Over the past half century, our western cities that emerged from the industrial revolution have grown into dense nodes of interconnections. The premise of spatial connectivity that inspired these cities has facilitated a consolidation of old urban cores into larger ecologies of interaction that provide reciprocal benefit to their participants.

Whereas the western metropolis has evolved through the idea of a larger city, it could be our smaller, post industrial cities that will serve as candidates for the next iteration of the cityscape. Armed with new mechanisms for access and mobility, our current technological reality brings opportunities to reconnect to a class of smaller, under-utilized cities and activate existing landscapes that were previously deemed inaccessible.  The adaptive reuse and re-programming of these existing and largely-forgotten downtowns will offer the ability to unlock a new sustainable city model in a return to the idea of dispersed urbanity.

Waterways provided key locations for elaborate manufacturing facilities.

2D Connectivity

From their beginnings, cities have revolved around the element of connectivity. The birth and growth of many of the large cities we have today was predicated on the physical connections that allowed for access to transit corridors and raw materials. The prevalence of transporting people and goods by ship lead to the siting of cities on the maps of coasts and rivers to utilize waterways as the connective tissue for exchange and communication. Thus, the utility of spatial adjacency became the determining factor to create our business hubs as ports with proximity to a concentration of commodities.

Just as the rise of America’s industrial age breathed life into urban areas across the country, its demise left a vacuum around a series of cities that were built for the purpose of making things. A combination of advances in manufacturing technology, the prospect of cheaper labor abroad and new opportunities for transport and distribution helped to decouple cities from their intended, and often singular, uses. The absence of industrial anchors brought the market to reassess the value of the cartographic adjacencies that historically made their locations so attractive and had served as the foundations of their connections to the world beyond.

Today, these historic cities sit as complex, vacant landscapes with an array of beautiful containers rooted in a network of infrastructural systems. Many have spent decades sitting idle, awaiting the adaptive evolution required to allow them to reconnect to their surrounding environs. More than any time since our country’s migration away from the role of an industrial leader, we now have the capacity to plug these cities back into a broader network and unlock their potential for a new urban experience.

The industrial canals of America’s former “Paper City,” Holyoke, Massachusetts

(Re)Defined Connectivity

While the buildings of post industrial cities have languished waiting for new supply chains to refill factory floors, the world has developed a different network of exchange that can reboot our ideas of utilizing these artifacts.  Technology continues to create ways to increase the amount of information we can access and the speed with which we do it. Adjacencies drawn on a map can be circumvented by fiber-optic bridges of communication. Vast expanses of cubicles over sprawling production floors can be replaced by remote server farms; employees can be a handful of seats within a cooperative work space rather than floor plates of desks for a single entity.

New modes for how we live and work offer a chance to reprogram the functional organization of spaces built for an outmoded use. According to a survey conducted by Gallup, 43% of employed Americans spent at least some time working remotely last year. Where telecommuting may have historically started in tech-based industries, the range of companies allowing, if not embracing, remote employees is on the rise. The advent of broader access to goods, generic drugs, driverless vehicles and distributed power generation all challenge traditional parameters of determining prime urban location. This new age of technology erases the need for spatial adjacency predicated on the outdated understanding of connectivity.

For cities formerly viewed as “detached,” these forces provide a way for new urban populations to benefit from affordable environments built around a pedestrian scale while still plugging into the network of living and business outside of their city limits.

3D Connectivity

A new generation of programming for these sites could constitute the greatest comprehensive recycling of resources in American history–a life cycle extension without equal. Like palettes of construction materials, our supply of unused industrial buildings are vast caches of latent energy stored in structures built for longevity. Any realistic, sustainable solution for our urban future will need to include the existing built environment.

The now-vacant Eblana Brewery in Boston’s Mission Hill area stands as an irreplaceable structure.

