News // Center for Building Communities

Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design with Nature

2008-02-01T09:51:00-05:00

Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design with Nature

Douglas Farr , Farr Associates, Chicago
2007. John Wiley & Sons. 304 pp. $75.

It’s not immediately obvious how Doug Farr’s new book differs from the many other books in this field, aside from having a laudatory preface by Andres Duany. The viewing-with-alarm part (“we are just coming to understand some terrible truths about the lifestyle choices made by the average American” {11}) has been done many times before, as have the case studies. His careful division of the case studies into built greenfield, unbuilt greenfield, built infill, and unbuilt infill, should be a clue. It’s also nice that he offers a fairly specific definition of the s-word in this context: “walkable and transit-served urbanism integrated with high-performance buildings and high-performance infrastructure,” with emphasis on density and access to nature. {42}

Farr’s book is distinguished by his systematic determination to reveal the trade secrets of sustainable design—those rules of thumb that bridge the gap between woolly generalities and highly specific case studies. With the help of a variety of experts, he’s gathered a bouquet of relevant numbers here, under the somewhat obscure heading, “Emerging Thresholds of Sustainable Urbanism.” For example, the reader learns that at eight houses per acre, stormwater runoff rates per house are 74 percent less than at one house per acre. {109} Car-sharing programs need at least 5 dwelling units per acre to work well. {167} Houses within a one-minute walk of a park sell for 24% more than comparable units elsewhere; those within 2 1/2 minutes of a park have a sales premium of only 15%. {170} Making these and other benchmarks more widely known helps break down barriers between different specialties and opens up possibilities for integrated design. {51-52}

Farr calls his book a first draft, which is appropriate, given the enormous gap between what we know about sustainable design and what we need to know. For instance, it seems odd that the only numbers we have for the minimum densities needed to support various levels of transit come from work done back in the 1970s by Pushkarev and Zupan in metropolitan New York City. {111}

But Farr isn’t just a technician, he’s a technician who wants to start a movement. He has hard words for Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”: “The 2006 documentary…avoided any mention of our country’s transportation and land use calamity. Besides suggesting the two actions a person could undertake with cars – pooling or sharing – the closest it came was this [toothless and context-free] recommendation: ‘Reduce the number of miles you drive by walking, biking, carpooling or taking mass transit wherever possible.’”

Farr continues: “The climate change dialogue to date has been all about technical fixes – better light bulbs, appliances, cars, buildings -.... We need to begin to demand both better widgets and sustainable urbanism now.” {57-58} This is a central point to which he returns frequently in interviews. For starters, he’d like to get his book into the hands of the thousands of well-meaning but largely untrained planning board members around the country. Perhaps inevitably, some will find his urgent movement-building rhetoric disquieting. The adoption of sustainable urbanism as a societal norm, Farr writes, “requires all of the many participants in the process of planning and developing the built environment to work as a single organism toward a shared purpose.” {12, emphasis added}

As a design product itself, the book is disappointing. In one important instance, Farr describes density as “the hot button of sustainable urbanism” (because it’s both a “sustainability silver bullet” and a magnet for public opposition), but the essential graphic on the following pages, depicting a range of densities using pictures, plans, and numbers, is almost unreadably small. {103-105}

The six case studies of built infill come from three continents: BedZED in South London (82 dwelling units on 4 acres); Glenwood Park in Atlanta (325 units on 28 acres); Holiday Neighborhood in Boulder (333 units on 27 acres); Christie Walk in Adelaide, Australia (27 units on 1/2 acre); Newington, Sydney, Australia (2000 units on 222 acres); and High Point in Seattle (1600 units on 100 acres). {214-237} Sustainable neighborhoods, Farr concludes, “are more than assemblages of energy-saving technologies,” they’re specifically adapted to their places. {210}

Farr draws a parallel between sustainable urbanism and the 1960s moon shot, in that both took years of work and inventiveness. The difference is that lunar exploration was a spectator sport for most Americans, and sustainable urbanism cannot be. In many ways it requires a cultural change. It “requires the improbable: that the base of the pyramid – millions of us – ‘get it’ and act in concert.” Without this, knowledge of design thresholds is for naught.

