Planning ahead

The Sydney Olympic Park urban design manager explains why considering sustainability is foremost for Olympic planning. Find out how Sydney succeeded and what Beijing and London can learn from their Australian counterparts

By Nigel Dickson

Beijing in 2008 and London in 2012 will be an opportunity for two very different cities to showcase sustainability as a key part of the Olympics.

Every host city for the Olympics city has a different set of issues for dealing with sustainability.

Solar panels in use at Sydney Olympic Parks

Beijing is a much larger and more complex city than the previous host cities of Athens 2004, Sydney 2000 and Atlanta 1996. Beijing is a fast developing city, being the capital of the most populous country on the planet and its situation is unique and beyond compare. London is a mature developed financial sector economy within the milieu of Europe.

Holding the Olympics in Beijing will highlight the progress being made by large rapidly expanding and developing nations and highly populated countries in tackling sustainability. Holding the Olympics in London will examine the infrastructure of older cities in meeting sustainability demands in a western setting.

Beijing has many qualities that lend themselves to sustainability including its density and widespread use of public transport. Its population is highly mobile, increasingly affluent, private cars are sought, and growth is affecting the areas surrounding the city. London is also compact with a major service economy, public transport infrastructure and a highly educated population.

The IOC’s Agenda 21 document sets out the key objectives in determining how sustainability will be viewed for Beijing by the IOC. But other environmental watchdogs will look more broadly at the advancement of sustainability across China.

In many ways the goal of a sustainable Olympics has changed just as definitions of the term “sustainability” have changed. Sydney was perhaps the first to deal with sustainability as a root ambition. The city used it very successfully as a marketing and promotion tool to great success.

Cities around the world are now recognising the need to pursue the sustainability agenda. To do so they are seeking to define indicators of sustainability.

Background to sustainability
“Sustainable development” or “sustainability” for short simply means that in a global context any economic or social development should improve not harm the environment.

The first elements of sustainability emerged in the global arena at the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment. At this conference 113 nations pledged to begin cleaning up the environment and most importantly to begin the process of tackling environmental issues on a global scale.

The excitement of the Sydney Olympics was underpinned by
organisation which emphasised sustainable development

Balancing the needs of the developing world for growth and the potential for a conservation-biased strategy was emerging as a major conflict for the planet with over one billion people living in poverty in the 1980s.

The UN established the World Commission on Environment and Development in 1983 to try and resolve this fundamental conflict. In 1987 they published "Our Common Future" which launched into common parlance the phrase “sustainable development”. This was then given form at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

In other parts of the world sustainability was becoming more focused.

In 1994 the Global Forum on Cities and Sustainable Development heard from 50 cities. In 1996 the UN held Habitat II, the second United Nations conference on Human Settlements, in Istanbul, Turkey. At the "City Summit" the nations of the world reported on progress in achieving sustainability in their cities.

The Biodiversity Treaty, which emerged from the Rio summit, took effect in 1993 and now requires all nations to keep better inventories of their biodiversity and to ensure protection and sharing in profits from the world's life forms. This is now part of international law.

At the core of the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 the following principles were developed:

The elimination of poverty, especially in poor nations, is necessary not just on human grounds but as an environmental issue.

The rich nations must reduce their consumption of resources and production of wastes. Global cooperation on environmental issues is no longer a soft option. Change towards sustainability can only occur with community-based approaches that take local cultures seriously.

The green aspect of Sydney’s successful
Olympic bid was crucial. Photo: Corporate Hoore

These principles have enabled a broader set of goals for sustainability to be expressed: the need for economic development to overcome poverty; the need for environmental protection of air, water, soil and biodiversity upon which we all ultimately depend; and the need for social justice and cultural diversity to enable local communities to express their values in solving these issues.

The 1992 Rio Earth Summit was also followed by a number of other key actions:

The Law of the Sea, which took 40 years to agree,is also now part of international law since the required number of nations finally agreed in 1993. It now means for example that fishing of migratory ocean species is regulated.

The Ozone Layer treaty in 1996 saw the end of most global production of ozone-depleting chemicals. 1997 saw the start of a new global treaty which prevents the transport of hazardous waste to developing countries, and the first serious attempts at setting targets on greenhouse gases began to be negotiated.