Not only does the demolition of our historic fabric constitute one of our largest waste streams, but its replacement with new construction deepens the tax of our planet’s resources. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the country produced 534 million tons of construction and demolition waste in 2014, more than twice the amount of all generated municipal solid waste. Over 90% of this waste stream came from demolition. In addition, as the publication of PlaNYC in 2007 aptly pointed out, “by 2030 at least 85% of our energy and carbon usage will come from buildings that already exist today.” Even if every new structure utilized the bleeding edge of best practices, their collective influence would only amount to a small portion of our total building stock. We will not build our way out of our consumption with disparate examples of new efficient buildings.

A solution could include focusing on existing square-footage that bears unused capacity–an increasingly rare commodity for our larger urban icons. Now armed with new generations of buildings systems and enclosure technologies, we can re-enter a former industrial node to give a second life to those resources, a life that is more efficient and costs less to operate than their original incarnation. Even outside names like Boston, San Francisco or New York that are familiar to overcrowding and high demand, a growing list of cities report less than 1% of housing stock for sale. Filling empty floors and vacant lots in cities built to fit 30-40% more than their current populations could be a valuable alternative to adding expensive space to environments nearing capacity.

4D Connectivity

Contrary to some new development experiments that try to create urban conditions on greenfield sites, our class of smaller, reactivated cities offers the unique ability to link the present not only to the future, but also to the past. Though their generation of survival has not been en vogue, the grids and structures of these industrial enclaves are rooted in a community lineage built on foundations that have often existed for over a century. The scars of their histories speak to an authenticity rather than the appliques of contemporary trends. The pasts that they have not been able to part from also leave them with a irreplaceable built environment outside the reach of fast fashion or overnight development.

Beyond the tacit benefits of so many physical resources, the stories and records of these aged landscapes connect us to lifetimes of wisdom that provide a benchmark against where we have been and how that can inform where we are going. The same aspects of these buildings that have dissuaded development efforts in the end of the last millennium also make them more pliable and agile to a new generation of building standards, policy fabrics, and infrastructural networks.

The concept of reuse is a difficult one in modern times where an increasing number of items are made for an increasingly short lifespan. As technology continues its swift pace of evolution, generations of products are rendered inert. Yet unlike our computers and cellphones, our post industrial fabric is full of assets that have retained their value, needing only to be plugged back in. The same advance in technology that evolved its way out of their city limits has now circled around with the ability to reconnect with new means and methods. The result could be a new generation of unique urban archetypes prompting the incubation of connection methods we can only begin to imagine.

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Beside New York’s Bryant Park this morning, a crowd paired their pre-work coffee with an interview of prolific architect Daniel Libeskind to discuss the future of our urban spaces. While some in the audience were still waiting for the kickstart from their morning java, the aminated designer spoke with an enthusiasm that belied the early hour.  The task at hand: help shed light on what Smart Cities are and how they fit into our future.

As a part of the “Future Of” series hosted by the Wall Street Journal, the conversation was guided by WSJ Financial Editor Dennis K. Berman to dig into this oft repeated concept of the next evolution of dense urban cores. In many ways “Smart City” is still a term in its infancy with many trying to define where it begins and ends (struggling with the same reality as “sustainability.”) Though regularly paired with the technology advances of infrastructural systems and the utilization of big data, in Libeskind’s eyes the crafting of tomorrow’s city has as much to do with looking back as it does looking ahead.  

The founder of Studio Libeskind did not definitively draw the limits of a “Smart City” as much as help shade in some of its potential qualities. “A smart city is a city that reacts to your desires,” said the designer who prophesied about systems and buildings that increase in their ability to respond directly to the will of occupants. When asked what role technology has to play in the realization of smart cities, the veteran architect was quick to affirm its necessity. 

