It's not difficult to see the appeal of the sustainable vision presented by global 'starchitects' Foster & Partners at a recent infrastructure conference in Hong Kong, with funky white automobiles zipping on autopilot along underground magnetic tracks around a pristine city of trees raising long green limbs and men wearing long flowing robes.
For Foster & Partners, well known locally for the HSBC headquarters and the Hong Kong International Airport, the foundation of sustainable engineering takes a step back from tradition. As associate partner Randy Liekenjie says: 'Buildings are just the tip of the iceberg,' with infrastructure, transport and sustainability built deep into Foster projects through, for example, the choice of materials, the manipulation of sunlight and building orientation, and the use of natural ventilation and wind towers for urban space.
But while engineers, architects and designers may well have utopian visions of our cities and future society, implementing them will require some serious challenges to the ways engineering projects are commissioned, designed and built. According to many in the trade, the current practice simply isn't sustainable.
'Government briefs tend to show a lack of understanding of what sustainability actually means,' says Fiona Waters, principal economist at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).
She cites the lack of 'joined-up thinking' between sustainable engineering and infrastructure, partly due to the structure of public finance: One-off projects are covered by the Capital Works Reserve Fund (CWRF), while recurrent and operating expenses come from current accounts.
'The government is very comfortable about one-off capital projects,' says Roger Nissim, adjunct professor at the real estate and construction department of the University of Hong Kong. 'But it's far less comfortable creating recurrent expenditure.'
This leads to an imbalance in priorities, says Waters. 'What tends to happen in the [CWRF] is there is a total focus on the building, how much is spent, the design, but very few questions tend to be asked about the operational side,' she adds.
