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People Bigger Than Cars?
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woonerf
Categories: woonerf
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No, this is not a science fiction thriller about 20-foot humanoids, although...that would be a good follow-up! If you look at the featured picture for this post, it's a street sign for the topic of the post. And in that street sign, people (even kids!) are bigger than cars. The reason for this will become evident if you just read on. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about The Built Environment and what that means for people in general, but also very special people – project leaders. So let me start with the term, “Built Environment”(there will be more terms as well here, some in other languages, so fasten your linguistic seat belts). What is The Built Environment? Some may say it’s just another word for ‘construction’ or for buildings. That’s a partially correct answer but it is nowhere near fully correct. Here, from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), is the definition: (The Built Environment encompasses) the buildings we live in, the distribution systems that provide us with water and electricity, and the roads, bridges, and transportation systems we use to get from place to place. It can generally be described as the man-made or modified structures that provide people with living, working, and recreational spaces. So, not just buildings, it’s anything that we humans make or modify to make our lives comfortable, productive, and fun. I’ll be posting about this topic a lot in the next few months – its an area of focus that project managers will need to learn about because of the amount of money business and governments are applying to infrastructure projects. And PMI knows this, having recently introduced the PMI-CP® certification. My first post in this vein is a concept that has begun to catch hold worldwide, although it started about 70 years ago in Delft, The Netherlands. I told you – you’d learn new terms in this post, and here is one I am not only going to define, I am going to get you to pronounce it properly! Respect language! The term is Woonerf. It is a mashup of two Dutch words, woon and nerf (literally ‘living’ and ‘grain’) Together, however, the word woonerf becomes “living yard”, and practically, it describes a ‘shared space’. Let’s get the pronunciation right, though.
Listen to it pronounced in Dutch here: https://www.howtopronounce.com/dutch/woonerf A woonerf is a place where cars, trucks, bikes, kids, dogs, people share a space and in which the motorized vehicles do NOT have the right of way, and in which there is less demarcation between the road and a ‘sidewalk’, and in which the roadway is often either narrow, populated with barriers (not speed bumps, but pieces of art, for example) that prevent fast driving. The four principles of a woonerf (see pic below) are:
From a project management perspective, there is a very interesting angle – one that involves culture and communications and stakeholder engagement. A very good example is this one, which compares the introduction of a woonerf in two different Canadian cities. It’s a short video. But watch it -very interesting to note the project management lessons learned here.
Below is a photo of the successful woonerf in Banff. I find it amazing how one word – in this case, woonerf – in effect, killed a project because it carried the ‘baggage’ of a Euro-centric culture that ‘won’t work here’, according to some key stakeholders. But the second part of the video shows how the woonerf concept did work in Banff. And it’s catching on all over the world in the past decade. This article from Bloomberg talks about six examples, from the USA, New Zealand, Germany, England, Sweden, and, of course, The Netherlands. And that’s from 2015. Since then, it’s become much more popular, with woonerf projects taking place everywhere. Here’s a recent example of a woonerf in Singapore:
And I close with a great summary of how a woonerf works in The Netherlands.
Stay tuned to this blog for more upskilling in linguistics and the Built Environment! We’ll be covering software platforms that facilitate planning and executing building projects with sustainability in mind. |
What goes up...
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A news item that popped up on several news outlets caught my attention this week – it was about the combined effect of the weight of the built environment in Manhattan (and New York City in general) and the rise of the sea level along NYC’s coastline. Bottom line 1: the City of New York is sinking, and the concurrently, the water is rising. Bottom line 2: This means programs, projects, and meaningful opportunities for project leaders Let’s start with the background: Coming Down! According to an article from The Guardian: New York City is sinking in part due to the extraordinary weight of its vertiginous buildings, worsening the flooding threat posed to the metropolis from the rising seas, new research has found. The Big Apple may be the city that never sleeps but it is a city that certainly sinks, subsiding by approximately 1-2mm each year on average, with some areas of New York City plunging at double this rate, according to researchers. Going up! The Guardian article goes on to say: The water that flanks New York City has risen by about 9in, or 22cm, since 1950 and major flooding events from storms could be up to four times more frequent than now by the end of the century due to the combination of sea level rise and hurricanes strengthened by climate change. Referenced in the Guardian article is a paper from a Wiley publication called Earth’s Future.
The study is titled: The Weight of New York City: Possible Contributions to Subsidence From Anthropogenic Sources Its plain-language summary is below: New York City faces accelerating inundation risk from sea level rise, subsidence, and increasing storm intensity from natural and anthropogenic causes. Here we calculate a previously unquantified contribution to subsidence from the cumulative mass and downward pressure exerted by the built environment of the city.
A 2022 sea level rise report from the US NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) says that without remediation (and this does NOT account for ‘that sinking feeling’) the sea level in NYC will rise by one foot by 2050. This is about triple the rate of the past 100 years. If you would like to see what that means for New York City - or your area of the world, you can actually generate interactive maps for your region in a cool site provided here by Climate Central. Here’s an example of Boston with 5.5 feet of sea-level rise. Doesn’t look too promising for MIT, Fenway Park, or Boston University:
To mitigate the situation in New York City, the US Army Corps of Engineers is proposing a very large program (mistakenly called a project by some) which I will cover in detail in a follow-up post.