In With the Old & In With the New

Libeskind paired his acceptance of technology with the weight of older urban contributions. “Technology is a driving mechanism for smart cities, but we have to know how to use it. It’s a pencil. It’s one million pencils connected to a super brain. But a pencil has never created a city. Human beings make cities.” His vision of new cities did not lie in the rendered facsimiles of virtual reality, but renewed interest and dedication to crafting a vibrant streetscape–an irreplaceable component of a successful urban ecosystem. “Streets are the oldest things we have,” the architect reflected, placing a great value on the histories that defined not only New York, but cities everywhere. “I think we need to stop worrying about architecture and start worrying about streets.”

It is true, we have countless cities not only in their country, but the entire world that have fallen out of a pattern of economic growth, but still remain packed with centuries of history and caches of dormant resources. Libeskind approaches older urban constructs like the Bronx with confidence in the wealth of opportunity they have to offer. He also pointed to cities like Pittsburgh and its combination of political and economic forces that has allowed it to promote its own evolution.

Berman threw out a question about the inevitable wave of driverless cars and whether or not this, along with other tech tools like smartphones, threatened the future of personal interactions to the streetscape. However, Libeskind’s optimism in the human factor was unwavering. In his eyes, the advent of driverless technology will only help to detach people from their automobiles and allow them to return their focus and contributions to the life of the sidewalk.

Berman broached the topic again with a nod to the struggles of streetside retail in the face of growing patronage of internet-based purchasing, but Libeskind remained firm in his resolve, assured that a new generation of retail experience will evolve to respond to new tastes and changes in access. This could be accompanied by proactive policy measures that are put in place to bolster small scale retail. 

“A Smart City would not just be based on statistics… You need human interest.”

Time will tell if this proves to be the case, but I share the architect’s view of its importance. There is no digital replacement for an urban street experience and yet the health of a streetscape rests only so much in its planning and architecture. The forces that we often attribute to “the market” are in fact human ones. Many, many human ones whose choices can proactively help or passively hurt the prospect of not only the bricks and mortar businesses, but by extension the public asset of the urban realm that they help comprise. As the architect points out, the value of our streets is an old idea rooted in millennia rather than a technological advance.

Before the morning’s proceedings had started, Mr. Libeskind could be spotted sitting alone on a bench in the park, taking in the bustle of the downtown muffled by the cultured landscape of one of New York’s striking public spaces. The scene was a fitting one with the glass spire of One Bryant Park standing in the background as a prime example of the evolution of our built environment to respond to technological advances paired with the New York Public Library and its heavily activated public space. The former has been around for a decade where the latter has been serving its role as a public asset since 1847. The combination was the very manifestation of Libeskind’s thesis: tomorrow’s technological achievements built on the foundation of historical ones. 

The post Libeskind Says Smart Cities Will Need History as Much as the Future appeared first on Intercon.

Vote With Your Wallet

Money talks. And while one could take this to mean which non-profits you support or which candidates you contribute to (both viable tools for helping to promote progress) I am actually talking about neither of those. I’m talking about how you spend your money day to day; the food you eat, the products you use, the clothes you wear, the hotels you stay at.

At the end of the Great Recession the United States found itself at a point of great opportunity. With the economy in dire straights and businesses struggling to manage in leaner times after so many years of flush business, Americans had the ability to choose what kinds of businesses would define the new economy and how business of the future would respond to the environment. In some cases this bore fruit. A survey from Green America, EcoVentures International and Association for Enterprise Opportunity found that in numerous cases sales of sustainable versions in products from food, to building materials to energy production all increased more than their traditional counterparts. Back in 2012, McGraw Hill noted that despite the fact that the construction industry contracted severely in the recession, the green building stayed flat, ultimately increasing as a share of overall construction market from 8% in 2008 to 17% in 2012.

We’ve now arrived at another key moment where supporting values through the free market is paramount to sustaining environmental stewardship. The new administration claims that its direction revolves around economic expansion, but any expansion that occurs is going to be on the backs of consumer choices.