The odds are enormous but, he insists, they’re not insurmountable. “The entire built environment gets renewed or rebuilt every few generations, and we just need to do it differently.” {296}

—Harold Henderson

Henderson, the CBC’s communications consultant, has reviewed books for the American Planning Association’s magazine Planning for 20 years. From 1985 to 2007 he was a staff writer at the weekly Chicago Reader, covering many topics, including environmental and planning issues. The opinions expressed in these reviews are his and not necessarily those of the University of Notre Dame or its School of Architecture.

Sprawl: A Compact History

2008-01-15T03:47:00-05:00

Robert Bruegmann, University of Illinois at Chicago
2005. University of Chicago Press. 306 pp. $27.50 cloth, $17 paper.

Robert Bruegmann went to Paris as a graduate student in the 1970s to study 18th- and 19th-century architecture. But when he flew in and out of Orly Airport, on the city’s southern edge, he saw something that blew his mind: a cityscape that looked like suburban Chicago or LA. European cities, he thought, were supposed to be pedestrian friendly, not like our monstrous agglomerations of auto-dependent sprawl. MORE at Chicago Reader website

Catastrophe: Risk and Response

2008-01-05T03:49:00-05:00

Richard Posner
2005. Oxford University Press. 336 pp. $16.95.
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Jared Diamond
2005. Viking (Penguin Group USA). 592 pp. $17.

We humans don’t do catastrophe well until one hits us, if then. After all, our ancestors didn’t survive by planning a century ahead; they survived by spotting predators fast and stretching one harvest until the next. Times have changed, say two prolific polymaths – Judge Richard Posner of the federal court of appeals in Chicago and best-selling uberhistorian Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel) – and we need to change too. Posner worries mostly that we’re ignoring low-probability but high-damage events, from asteroid strikes to scientific experiments gone wrong. His cost-benefit calculations about them make for good policy, dry reading, and the occasional unexpected chuckle. Diamond too thinks we’re ignoring problems, but he’s focused on a dozen imminent environmental threats that could do us in if not attended to. He tells how and why other societies collapsed after ignoring similar problems, and over and over again he makes you wonder, what were they thinking? MORE at Chicago Reader website

Sustainable Residential Development: Planning and Design for Green Neighborhoods

2007-12-21T09:55:00-05:00

Sustainable Residential Development: Planning and Design for Green Neighborhoods

Avi Friedman, McGill University
2007. McGraw-Hill. 288 pp. $59.95.

“The thrust of this book is to reintroduce common sense to the design of neighborhoods,” writes the author in his preface. {xi} To the usual lingo of sustainability he adds the concept that decision-makers should follow “the path of least negative impact…a path that will result in the smallest negative impact on the environmental, societal, and economic factors of a project.” {10} He discusses infill, grayfield (commercial), and greenfield sites. Infill, while preferable in his eyes, can be difficult to build: “When an entire area or a single plot of land has remained vacant, there is usually a good reason for it”—environmental, political, technical, or legal. {48}

Sure enough, most of the projects Friedman describes in detail are greenfield projects, such as La Foret de Marie-Victorin near Saint-Nicolas, Quebec. His description of the planning process there suggests a purely professional reason why infill projects sometimes don’t get done, and don’t get the publicity when they are done: they don’t give the architect/planner/developer as much scope. At La Foret, “we started…by studying regional and urban issues and their potential effect on the site. We correlated the contribution of these aspects to sustainability…. We began a careful study of the site´s natural assets,” including “existing microclimates. ...Identifying the site’s flora and fauna was the next stage.” {73} The one infill project discussed – in Le Village, a neighborhood of Cornwall, Ontario – also involved careful study of the neighborhood and involvement of residents, but it simply couldn’t offer the same chance to start fresh and do it right. Indeed, the architectural guidelines for maintaining the neighborhood´s character are meticulous (“sliding doors are not permitted”). {234}

Friedman describes his case studies in generous detail. Interestingly for a book that extols density, each of the three rehabilitated Le Village houses discussed in detail was converted from a duplex to single-family occupancy. {234-6} It is hard to swim against the current.

—Harold Henderson

News // Center for Building Communities

Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design with Nature

Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design with Nature

Sprawl: A Compact History

Catastrophe: Risk and Response

Sustainable Residential Development: Planning and Design for Green Neighborhoods

Sustainable Residential Development: Planning and Design for Green Neighborhoods

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