From an article recently published in The City, The Army Corps estimates construction on the $52 billion project would begin in 2030 and be complete by 2044. The project must be first approved by federal, state and local officials and funded before any of the work can start. The public can comment on the project proposal through Jan. 6 — via email or snail mail — in order to inform the design, which is expected to be finalized in 2025. Some specific proposals for neighborhoods include:
In the next post, I would like to cover the Army Corps of Engineers’ proposal, but also the way in which they considered stakeholders and presented this major, important program to taxpayers and other stakeholders. REFERENCES: Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/19/new-york-city-sinking-skyscrapers-climate-crisis Parsons, T., Wu, P.-C., (Matt) Wei, M., & D'Hondt, S. (2023). The weight of New York City: Possible contributions to subsidence from anthropogenic sources. Earth's Future, 11, e2022EF003465. https://doi.org/10.1029/2022EF003465 |
ChatGPT Drank My Water
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I’ve previously posted “ChatGPT Ate My Brain”. Now, here, I’m posting on AI’s increasing and seemingly unquenchable thirst for water. I was triggered to write this based on an email exchange with fellow BU professor Dr. Dave Silberman, who went me a recent article from Forbes, “AI’S Unsustainable Water Use: How Tech Giants Contribute To Global Water Shortages” which quotes a to-be-peer-reviewed article (download here): which states: "training GPT-3 in Microsoft's state-of-the-art US data centers can directly consume 700,000 liters of clean freshwater", which they calculate could be used to produce 370 BMW cars or 320 Tesla electric vehicles. Furthermore, ChatGPT 'drinks' the equivalent of a 500ml bottle of water for a simple conversation of 20-50 questions and answers. Which may not seem like much... until you consider that the chatbot has more than 100 million active users, each of whom engages in multiple conversations. So, I thought it would be a worthy use of a little H2O to ask ChatGPT what it thought of the situation. It was surprisingly frank: My question: As a person interested in sustainability, I am alarmed to see that AI is very 'thirsty' for freshwater, based on this article https://www-forbes-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.forbes.com/sites/federicoguerrini/2023/04/14/ais-unsustainable-water-use-how-tech-giants-contribute-to-global-water-shortages/amp/ . Is it true that AI consumes large amounts of water, and what is being done about it? The answer from ChatGPT: Yes, it is true that AI systems consume significant amounts of water, especially in the training phase of machine learning models. This is because AI requires vast amounts of computational power, which generates heat that needs to be dissipated, and cooling systems that use water to maintain the necessary temperature. Additionally, data centers that host AI models require a lot of water for cooling and other operational needs. The impact of AI on water resources is an important concern, and there are ongoing efforts to address this issue. One approach is to use more energy-efficient hardware, such as specialized processors that can perform AI computations with lower power consumption. Another approach is to develop more efficient cooling systems that use less water, and to use recycled water or other sustainable sources of water for cooling. In addition to technical solutions, it's important to consider the environmental impact of AI in the design and deployment of AI systems. This means taking a holistic approach to sustainability and considering the entire life cycle of AI systems, including the raw materials used to manufacture hardware, the energy used to power AI models, and the disposal of electronic waste. Overall, the AI industry and the broader technology sector are increasingly aware of the need to address the environmental impact of their activities, including water use, and are taking steps to reduce their impact on the planet. The video just below from Amazon Web Services (AWS) tackles the issue and provides some ways that AWS is helping to battle this, wanting to be “water-positive” by 2030. When you watch this video, note that what they are really discussing, without saying it directly, is that they have a portfolio of programs and projects which initiatives that execute the strategy aimed at that goal, which is in turn, aligned with their sustainability-oriented mission and vision statement. This is very much in line with the model that (for example), folks like Gilbert Silvius, Alexandra Chapman, and others have been promoting for a long time. Google recently shared a blog post revealing its water use – a staggering 4.3 billion gallons of water in 2021, which works out to an average daily water footprint approaching a half-million gallons per data center. It gets complicated as well, because there is a trade-off (we’re used to those as a project manager, though) between reducing water and reducing carbon. The initiatives you see in the video, I’m sure you have already guessed, take energy and have their own impact. From the Google blog post: When used responsibly, water cooling can play an important role in reducing emissions and mitigating climate change. Water-cooled data centers use about 10% less energy and thus emit roughly 10% less carbon emissions than many air-cooled data centers. In 2021, water cooling helped us reduce the energy-related carbon footprint of our data center portfolio by roughly 300,000 tons of CO2." So it is a complicated, convoluted, higher-level, higher stakes balancing act that we must perform. “Going Waterless” was one of the top eight trends identified by Data Center Frontier. So at this point it seems we’re at least conscious of the problem. Now – can we get the right amount of talented project, program, and portfolio leaders on the job? It’s an important enough problem to pour over…
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Sustainability PMXPOsure
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The Project Management institute runs its PMXPO session each year, and I make it a point to attend, to take in the presentations, network with hundreds of active practitioners, build my network with quality contacts, and get the latest ‘buzz’ of our profession. PMXPO is always a great learning and networking opportunity! For PMXPO 2023, I was very happy to see that one session was entirely dedicated to sustainability in project management. Session 207 (details below) was called “What Does Project Management Have to do With Sustainability?”, and included a conversation amongst PMI leaders:
For a little over 30 minutes, these PMI leaders raised awareness and helped to answer the title question. It turns out (as many have been saying for decades!) that sustainability has quite a lot to do with project management, or as I refer to it, project leadership. In fact, I make that the distinction between project management and project leadership. A project LEADER knows not only how to do the project, how to balance time, scope, cost, quality, and risk, but importantly, why the project was chartered in the first place and how the project’s outcome will provide benefits in the long term, how it will generate value, and is aware of the project’s broader impacts on a broader set of stakeholders, including society and the environment.