Power to the States

While President Obama’s White House could be counted on as, at the very least, a quiet proponent of environmental measures, President Trump has already taken steps to weaken both regulation and enforcement. With the confirmation of Scott Pruitt as the Director of the EPA–a man with a history of ardent efforts against the environment and the agency he now leads–our strongest tool for enforcement at the national level may be severely blunted. This does not, however, leave the country powerless to promote progress or maintain localized momentum built over the course of the past eight years.

Some would argue that a notable amount of recent environmental policy and initiatives have originated not from the Congress (obviously) or the White House, but states and their cities. City populations are poised to author both the discussion and the actions taken on our relationship with the natural environment. As architect and professor Vishaan Chakrabarti notes in his book A Country of Cities, while our metropolitan areas represent only 3% of the land in the U.S., they contribute 90% of the country’s GDP and 86.2% of its jobs. Brooks Rainwater recently noted on Business Insider:

“But no matter what unfolds in the coming weeks and months, cities are committed to creating a sustainable future. If the federal government chooses not to lead on environmental and energy issues, American cities will forge a path forward. Solidifying this commitment, over 1000 local officials have signed on to the Mayors’ Climate Protection Agreement since 2005, acknowledging the threat of climate change. In an even bolder statement, 130 American cities have joined the Compact of Mayors to support the Paris agreement and commit their cities to take action to reduce carbon emissions.” 

This also means that the short game is not just about contacting your Senators and Representatives at the Federal level (though definitely do this, over and over again) but your state level elected officials as well. Try to keep your focus on which groups offer you the most ability to influence your surroundings and make your voice heard. If that is with you State Senator, excellent. If it is across the desk of your mayor or selectman, so be it.

Say Yes as Often as You Say No

Voicing opposition to proposals that decrease the health and safety of our citizens or put our planet in more danger than it already is are well founded and certainly necessary, but the pro-environment standard cannot be known as one of only criticism. Just as it is important to speak out against transgression, so too is the recognition of people, companies and organizations who serve as a model for where our society should be headed. When you see an example of progressive change, make it a habit to convey your endorsement. Phone calls, letters, emails or, better yet, handshakes can be the positive feedback that keeps programs, products or initiatives around rather than falling prey to a perceived lack of impact.

Talk to the Other Side

We all like having conversations with like-minded folks, but the truth is that screaming into the green echo chamber is going to have a limited effect on inducing change where we need it the most. Make a practice of seeking out (calm) exchanges with those that may know less about sustainable issues or why they are important. The standing view of this forum is that the majority of inaction on the environment comes as the result of ignorance rather than apathy. Just last week Nina Burleigh on Grist was pointing to a number of House Republicans that were emerging as proponents of climate change action, due in no small part to some of their coastal districts that are already seeing the effects of rising sea levels. First hand knowledge can be a powerful weapon when combined with orderly and construction debate.

Though there have been many mornings over the past 60 days that the morning coffee is paired with disappointing news for our country’s environmental leadership, tomorrow’s leaders can come in all shapes and sizes and from all locations.  While President Trump may not yet be the environmental leader that some of us believe he should be, it is not the first time in modern history when Presidents or their EPA administrators were not making ecological health a priority. Our stance can remain the same while our methods shift and evolve to respond to the current political headwinds. They must, because at this point the biosphere cannot afford four years of inaction.

The post Environmentalism in the Age of Trump appeared first on Intercon.

[Editor’s Note: Below is a guest post from Jesse Glicker LEED AP. Formerly, the Special Projects Coordinator at COOKFOX Architects, Jesse is currently a Masters Candidate at UCL’s Energy Institute studying Economics and Policy of Energy and the Environment.]

There is no shortage of news headlines about upcoming changes in the U.S. With the presidential inauguration only just behind us, we are already seeing intense shifts in policy targeting changes in the health care system, immigration reform and the renegotiation of trade deals. In this time of transition it is important not to lose sight of what this means for the environment and the U.S.’s role in fighting global climate change. Under the old administration, climate change was an accepted fact and U.S. environmental policy reflected that.

