Competing models by industry, government and NGOs
Steven A. Moore and Nathan Engstrom
In 1992 the city of Austin, Texas, was the first in the country to create a residential
green building programme and by the end of the century about 26 similar ones
emerged in 16 different states. Moore and Engstrom argue two related points. The
first is that ‘green building’ reflects the latent fusion of two powerful late-nineteenthcentury
ideas, preservation of the natural environment and protection of the public
health. These two concepts were so ideologically opposed at the turn of the twentieth
century that it took a full century of changing conditions to reconcile the opposing
assumptions that motivated their respective supporters. Second, the authors hold
that, once reconciled under the broad umbrella of ‘sustainable development’, green
building programmes foreshadow North American building codes of the twenty-first
century. Some US green building ‘programmes’ are departments within municipal
governments, others are the products of homebuilder associations, and at least two
are non-profit non-governmental organisations. Taken collectively, these
‘programmes’ reflect a changing cultural horizon with regard to public health and the
built environment. Taken individually, however, they reflect contradictory social values
that vie to redefine how a private house embodies a public ‘good’. The authors’ project
is not to predict how these conflicting social values will become resolved, but to better
understand the social construction of green building programmes as antecedents of
twenty-first-century cultural values that will ultimately become realised as standardised
building codes.
Green building as good building
Building codes in the United States derive principally from English precedents. Their
adoption can be understood as acceptance by mid-nineteenth-century Americans of
those utilitarian values which made it possible to restrict some individual freedoms, like
shoddy building practices, in favour of general health, safety and welfare. The political
will to pass such legislation was, no doubt, strongly influenced by a series of devastating
fires that damaged or destroyed eleven nineteenth-century American cities and
the chronic outbreaks of typhus, yellow fever and smallpox that plagued many other
cities (AIA 1990: 9). These crises were inevitably followed by legislation and the
founding of institutions intent on eliminating those building practices that would most
obviously contribute to repeat fires and epidemics. Historians generally refer to this
phenomenon as the era of ‘sanitary reform’ or the ‘public health movement’.
If we accept this dialectical relation of crisis and reform it is tempting to interpret the
appearance of ‘green building programmes’ in the US, not as a new phenomenon, but
as a continuation of two nineteenth-century social movements: the public health movement
and the environmental movement. The environmental crises experienced by contemporary city dwellers are, after all, not different in kind from those experienced by
nineteenth-century urban dwellers. Poor air quality, fouled water and general environmental
degradation are the unintended consequences of industrial development that
are shared by both periods. It does not really matter if the sources of pollution have
shifted from smokestacks to tailpipes – the threat is the same. What is different in our
current situation is that the dramatic fires and epidemics of the nineteenth century have
been replaced by more subtle and pervasive effects that derive from long-term industrial
development. Energy scarcity, water scarcity, climate change and chemical sensitivity
are environmental conditions that even the economically comfortable can no longer
avoid by moving further out of town. It is now solidly middle-class citizens, not only the
industrial proletariat, who experience the crisis of environmental degradation and seek
environmental security from government, industry or third-party experts. The risks associated
with environmental degradation have, then, been somewhat democratised. And
with the democratisation of risk has come economic and political controversy (Beck
1992: 191–9).
The production of environmental programmes and building codes is, of course, not
entirely a matter of science. Rather, it is a highly social and contentious process in which
some interests are suppressed and others are reinforced. The presence of competing
interests is reflected in the confusing array of codes and green building standards that
have emerged in response to contemporary environmental conditions. Commercial
construction certification schemes like LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental
Design), BEES (Building for Economic and Environmental Sustainability) and BREEAM
(Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method) are just a few
examples. Such conflicting standards tend to frame problems and propose solutions in
ways that define opposing ‘goods’. All manufacturing standards are, in this view,
socially constructed agreements that favour a particular set of actors because they
contain the interests of the standard-makers (Latour 1987: 201).1
Beginning with the sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920), many have argued that the
history of modernisation has been synonymous with standardisation (Weber 1958:
181–2; Feenberg 1995: 4). Weber understood that the institutions of modern
commerce are better able to optimise exchange value by imposing a single structure on
diverse populations and spaces. This logic suggests that those outside an emergent
technological network run the risk of being excluded from certain exchanges. If your
locomotive is of the wrong gauge, your motor of the wrong voltage or your software of
the wrong operating system, you are excluded. The mechanisms of commerce, then,
favour dominance by a single technological standard. It does not really matter what that
standard is – DOS versus MAC, for example – so long as it is commensurable with the
endless array of local conditions. If we apply the logic of modernisation to the homebuilding
industry, it suggests that the emergence of multiple green building
programmes and model environmental codes are competing attempts to standardise
the many variables of ‘good’ building to include ‘green’ building practices.
On this basis, we hypothesise that standards designed by industry, government, and
non-governmental organisation (NGO) environmentalists will differ. This hypothesis is
based on the assumptions that these organisational types generally represent opposing
political interests and that with authorship of a building code comes the power to regulate
the social and technical constitution of the artefact. We also assume that, in practice,
standardised codes represent, to one degree or another, the negotiated interests
of industry, government and environmentalists. Building codes can, then, be understood as the temporary resolution of social conflicts that are, in turn, materialised
as buildings. The establishment of codes, by any means, pushes the building industry
down a particular technological path. Green building codes will, for example, push us
away from paints that rely on volatile organic compounds to those that do not and from
harvesting old-growth timber towards substitute technologies such as engineered
wood products. In these and other similar cases some technological networks will
benefit and others will necessarily suffer.
Green building programmes intend to challenge existing building codes and seek to
redefine the agreements that shaped them on the grounds of the general welfare.
