Teleworking Cities of To-Morrow

Above: Ebeneezer Howard's famous 'Three Magnets' diagramme as reimagined for a teleworking city of to-morrow.

An idea whose time has come

During the early stages of the Coronavirus lock-down, the RIBA Journal decided to launch a competition posing the question of how do we live with this virus going forward? The competition was called, 'Rethink: 2025 – Design for life after Covid-19'. In the run-up to launching Deeper Green, founder Ian McKay decided to dust off an idea he originally mooted in the late 1990's through his former practice, BBM Sustainable Design. In its original guise, the idea was known as the Comstation and it was an idea targeted at helping society reduce its dependancy on commuting with view to lowering carbon emissions. Twenty odd years on, it would appear society just was not ready for it. Perhaps with the enforced working from home regime of the first half of 2020, its time has come. In its updated format, now called The Node, the proposition thinks through issues around living with the Covid-19 pandemic.

Transitioning out of the age of the commuter

There are of course two existential societal threats that we currently face, Coronavirus and the climate change emergency. We therefore must exploit the positive environmental changes we have all witnessed these last few months while we get the society back to work and school. So this proposal concerns two sectors effected by the Coronavirus outbreak. One is transport, where the lockdown gave us a unique insight into how society could cope with far less mobility, and the other is the service sector which perhaps most easily of all sectors adapted to the limitations of homeworking.

The main premise of this proposal is to nurture a society where about 70 per cent of the working population telework roughly 70 per cent of the time with a view to reducing carbon emissions and improving quality of life.

In the 19th Century, the UK pretty much invented the Age of the Commuter and the town and country idyll which was emulated the world over. Since the mid-1980's the transport sector has become the UK's biggest polluter. Politicians and business leaders alike have pretty much turned a blind eye to our unbridled use of transport. We love it. We are mobility junkies.

Above: Since the mid-1980's the transport sector has become the single biggest emitter of carbon in the UK and continues an upwards trend.

In the last 40 years, the Information Age has arrived. Whilst some hinted that teleworking could start to replace commuting, there has been little interest in exploiting the potentials for social and environmental benefit. The stay at home lockdown however has revealed to so many of us that we can telework, at least in some sectors.

Potential benefits of teleworking:

• new revenue streams for rail operators in the post-commuter age

• less interaction in congested transport systems and shared working environments where contagion can spread

• less money and carbon emissions expended on commuting

• potentials for increased productivity

• less stress by avoiding peak time travel crush, delays and cancelations

• commuting time redirected to exercise, family etc.

• flexible hours to help with childcare

A basic programme of accommodation might include: 

• season ticket holder hot desk spaces

• hireable meeting rooms

• printing and scanning stations

• café and créche (with roof terrace space and solar shading)

• indoor and outdoor exercise space

The case for a new building typology

Above: The medium to long distanced commuting towns have the greatest potentials for carbon emission savings and quality of life improvement through adopting teleworking lifestyles.

Working at home is not for everyone. Facilities can be poor and family interruptions dilute working focus. Without a change of scene, quality of life can be negatively impacted. What then if commuters did not have to commute everyday? What if season tickets could be used to travel or rent space in a rail station based facility? Such an arrangement might be financially viable as it could be paid for by moneys that would otherwise be destined for increasing transport capacity.

This new building typology, we are coining, a Node. It would be an extension of the traditional station. It would be built above station car parks or over tracks, typically in a linear format to grow with demand. It would target embodied carbon construction of below 500kgCO2e/m2, be designed for optimum deconstruction and reuse and have operational energy use of below 55kWh/m2/annum.[1] The Node would not just be a place to hot desk, it would become a community hive of activity and networking with a range of supportive facilities to make teleworking a quality of life step forward.

The proposal can play an important role in integrating pandemic resilience. The basic layout would afford inherent contagion control. It would also be able to engage active measures should a localised lockdown be imposed to allow people to continue using the facility within acceptable levels of risk.

Above & below: Elevation, long section and cross sections of ‘The Node’ complete with car and bike parking on the ground floor, serviced office space on the upper floors and with various technologies employed towards zero-carbon operational performance.

This vertical section view of the building showing some of the technical strategies for its low-energy operations, with a twin skinned facade serving as a buffer to temper replacement fresh air, reduce excessive hot summer solar radiation whilst maximising potentials for winter passive solar gains. Cross ventilation is powered with passive stack ventilation towers with rotating wind cowls serving to increase air flow.