The Paris Agreement, considered the most ambitious global climate change efforts to date, was signed by 195 nations in December 2016. The agreement shows how serious the international community is about combating climate change.While the United States often claims the position of a leader in global policy, its waning commitment in the transition to a low carbon economy leaves it open to become outpaced by other world powers. The U.S. must remain focused on staying competitive in the high-growth industry of renewable energy and assess the options for doing so with or without federal support in order to remain a leader in this global effort.

The Numbers

Investment in renewables is a potential indicator for the feasibility of our country’s transition to a low carbon future. In 2005, total global investment in clean energy was low by today’s standards at 88 $USD billion. The U.S. was the clear leader at the time with 17 $USD billion, while China trailed behind at 8.81 $USD billion. That trend has changed significantly. Ten years later, global investments are up to 349 $USD billion with China soaring to the lead with clean energy investments totaling 119 $USD billion, more than 12 times what it was 10 years prior. Meanwhile, the U.S. came in at 56 $USD billion, nearly half that of China.

This month his China announced it plans to invest 361 $USD billion into renewables by 2020. This investment could reportedly create 13 million new jobs in China according to Reuters, adding to China’s current 3.5 million renewable energy jobs. By comparison, the U.S. has less than 1 million and the outlook for this figure to increase under Trump is very unclear (certainly if the US is relying on government funding for those jobs).

China is utilizing clean energy as an economic tailwind while the U.S. remains a tepid participant. What sectors these investments are going to is a clear indicator for where the jobs will be and the majority of growth will take place. While China’s still relies mainly on coal for its energy supply, new investments largely targeting the solar PV, hydro and wind industries will go a long way toward creating that growth.

Renewable Energy vs. Cleaner Carbon

One main factor to explain the U.S.’s stagnant growth rate in the development of renewables is the recent increase in natural gas production from shale. Production rates are at an all-time high and projected to continue to increase.

Natural gas is not completely evil here: As coal plants retire, natural gas production is filling the void (coal being a far worse culprit in CO2 emissions). Combined with the onset of the Great Recession, the switch from coal to natural gas is largely responsible for a net reduction in CO2 emissions nationally. But, for better or for worse, the move toward more natural gas, stifles the need to invest in alternative energy. While the cost and price of renewables are decreasing, set to undercut the price of fossil fuels, without the investments in infrastructure and innovation or the political will, the transition will be a slow one.

Cleaner Policy

The United States is leaving behind a previous administration that strove to identify itself with advancements in environmental policy. U.S. interest rose greatly to enter the fight against climate change and to increase energy efficiency. Under President Obama, the Clean Power Plan (CPP) was introduced and the Paris agreement was signed, additionally, grants were set up to invest in a smart grid and money was set aside for research and development (many of these efforts have since been removed from the official White House website since this past Friday).

While still controversial, the CPP is facing support from coastal states. The CPP aims to limit national CO2 emissions from power plants by setting regulations and standards on the state level. Although currently tied up in court, the Plan has the potential to lower U.S. CO2 emissions by 30% from 2005 levels and spur investment in alternative energy production (mainly due to the fact that the CPP would mean clear, stable support that investment in renewables will pay off in the future). According to the Annual Energy Outlook for 2016 by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), the CPP alone could result in a 20.5% increase in the construction of new renewable capacity between 2015 and 2030.

Source: U.S. EIA

Internationally, under the Obama administration the Paris Agreement was signed. The Paris Agreement is potentially the most ambitious multilateral environmental agreement to date. 125 countries have ratified the agreement, agreeing to stay below an increase of 2 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial temperatures. All countries party to the Agreement were required to submit Intended Nationally Determined Contributions ((I)NDCs), essentially a plan for how they will adhere initially to the Paris Agreement (not to meet the full agreement). The United States’ (I)NDC states:

The United States intends to achieve an economy-wide target of reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 26%-28% below its 2005 level in 2025 and to make best efforts to reduce its emissions by 28%.

