As mentioned in other posts and PM, the time has come that @reef-building will soon sit around the table with the technical experts and one of the points of discussion will be energy, water recuperation, …
As sustainability is one of our foundational values, I would like to start up something around this topic. Like Chris mentioned in a post , I have the feeling we would need to start with a discussion about ‘what we mean by sustainability/durability’, to be a bit prepared for these discussion with the special techniques.
As much as I would like to postpone this item to a later date, when we have more time, i am afraid if we don’t start this up now, it will be too late, or it will lead to all kinds of discussions during the interaction with the special techniques, which will make it very hard to give ‘fast’ answers to their questions for us.
I assume this topic is for team-building, but being a rather limited bunch of people with limited energy, i would like to open it to all @reeflings. Maybe create a helping circle?
Any people (reef building or other) interested in joining?
PS a status of the info we have at this point, related to the subject:
new construction => we need to go for passive, no choice about that
we will have solar panels (how much and where not defined yet) => a prerequisit to obtain a certain peb
in the price calculation, there are no bateries foreseen to store the energy coming from the solar pannels
there will be recuperation of water
there will be green roofs (and thus for me not the possibility to go with sth else than flat roofs
soonish (i think from january 2025) no possibility to connect to gaz any more for new constructions, so we will work with heat pumps (what kind , not yet defined, but the architects seem to be talking mainly about those recuperating heat from the air)
TB asked the question about insulation material that they think of using: not oil-based materials, but mineral based materials (laine de roche, laine de verre,…), and thus not more sustainable materials as wool/fibre de bois/… neither (for now)
we asked the architects to get in contact with Filip Descamps, an expert on sustainability. So for no reaction from him. The architects have worked with him before, and the way I understood it, he goes for solutions integrating the whole neighbourhood, which is great, but don’t know if we want to go there as our time will be limited
The way I’d like to take this forward is to ask for a meeting with this Filip. From there the helping circle can then try to present a summary to the plenary.
At the meeting with the notary on Friday, he mentioned something about creating an energy framework to sell and/or share excess energy generated by the Reef. If I understood correctly, he was advising us to move forward with that sooner rather than later. And I imagine, in terms of a sustainability helping circle, that it boils down to a decision about investing more in solar panels at the beginning to recoup costs later, and perhaps also generate enough to cover running costs for the community…
checked with the architects where they are with Filip Descamps : they have relaunched the request twice now and no reaction from his part. They think he’s either not interested or too busy and advise us not to count on him any more
the architects received some updated price offers from the technical experts. They are mainly waiting for the one of B solutions , which they expect to receive after their holidays (beginning of january). So we will be signing the offers first half of January i guess, and starting discussions from mid january onwards, during 2 à 3 months. In this period the decisions about sustainability will be taken.
In this week’s Team Building meeting (@reef-building ) we discussed the sustainability as well (I was maybe a bit too hasty to launch this topic without speaking to TB first, sorry for that).
Our suggested approach to that would be to organise a workshop about it on the next PM (Sunday 05/01) and turn it into a morning and afternoon session. The workshop open for those interested in the sustainability. It would probably also be a nice interaction moment with the current exploring/associate (?) members who didn’t have the occasion yet to come to a PM.
the goal of the workshop would be to get clarity on what ‘sustainability’ means for the group and what elements in this we find most important
it would then be up to this helping circle to distill what elements of sustainability are most important (order of priority?) so that TB can clearly communicate to the architects/technical experts what it is we find important and for them to propose solutions to answer these needs, with the cost implications.
I would - personally- also like to go and have a chat with Homegrade (https://homegrade.brussels/) after the workshop/vision on what is important to us, to have another view on things/what could be feasible,…
@joannes, myself (and maybe sarah) will have a brainstorm about this workshop on Monday 30/12 19:00 online. If any of you would like to join, feel free.
@reef-building : here is the document where we discussed with the architects what was included in terms of sustainability (internal link - see at the end of he documen). I don"'t think there is much that we didn’t remeber already though…
I don’t remember more than that, but maybe Els you remember other things?
Talked to some people about this topic and not convinced any more that a workshop to ‘define what sustainability’ means is the way forward. I agreed with TB to delegate ‘how to proceed’ with this topic to this helping circle.
I don’t know if it’s better to get together during a live call or if we can work it out via ER.
Here is my thoughts about this:
as mentioned in the first post: the reason i wanted to create this helping circle is to be (better) prepared when we start the discussions with the special techniques who will come back with questions to us concerning energy, durability, …My concern is that their questions might lead to big discussions (= long discussions) as at this point it is not clear ( for me) what the group wants/means when we say that ‘sustainability is one of our core values’, neither is it clear what budget we want to allocate to ‘sustainability’ (on top of what the architects have foreseen in the FS) or maybe we don’t want to allocate any extra budget…
I understood that for some people it’s hard to say what sustainability can mean when it comes down to a construction of a cohousing, so a workshop might not bring much output.
As the discussions with the special techniques will start soonish, our time is limited so the workshop approach might not be the most ideal either.
So how to proceed? A workshop anyway? A survey? Working on a proposal , based on input of the architects/ visiting homegrade and only then going to the group?
Building on Els’ idea for a survey, I had an AI think about aspects of sustainability. ChatGPT - Sustainability in Co-Housing (). We could do a survey and ask people to force-rank the listed aspects of sustainability by asking: “Where do you want The Reef to spend most money on?” Not all aspects listed in the answer are pertinent to The Reef. Some of them have already been met, some are simply impossible and others don’t cost anything at all.
() to @alberto’s point of rational use of AI: the energy consumption of generating this answer was equivalent to driving a car for 1m or flying in a passenger plane for 50cm; clicking the link is similar to calling a web page.
I like this idea. As it is, the output is about 20% “grey goo” and needs substantial manual pruning. We need to take away stuff that is not relevant to construction (like governance methods, which we already have, or Public Transit Accessibility, which is what it is in Chaussée de Jette) and output derived from training the algo on meaningless corporate PR (“Striving for net-positive energy generation”, yeah, right). But after that is done, you get an interesting list. Also, this survey would include an “other” option for people who have ideas not already on the list.
Another way forward that I see is talk to another cohousing, maybe even invite someone to the plenary where we discuss this. But that would depend on the deadline! What’s the deadline on this?
Since our slow decision-making appears to be impacting the timely delivery of The Reef, I think we must now move very fast on all fronts. For the sustainability front, the technical experts will start their work soon. We need to give them some direction if we want to maximally match their output to our needs & desires. Or face the cost of “change requests” down the road. For a hard deadline, I defer to @els.
). We could do a survey and ask people to force-rank the listed aspects of sustainability by asking: “Where do you want The Reef to spend most money on?” Not all aspects listed in the answer are pertinent to The Reef. Some of them have already been met, some are simply impossible and others don’t cost anything at all.