The carbon calculation

The environmental case for The Node can be shown with the simple calculation showing the carbon emission per passenger kilometre[2]:

Brighton to London Victoria round trip = 177kms

177 km x 0.06* kg CO2/ Passenger Kilometre by rail = 10.62kg of carbon per day

253 working days per year = 2,687kg of carbon per year

On the basis that commuters might telework around 70% of the time, this would equate to carbon emission saving of around 1,881kg of carbon per annum per commuter. Naturally there would need to be some changes to the responsiveness of rolling stock to take best advantage of lower passenger numbers travelling each day.

The wider built environment ramifications

City centres would change. With businesses and organisations needing less office space and therefore less office buildings needed generally, central business districts could undergo a renaissance of downtown living. Some office building could be refitted to suit more open and flexible use of businesses whilst others could be turned into residential units and the odd disused building plot deconstructed to make way for urban lung pocket parks. Meanwhile, what were sterile weekday dormitory town centres would benefit from more locally distributed financial activity.

Architectural strategies for The Node

With a climate emergency to plan for and diminishing carbon budgets to play with, the architectural strategies for The Node need to be benchmarked as close as possible to net zero carbon as practically possible. The template for each installation will need to recognise embodied, operational and end of life carbon impacts.

Structural Strategy

Above: The structural systems proposed exploit the benefits of bio-based materials such as fast-grown cross-laminated timber superstructure with its ability for renewal and carbon dioxide capture and storage, low-carbon concrete piloti on reversible screw piles for maximising deconstruction and re-use potentials.

• Reversible screw pile foundations

• Ground storey piloti constructed with low-carbon concrete technology

• Superstructure formed with cross laminated timber cross walls and floors with the cross walls acting as transfer beams to receive glulaminated beams to support the floor and roof decks

• Apertures cut in the cross walls to have rounded corners reminiscent of apertures formed in the fuselages of planes, ships and trains from the late 1950's onwards

Environmental Strategy

• Utilise passive stack ventilation with roof mounted wind cowls (safer during pandemics than air conditioning)

• Post-loaded thermal mass using previously constructed sources of concrete, masonry or sand and cement screeds

• Nigh time cooling of the thermal mass

• Micro-louvre technology to reduce summer and mid-season solar gain through glazed apertures

• Ground or air source heat pump with electric back-up for space heating and domestic hot water

• Extensive on-site renewable energy systems mounted over roofs and roof terraces with 30º pitch for southerly oriented buildings or 5º – 10º pitch for east and west oriented buildings

• Rainwater harvesting and high level storage to provide gravity fed toilet/urinal flushing water

• Planted roof terraces to provide net-biodiversity gain over the car park

Covid responsive measures

We need to address the possibility that an effective prevention and cure may never materialise for Coronavirus / Covid-19. We must plan therefore for getting back to work with a more sophisticated and dynamic approach than purely applying the commercially disastrous two metre social distancing requirement. A significant part of this toolkit is the widespread adoption of face masks. However there maybe built-environment solutions which can help. One is to create anti-viral vestibules around entrances to buildings. These structures can be relatively easily erected with a kit of parts on the outside of the building or if the building already has a good sized draught lobby they could be retrofitted into these spaces. The idea is to create a passageway through which people move through should another outbreak arise locally, and in such situations an antiviral mist can be sprayed to treat everyone entering the building at times of heightened risk.

Above: The basic layout of the hot desk spaces relies on discrete screens either side to form niches which might largely contain aerosol-borne contagion with no one facing someone else. If local virus outbreaks occur, work stations would be misted with an alcohol spray between use and wearing of face marks made mandatory.

Combined with automated temperature checking, the use of hand wash dispensers at entry points and the ubiquitous wearing of face masks, it should be possible to remove social distancing requirements such that pretty much all commercial activity can continue within acceptable risks. For The Node, these measures would be integrated from completion. Additionally each hot desk space would be created as a discretely enclosed niche to help contain contain any virus laden aerosol from occupants. During any new outbreak, hot desk spaces can be treated with anti-viral alcohol-based misters after use with the cleaning staff able to electronically update when a particular workstation is available. In this way the environment created reduces risk of spreading contagion but if a local outbreak happens, further measures can be easily implemented.

[1]    RIBA 2030  Climate Challenge target metrics for non-domestic buildings, RIBA Sustainable Outcomes Guide 2019

[2] http://www.aef.org.uk/