pdf 1 - exhibitions international

expansion, which included a vinyl play mat printed with a town plan and roads,
a series of residential and commercial buildings to put on it, and a church, plus a
range of plastic cars, lorries, trees, bushes and road signs. 32
The advantage for Lego, as it had been for Märklin, was that a system offered
continuing sales. A system also provided a selection of items at different prices;
you could use your pocket money to add a single car to your city while waiting
for a kindly relative to give you a big set of bricks for your birthday. In architectural
terms this Lego city of 1955 has a relatively modern appearance, which
makes it look like the first of Britain’s postwar new towns, such as Stevenage with
its pedestrianized city centre. 33 Scandinavian (and hence Danish) design is cited
as one of the influences on the British new towns: the reason why they looked
different from what had gone before, 34 and presumably the reason why they look
like Lego.
Moving to the twenty-first century, which has not turned out to be nearly as
futuristic as we thought it would be in the 1950s, the call is now more for green
cities than for new towns. The European Green City Index, a recent study of thirty
cities in Europe, found that while cities were striving to be green, they were still
a long way from getting there, with renewable energy contributing only 7.3% of
total energy, only 20% of waste recycled, and nearly 25% of water lost through
leakage. 35 The ‘greenest’ city overall was deemed to be Copenhagen, 36 whose
goals include becoming the first capital city in the world to be carbon neutral by
2025. 37 Lego is a proudly Danish company, so if Denmark’s capital is Europe’s
greenest city, maybe Lego also follows this green trend.
Lego’s Progress Report 2011, which deals with sustainability, tells how the
company organized an event in Melbourne called ‘Build the Change’ in which
800 Australian schoolchildren built a green city out of Lego. 38 Without being
entirely specific about it, because Lego has never marketed a ‘Green City’, Lego
has over the years managed to provide some of its components. The European
Green City Index measures cities’ greenness in the fields of CO , Energy, Buildings,
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Transport, Water, Waste and land use, Air Quality and Environmental
Governance. 39 If we assume that those little Lego people (officially called
‘Minifigures’) are not capable of much in the way of Environmental Governance,
what does Lego offer in the other fields? How does it reproduce, on the carpet,
the kinds of cities that would be desirably green in real life?
Between 2008 and 2011 Lego made five sets that seem to form essential
components of the green city. The first is the ‘Construction Site’ (no. 7633), in
which a large mobile crane is the centrepiece of a block of low-rise mediumdensity
apartments with shops on the ground floor. The flats are prefabricated in
room-sized modules and the crane boom is long enough for them to be stacked
up to four storeys high, but not higher, so the Lego Minifigures can walk up and
don’t need a lift. This one is perhaps a bit hard to describe as particularly green,
but medium-density housing often figures in proposals for greener development
– for example, it forms part of the Green Party of New Zealand’s housing policy
in an attempt to improve public transport access and avoid urban sprawl. 40 The
next, undeniably green, set, released in 2009, is called ‘Wind Turbine Transport’
(no. 7747). It makes a large-scale wind turbine to power the green city and a
truck and trailer to transport it from the factory to the site where it is to be put
up (perhaps with the aid of the previous year’s crane?). The year 2010 produced
the apotheosis of urban sustainability, the ‘Public Transport Station’ (no. 8404),
a set that includes not only a bus and a tram, but also a street-sweeping vehicle,
a bus/tram interchange station, a bus or tram stop with cycle rack and bike, a
kiosk for buying postcards, a couple of recycling bins and a sports car – this last
is not very green but maybe it is a hybrid, and we have to hope that the bus is
bio-diesel or battery-powered. Also in 2010, there was the ‘City House’, a threestorey
residence using the same prefabricated elements as the original apartments,
but designed as a town house, and with the inclusion of a small photovoltaic
panel on the roof. There is another Lego set of a house with a solar panel on the
roof, the ‘Hillside House’ (no. 5771), introduced in 2011, but it is not part of the
City range. Lego, in these five sets, have covered CO and Energy, with the wind
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turbine set, Transport, Waste and maybe Air Quality with the public transport
set, and Buildings with the Construction Site, City House and Hillside House.
In the real material world, Lego is made from acrylonitrile butadiene
styrene plastic (ABS), which is made from oil and natural gas. 41 In 2011 Lego
used 49,000 tonnes of plastic, which is actually relatively little material. 42 It takes
the equivalent of 2 kilograms (4½ lbs) of oil to make 1 kilogram (2¼ lbs) of
ABS, 43 so the manufacture of Lego currently uses roughly 100,000 tonnes of oil
a year. A typical Lego set from the ones listed above to form the green city weighs
less than 2 kilograms, so the whole green city in Lego would represent less than
20 kilograms (44 lbs) of oil equivalent. In measurements of energy consumption,
a kilogram of oil equivalent represents roughly 42MJ. 44 An average car will use
around 3MJ per kilometre ( 2 ⁄3 mile) over its lifetime45 so the Lego green city
would represent 840MJ or 280 kilometres (174 miles) of driving. This is probably
184 Lego and the Green City Lego and the Green City 185