Going For A Gold In Living Green And Social Sustainability At The BC Winter Games

The Millennium Water development on the south bank of False Creek is a 1,100-unit housing project development that will serve as Vancouver’s Olympic athletes’ village, will certainly be environmentally sustainable, design manager Roger Bayley assures.

The development’s living green initiatives will include:

• A “district energy system” that will sop up residual heat from city sewer pipes to warm water feeding the vein-like capillaries in the development’s ceiling-mounted radiant heating system. Also, in the summer, those same capillary- mat panels can reverse, running cool water, to draw the heat out of homes. 
• Buildings in the development will feature wider, naturally lit and ventilated corridors and thicker, more deeply insulated exterior walls, and exterior, automatic shading to keep units naturally cool in strong sunshine.
• Unseen, drains will siphon rainwater falling on the project’s buildings into basement cisterns that will irrigate its green roofs and gardens in the summer and be enough to flush its toilets in the fall and winter.

These living green features combine to reduce the Water’s energy use by 50 per cent and potable water use by 40 per cent.  But that’s not all.  Let’s take a walk through the courtyard and gardens where living green flows into social sustainability.

All the units in the development look over the courtyard and gardens.  Lush gardens that incorporate evaporative rainwater ponds that will act both to irrigate the shrubs and plants and cool the air on currents as they flow around gaps in the buildings designed to take advantage of air movement.  “A lot of people think of sustainability in environmental terms only,” Bayley said during a recent tour of the construction site.  “They don’t think to take the next step of the social issue and what the social circumstance (of the development) feels like, and how those inter- relationships work.”  “I think that’s the big experiment here,” Bayley said.  “This intermingling of different social activities and different social structures is all going to play out here in a melting pot that I think a lot of people are going to watch and see how successful it really was.”

The City of Vancouver’s overall objective was to turn Southeast False Creek, where the development is being created, into a showpiece for sustainable development built to the Canada Green Building Council LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) gold standard.  It seems to have turned into so much more.  Kudos’ to Vancouver for taking a big picture approach, it will be interesting to see how this plays out.  It’s definitely a step in the right direction towards a holistic approach to sustainability and living green.

Watch to learn more about the Millenium Southeast False Creek Development

Tags: 2010 Olympics, 2010 Winter Games, 2010 Winter Olympics, eco design, environmental accountability, environmental consciousness, environmental design, false creek, green construction, Green Living, living green, Olympic Village, planet forward, Sustainable Living, Vancouver Olympics, water conservation