Several factors are needed to achieve this goal. The Center for Climate and Energy Solutions published a paper in November 2016 detailing such actions. On the policy side, stricter fuel economy standards for medium and heavy duty trucks and policies to reduce methane emissions from oil and gas. The paper also outlines the important role of technology to “fill the gap” between business as usual and actually meeting the emissions target, namely, advancements in battery storage and the development of carbon capture and storage on natural gas plants. These measures are obtainable, but focus on only just meeting the Paris targets with incremental advances in technology. To be a world leader in the fight on climate change the US needs to focus on long term, radical technology, policy and process change.

Already, the newly-elected President Trump has been promising (or threatening, depending on your view) to withdraw from the agreement. Even the conversation surrounding pulling out of the Paris Agreement signals instability to firms and organizations looking to invest in eco-innovation. Why restructure if the policy will become irrelevant during the upcoming term? A lack of consistent support from federal policy has plagued renewable development since its inception and could still stymie growth even in the face of the most critical environmental accord of modern times. international level. Additionally, as U.S. policy on renewables and clean energy investments become less clear, foreign countries and companies seeking investments will look to more stable investing landscapes.

Robinson Meyer, of the Atlantic, wrote on the consequences of the U.S. withdrawing from Paris. After an speaking with Todd Stern, the former US special envoy on climate change. He stated, “If the Trump administration withdraws the United States from the Paris Agreement, the country would face a massive global diplomatic backlash and permanently cede worldwide leadership on climate and renewable-energy issues to China…”

All is not lost -the potential failure of action at the federal level forces the nation to look to the states.

The 10th Amendment – Power to the States

There is a growing perception of the potential of state level government to fill the void left by federal policy. A prime example is the polarizing effect the Clean Power Plan had on states; while some states did bring the Clean Power Plan to court, several fiercely fought for it. Click here for a breakdown of where each state stands.

Notably, California has been a national leader in such efforts. California has set their own emissions reduction targets and their governor has gone so far as to say they will work with other states and nations on climate change policies. On the other side of the country, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative was formed between Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont to cap and reduce CO2 emissions in the power sector.

C40, an NGO based on a collaboration of cities around the world to address climate change, recently released a report on the role that US cities in particular are playing in meeting environmental targets. The report aptly states, “The U.S. federal system endows cities with greater power than many other cities elsewhere in the world. The System allows state and city governments to set policy and targets, design laws and stands, implement financial mechanisms to develop and support markets (e.g green bonds), and enforce regulatory compliance.” This could continue to serve as a mechanism for local economies to prioritize environmental goals in the same way we have seen renewable energy portfolio standards grow over the past decade. The report goes on to point out that if all U.S. cities with populations over 50,000 followed subscribed to C40’s measures, they could reduce city emissions by 28%, representing 36% of the total necessary to hit the U.S. target for the Paris Climate Agreement by 2025.

It is important to note that even under the environmentally friendly Obama administration, the United States’ standing slipped in terms of its investments. This is where the private sector comes in to fill in where policy cannot; there is strong support for Paris from more than 100 American companies including Nestle, JLL and Nike. These companies were part of a coordinated effort, started in 2015 to support a low carbon economy called, “Business Backs Low Carbon USA.” The opener to the effort states, “Failure to build a low carbon economy could put America’s prosperity at risk. But the right action now would create jobs and boost competitiveness.” The effort advocates the implementation of the CPP and recently released this letter to now-President Trump in support of the Paris Agreement.