According to this utilitarian logic, private dwellings contribute to or detract from several
kinds of public resources or public goods. With regard to the construction of private
houses, two types of damage to public resources can be assessed by environmental
accountants. The first are those negative environmental impacts that derive from gathering
building materials and energy from distant locales. Water pollution caused by
timber ‘clear-cutting’ or strip mining is an example of this type, where costs are borne by
downstream citizens reliant on access to clean water. The second is the public cost to
maintain the health and welfare of those citizens who build badly, either out of ignorance
or malice. An example of this type is personal injury and property damage derived from
building on a flood plain, where costs are borne by taxpayers. In the eyes of utilitarians,
the loss of either type of public good trumps private property rights because such
ruinous acts increase the public cost to maintain the ‘civic economy’. If we agree, then,
that the general welfare is promoted by green building we have also agreed in principle
that green building is a necessary if insufficient condition for good building.
The balance of this chapter is in four sections. The first section establishes the early
linkage between building codes and the public health movement and the delayed linkage
of building codes to the environmental movement. The second section examines how
changing technological standards both reflect and attempt to resolve cultural conflict. To
make these arguments concrete, we will, in the third section, empirically examine three
cases that demonstrate how government, industry and environmentalists infuse technological
standards with opposing values. Finally, our conclusion will argue that through a
process of crisis, reform, codification and standardisation today’s green building
programmes foreshadow the social construction of twenty-first-century building codes.
Building codes, public health, environmental preservation
In this section we argue that the long-term development of building codes related to
human health is rooted in nineteenth-century utilitarian thought and becomes fused with
the environmental preservation movement at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
The codification of building standards, as all architecture students learn early in their
careers, begins with Article 229 of the Code of King Hammurabi (Mesopotamia 1780
BCE) (Sanderson 1969: 5). The Greeks and Romans certainly contributed to the establishment
of construction standards, but it wasn’t until 1189 in England that a building
act representing municipal legislative power was developed. Five hundred years later, in
1676, a document resembling a modern building code was created through an Act of
Parliament to regulate the rebuilding of London after the devastating fire of 1666 (AIA
1990: 8). These pre-modern codes were, in emphasis, fire-prevention ordinances. The
emergence of the industrial revolution and rapid urbanisation in the nineteenth century,
however, created new conditions that catalysed the codification of building standards.
The idea that there is a collective or ‘public’ health, and that it is linked to environmental
conditions, emerged in mid-nineteenth-century England as ‘the sanitary idea’.
Most historians attribute the first or most prominent articulation of this idea to Edwin
Chadwick, son of James. The elder Chadwick was a devotee of the revolutionary Tom
Paine and had sufficient status among radical thinkers of his day to gain his son a position
as the personal secretary to Jeremy Bentham, a progenitor of utilitarianism. It was
Bentham who argued for the ‘greatest happiness principle’, that ‘the end of life, ethically
speaking is “the greatest good for the greatest number”’ (Reese 1980: 53). Although
the younger Chadwick was profoundly influenced by the utilitarians in philosophical
matters, he is remembered, not as a thinker, but as a civil servant and man of action. At
the behest of Parliament, he published in 1842 his Report on the Sanitary Condition of
the Labouring Population of Great Britain, which proved to be as historically influential
as it was then controversial. Chadwick’s report was considered radical because, first, it
relied on rigorously gathered empirical data rather than deductive logic, and second, it
employed such methods to reject the commonly held idea that disease was the fatalistic
imposition of God’s will. With equal temerity, Chadwick challenged the received
wisdom that held poverty to be the main cause of ill health. Chadwick argued the
reverse, that ‘the attack of fever precedes the destitution, not the destitution the
disease’ (Chadwick 1965: 210). For Chadwick and his fellow ‘sanitarians’, disease was
not an outward sign of moral depravity, but the misfortune of those subjected to
degraded environments. In the eyes of historian William Luckin, Chadwick was a ‘protoenvironmentalist’
because he identified an environmental cause of disease before there
was any scientific understanding of pathogenic organisms (Melosi 2000: 46). It was not
until some 20 years after the publication of Chadwick’s report that ‘germ theory’, based
on the work of Pasteur and others, would begin to supplant the then dominant ‘miasma’
theory of disease.
Chadwick’s medical logic might have remained simply prescient were it not for the
political implications of the sanitary idea. Beginning with the utilitarian formula of ‘the
greatest good for the greatest number’, he reasoned that true ‘civic economy’ required
‘preventative measures in raising the standard of health and the chances of life’
(Chadwick 1965: 246). It was a short mental step from advocating the economic value
of public health to advocating the creation of a general building code backed up by a
strong central government capable of enforcing such standards (Chadwick 1965:
339–47). The utilitarians were, then, precursors of the modern welfare state.
In recent years utilitarianism has been much criticised for its easy disregard for the
civil rights of minorities. Bentham, Chadwick and their followers constructed an attitude
towards social order that we now regard as highly authoritarian and technocratic. They
were not predisposed to trust in the ability of common citizens to make sensible choices
concerning much of anything. Rather, their idea of ‘civic economy’ relied on an educated
elite to manage efficiently the interests of society, which they conceived to be essentially
economic in nature.
Such an efficiently managed or sanitised society was the nightmare of Michel
Foucault (1975). In Foucault’s view, the institutions of public health constructed by
nineteenth-century utilitarians were little more than the illegitimate mechanisms of the
modern bureaucratic state through which social deviancy might be eradicated. The
ethical dilemma posed by the doctrines of public health, then, is characterised by a
confrontation between two seemingly rational desires. First is the desire of those who,
like Chadwick, wish to minimise the waste of resources associated with environmental
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