Peter Vangsbo - Decarbonising our Cities: A Roadmap to Reduction

The Hearing Architecture podcast, proudly sponsored by Brickworks, presents Again and Again and Again, a mini-series hosted by Hilary Duff.

Each week we bring you interviews and conversations as we seek better ways to understand, harness and deploy the expertise and knowledge of professionals currently within the design community, at home and abroad. Our guests are all experts on circularity within the building industry and share the aim to display that waste is not an accident, but the consequence of decisions made at the design stage. Here is our opportunity. We as designers have an opportunity to do better.

The construction, operation, and maintenance of buildings account for almost 30% of the globe’s carbon emissions and 40% of global energy consumption. This current way of practice is unacceptable, unsustainable, and misaligned with climate reduction targets. Our current model of architecture makes these problems worse. 

However, it also gives the architectural community a huge opportunity for impact and with a significant portion of new construction taking place in urban environments, cities have a role to play in encouraging sustainable construction methods and creating a market demand for low-carbon and bio-based materials.

Enter this week’s guest; Peter Vangsbo, Associate Director for Climate and Sustainable Services at Arup.

Peter leads the Circular Cities Services the Arup Copenhagen office. As part of the Nordic leadership team, he provides deep expertise in the areas of circular systems, decarbonisation, resilience, and climate change.

 His home city of Copenhagen is a locale often touted as being a hotbed of progressive, sustainable thinking, and of wide-spread design understanding and appreciation. This is something I saw and experienced first-hand during my visit, where an average apartment was just as likely to feature an PH5 Henningsen lamp as they are an Ikea piece. It’s a city where city residents can swim in the harbour within the centre of the city, and visit, hike up or even ski down the envelope of the infrastructure facility that processes their household waste (Google CopenHill by BIG if you don’t know what I am talking about). The urban setting of Copenhagen is like no other.

Peter has experience working on large urban and infrastructure projects and has experienced success in championing low-carbon construction, efficient reuse of resources, and the specification of biobased materials. I was interested in speaking with Peter to understand when working on large-scale and vital city infrastructure, how public and private sectors can interact and how he has managed to focus conversations and processes around these green and self-proclaimed ‘radical’ initiatives.

We discuss aspects of business model innovation, finance and funding, governance and policy, locality-based sustainability goals, and how to use data to prove the benefit of sustainability against the feasibility targets so often aimed for in business. 

We query the market barriers to accelerating the use of biobased building materials and how low-carbon construction needs to invest more in alternative building materials and we call upon industry leaders and city policymakers to make tackling embodied emissions a priority.

This has been Again&Again&Again, a mini-series of Hearing Architecture, proudly sponsored by Brickworks, and made possible with the support of the Alastair Swayn Foundation. This episode was recorded during a period of residency with the Danish Arts Association in Copenhagen. Thank you so much for listening and thank you to our international guest Peter Vangsbo of Arup, Denmark for your advocacy and expertise and engagement of policymakers and key players across the public and private sector, as we continue to work towards sustainable cities and carbon-positive future.

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