America is still in control of its own destiny when it comes to participating in a direction that will bring a cleaner energy grid, more jobs, and more innovation. Current efforts (both political and market based) in the U.S., if maintained, can get the U.S. to meet the Paris goals. Technological growth occurring in carbon capture and storage, battery storage and other incremental improvements taking place are certainly moves in the right direction. While it is the responsibility of the country to help guide this process, the “country” may end up having to be the people, companies and governments in each of the 50 states rather than the federal government charged with their management.  In the words of Donald Trump himself, “…we are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the people.”

Photo Credit: abubakershekhani.com

The post The Future for Renewables and Our Low Carbon Ecomony appeared first on Intercon.

An Automotive Landscape

Fort Collins, Colorado shares many characteristics with typical, small, American cities. With roughly 150,000 residents in just under 56 square miles, Fort Collins hosts the campus of Colorado State University and a thriving local beer culture. Like so many other cities, Fort Collins has grown with its deference to car travel and has reached the point of problematic congestion on its road ways. Despite proactive efforts to promote biking, buses and modern traffic systems, car traffic has continued to rise along with its effect on the local environment. According to an article in the Coloradoan,

“Fort Collins traffic congestion has never been worse. The volume of traffic is at an all-time high, the city’s busiest intersections have gotten even busier and people are driving more than ever. What’s more, the exhaust that snakes out of all those tailpipes makes up about a quarter of community greenhouse gas emissions, contributing to rising temperatures and some of the nation’s highest smog-causing ozone levels.”

A new proposal by design firm DCP highlights opportunities for the paved grid of roads and sidewalks to evolve into an ecology of functions that benefit residents and the environment. The site chosen for the study was South Mason Street, a main spine for community not only due to its central location to the city and CSU, but also because it is the home of an active freight rail track with trains passing by at least twice a day. Cars and trains currently hold a disproportionate presence in the composition of South Mason Street that make it more of a road for cars than a street for people.

Traffic Monoculture vs. Multi-Modal Ecology, DCP

One of the tricky (and unpopular) truths about mobility is that one cannot affect walkability without affecting car travel (usually an inverse relationship). This is only more true when starting with an existing landscape that is car-dependent like ours. As author and engineer Jeff Speck notes in his book Walkable City:

“When more than a quarter of workers take transit, more than 10 percent go on foot. When fewer than 5 percent take transit, fewer than 3 percent go on foot. It isn’t just that transit users walk more, but non-transit users walk more in cities shaped around transit. For the most part, cities either support driving or everything else.”

Instead of promoting a monoculture of cars, DCP likened the infrastructural landscape as more of a permaculture-based system. With roots based in agricultural growing practices, “permaculture” is the development of complementary, interconnected systems to form a productive ecology–not dissimilar from the goal of a vibrant streetscape. The proposed design applies permaculture principles to South Mason Street to replace its transit monoculture with the cultivation of a multi-modal ecology. Area that has been doled out to high speed travel can be reclaimed for a more balanced distribution among multi-modal transit types to create a safe, walkable environment. Crafting new boundaries to the existing right-of-way could help decrease the sensory dominance that the train imparts on the street environment. A low screening element provides visual and acoustic dampening at the trains base and provides an additional layer of separation, aiding the pedestrian in returning focus to the walkable surroundings.

South Mason Street Site Plan, DCP

Permaculture & Infrastructure

Rather than a road of consumption driven primarily by the use of fossil fuels, the design creates an armature of production, organized around the holistic cultivation of community resources. Perhaps the most important resource to a vibrant, local streetscape is the fostering the pedestrian presence. Preserving not only adequate sidewalk access, but also protection for crossing multi-modal transit paths are critical to convincing residents that their neighborhood is walkable. By dispersing new public space in the form of parklets and shortening crossing distances at intersections, pedestrians can come closer to parity within the spatial hierarchy of the boulevard while bikers can utilize the 3,300 linear feet of new protected bike lanes.

