings to become sustainable.
For me this means that they should ideally require energy inputs for neither heating nor cooling to any great extent and where such inputs are required, they should as far as possible be produced locally based on solar energy flows, rather than piped in from some massive chunk of capital investment a distance away. The materials should be as far as possible low-energy and should be workable locally and with simple hand tools wherever possible.
The question then arises about where the investment to make the implied massive changes would come from, whether to modify existing buildings, e.g. by strapping on insulation and energy systems or to recycle their materials elsewhere and how best to achieve any of this with market forces working against it.
