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The Edge Debates |
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The 19th Edge Debate: 4th December 2003Tipping points'No idea is more appealing', wrote the Economist earlier in the year in an article about the Tory leadership 'than one which appears to offer not only an explanation for the grimness of one's predicament, but also the possibility of escape from it'. The article was about tipping points. The term derives from a mathematical insight known as geometrical progression and is most commonly used to help predict the speed at which epidemics of contagious disease are likely to spread but also for developments such as the spectacular explosion in mobile phone usage, or the fall in New York's crime rate in the early 1990s. It could be a helpful lens through which to view the success we are having with our sustainability targets. The idea is particularly topical because of the establishment of Margaret Beckett's recent New Sustainable Buildings Task Group. 'Clients' said Mrs Beckett, 'must demand more sustainable buildings. Financial institutions must back developers. We need sustainability at the heart of our skills and professional training. We need architects and designers to incorporate .sustainability in their designs. Manufacturers must deliver efficient buildings services and fabric components. Builders must develop and market sustainable buildings, and we need consumers to demand those higher .standards.' We have been able to find few people in the industry that know anything about this new task group or what it is likely to say when it reports to government in February 2004, but that not withstanding, we wondered how helpful the idea of tipping points might be in getting the right sort of buildings build and moving towards the government's very demanding sustainability targets more generally.
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