Sustainability and the Olympics
In the early 1990s there was a convergence of discrete activities that rapidly promoted the idea of sustainability to the world stage and the idea of building cities and, importantly, the role of the Olympics in acting as a benchmark for sustainability and the environment.

Increasingly the Olympics had been seen as an opportunity for cities to showcase their relative merits and amenities, and pressure on cities bidding for the Games to best present their credentials increased.

The IOC has now put forward a clear platform on the environment and sustainability as part of its key principles.

In 1988 Sydney lost the right to bid for the 1996 Olympics to its rival city Melbourne. Atlanta eventually won the right to stage those Games. In the repositioning for the 2000 Games Sydney learnt quickly that for its bid to have a chance in topping its competitors it would have to have strong support from European IOC members. Sweden and Denmark are some of the strongest adherents to environmental protection in the world, and they were very interested in the concept of a Green Games.

In 1993 the Sydney Games bid was presented to the IOC Inquiry Commission on the Environment. The head of the Inquiry Commission, Swedish IOC member Gunner Erickson, was responsible for recommending to IOC members the merits of competing bids. He was reported to have said that, "the most important aspect of Sydney's bid was the green aspect".

The environmental guidelines for the bid included the decision to avoid PVC and not use CFCs, HCFCs and HFCs, and these were accepted in order to win the European vote.

More broadly there has been considerable effort in developing an understanding of how cities function and how sustainability can be sought across cities. One of the strongest themes running through the literature on urban sustainability is that if we are to solve our problems we need to view the city as an ecosystem. The city is now conceived of as a dynamic and complex environment.

It is possible to define the goal of sustainability in a city as the reduction of the city's use of natural resources and production of wastes while simultaneously improving its liveability, so that it can better fit within the capacities of the local, regional and global ecosystems.

The Sydney 2000 Olympics were described as the "Green Olympics" having 100 per cent renewable electricity (from rooftop PV and wind power), energy efficient buildings, solar hot water, no PVC or rain forest timber, a rail service connection, bicycle/pedestrian oriented layout and water and waste recycling systems.

The goals of the Olympics were set in relation to: Energy, Transport, Material Flows, and Building Materials.

Sydney’s Summer Games in 2000 achieved huge notable success for a variety of reasons. So why was it judged to be such a success and future benchmark?

One key mechanism was the manner in which the bid company and later SOCOG and the support organisation rallied to the cause of embracing sustainability as an idea for the Games. The organisers used it and promoted it to gain advantage over other bids, and then later as a means to benchmark their achievements. There was room for the Sydney Olympic Bid Company, using a difficult, contaminated and polluted site, to be open to widespread criticism. The site did not have good transport infrastructure, or social facilities. Instead the organisers and their design teams turned this into a rallying cry for the embrace of improvement; a challenge for the site and for Sydney in general.

Secondly, Sydney organisers enabled the environmental guidelines that were used to win the bid to be created as state planning laws for the Olympic precinct a short time after the bid was won. This required all designs to submit their sustainability credentials at the design stage, approval stage, documentation and construction phase, hand over and conversion phase for post-Games use. Clear development briefs were prepared for each venue and facility at the site incorporating all requirements, including sustainability principles, for the private sector to meet.

Thirdly, the masterplan for the Games was robust and prepared with keen regard to sustainability principles. It was dependant on a compact site, with the majority of venues located in close relation to each other. The site had transport restrictions such that the design team had to rely on a high-capacity rail system at the centre of the precinct. Automobile parking was limited and provided at peripheral locations. Large open-space systems that were remediated wetlands and waterways were retained and protected for plants and animals. Future development sites were nominated that allowed for easy post-Games development to increase the economic and social benefits of the site to the broader Sydney region.

Finally, the city itself commenced the acknowledgement of sustainability principles. Strategies developed throughout the Games process have now come into widespread use by industry in Sydney and other Australian cities. The follow-on effect has taken some time but sustainability audits are now required for all housing and commercial projects. Applications for new developments are reviewed against sustainability criteria.