This is what these folks covered eloquently in their time. Bottom line: what do project management and sustainability have to do with each other? Just like the image that kicks off this blog post: everything. They are intertwined and inseparable, whether we want to recognize that or not. Our projects’ products (outcomes) go on and on after the ribbon-cutting ceremony. They provide benefits (and sometimes not-so-beneficial impacts) for days, weeks, years, decades, centuries. The benefits (or disbenefits) are felt not just by one stakeholder, but by a wide swath of stakeholders. If we recognize this, we advance from project managers to project leaders. I would like to see much, much more of this at PMXPO, and ideally, it’s a conversation that PMXpands to include practitioners and perhaps government leaders as well. Please take a half-hour and watch and listen to this important conversation. Catch up on Session 207: What Does Project Management Have to Do with Sustainability? from PMI’s recent Virtual Experience Series 2023: PMXPO that was broadcasted in March. This session along with the rest of the program is available on demand through 31 January 2024. Be sure to watch for announcements for PMXPO 2024 and join me there!
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19 Stories of Green
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This blog post will let you share (and participate, in a fashion) in a tour I just took today of a landmark new building in Boston – the Data Sciences Building at 665 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, on the campus of Boston University. Some numbers:
I was lucky enough to have a private tour for a small group of sustainability liaisons from BU’s individual Colleges, led by Dennis Carlberg, Adjunct Professor and Sustainability Director for BU. I will share some photos here and link you to a full album of pictures and a couple of short videos. One takeaway for project managers is that we, as agents of change, can push for innovative, sustainability-minded solutions based on benefits that show themselves in non-traditional ways and/or only after time has elapsed – and therefore are not measured very easily. Here’s one example from my tour. When the team decided early on to use geothermal heating and cooling for the building, one non-apparent (but HUGE) benefit was the amount of real-estate this made available in the building for use by students, faculty, and staff, that would have been otherwise taken up by gigantic heating and cooling units. 90% of these needs are taken care of by the geothermal system. Sure, the geothermal system involved pushing thirty-one 6-inch specialty tubes (see photo below of a model) into silt and bedrock, but the payoff is huge in the long-run.
Professor Carlberg showing a model of one of the 31 pipes used for the geothermal system. The real ones are 6 inches in diameter and go into the ground twice as long as the John Hancock Tower is high. And sure, it took extra effort to place green roofs all around in the space made available by the Jenga-like construction, but again, this makes the building more attractive and livable and assists greatly with the handling of rainwater.
(photo taken from the 5th floor of the building) (the plants are mostly sedum) Aside from the tremendous (and also measurable) benefits which this yields in terms of meeting BU’s Climate Action Plan, the fact that valuable Boston real estate is being more effectively used is a big deal and was considered in the project’s cost benefit analysis. Are these sorts of benefits – and is this sort of thinking considered in your projects’ cost-benefit equations? The tour was amazing – the building is amazing – as you can see from the photos and videos. I highly recommend that you take the tour yourself, and you can do it RIGHT NOW from the very device on which you are reading this blog post (unless that device is a piece of paper). Go here: https://www.bu.edu/sustainability/virtual-tour-ccds/ This will take you to a highly-interactive tour of the building and provide technical insight into how this became such a successful project. You will basically get a chance to see on your screen what I saw demonstrated on a gigantic touch-screen by Professor Carlberg (see photo below).
This is in the lobby of the building - the "Sustainability Wall" - a giant touchscreen. Experience it yourself RIGHT NOW by clicking here.
I suggest you visit at least the following (each only runs for a few seconds to a minute or so).
As project managers – or rather, project leaders, we have the chance to push for projects like this, or at a minimum to push the product owner, sponsor, and/or Senior Management to put in place thinking such as that which went into this amazing building. See an album of the pictures (see screen capture below) from my tour by clicking here.
You will get to see details and videos from the tour. Come visit! I hope you have a chance to visit the actual building at the campus of Boston University! |