One of the repercussions of our growing (and aging) road network is its impervious nature, shedding precipitation in concentrated quantities rather than allowing for absorption back into the earth to recharge aquifers. Though some pervious, planted surface does currently exist, grass represents its predominant component. While still a natural analogue for the wild prairie, grass stands as yet another modern monoculture, often requiring a large amount of chemical care while providing relatively little in the realm of biodiversity.

Permaculture Planted Detail, DCP

Helping to support the natural environment does not begin with endangered species, but the foundation of ecological health at the smallest of scales. Building up from there helps rebuild ecologies and fortifies them in their entirety. Largely through the redistribution of existing planted space, new raised beds supply more than a network of dedicated, protected bike lanes, but acreage for food production via a new community garden. With the foundation of permaculture principals, a combination of bushes and ground with 100 new fruit trees cover can yield perennial crops with minimal maintenance–a source of renewable food for the community at large. These new plantings can be paired with a deployment of sunken bioswales whose rain gardens can increase the variety of habitats and collect an estimated 67,350 gallons of stormwater runoff.

Proposed Site Section, DCP (Click to enlarge)

In assessing the impact of the daily freight trains, the design team added a new acoustic barrier for the freight right-of-way combined with two planted medians create a layered view across the street for pedestrians. The new raised planters take their form from concrete footing bolstered with recycled content like fly ash or ground glass to support reclaimed railroad ties. The goal of the designers was not to remove the cultural icon of the train, but rather dampen its negative side effects for the surrounding environment.  As we change the active role that cars and trains plan in defining the atmosphere, pedestrians and bikers can reclaim the street and help encourage the infill of adjacent lots with walkable retail and artisan program, eventually completing the street’s transformation.

Full Contact Infrastructure

The latent message in the proposal probes at the relationship between residents and the systems needed to maintain quality of life. For decades, the status quo has been to hide these systems to the best of ones ability while their functions are removed from the natural environment (even when nature could potentially perform some of them better than its replacements). A new idea of infrastructure could see more of its components including natural processes that engage residents while yielding better pedestrian settings in return.

This multi-layered ecology provides a number of dividends: solar shading, biophilic environments, rainwater absorption, air purification and a continuous production of seasonal fruits and berries. From there the ecologies can grow, starting at soil health fueled with local compost to the myriad of nature and migratory birds. Whether managed by the city or its residents, the communal orchard of South Mason Street could help to redefine the modern roles of infrastructure and its engagement with the community.

All Imagery Courtesy of DCP

The post Infrastructure as Permaculture appeared first on Intercon.

The juxtaposition of modern programs and industrial building shells fell into favor before the droves of hipsters ratified its value, but current trends have only added to the swell of interest that gives new looks to our countries artifacts of the industrial age. Despite their decades of neglect, the brick walls and steel sash windows of our former factories and workshops carry an authenticity that a growing number of urban dwellers have come to covet.

When the former industrial sites prime for renovation are gobbled up and refurbished, developers turn their eyes to nearby lots and their proximity to a growing demand for housing and retail. The healthy demand, and the subsequent rising rents, can make the case for re-zoning for industrial uses to residential and commercial ones an easy one for property owners. In many cases, the result can be an active streetscape seen as a win-win-win for local communities: derelict sites were removed, property values increased and new businesses have flourished with residents to support them.

Communities Built on the Floors of Factories

At the beginning of the cycle this was most likely often the case. Neighborhoods like New York’s DUMBO or Boston’s Seaport District were largely vacant just 20-25 years ago rather than the centers of development that they are today. The switch from manufacturing zoning brought broad-based improvement to areas that cities had struggled to revive, but the more mature stage of the development curve of these areas that we occupy now prompts the question of whether or not the integration of industrial uses is worth revisiting and if the city could suffer from having industrial uses stricken from the urban landscape.

I recently read an article by Andy Cook over on Next City that makes the case for maintaining industrial zoning in thriving urban areas. The author correctly points out:

“An industrial building-turned-luxury-apartment-complex can generate in one month of rent what an industrial user would pay in a year. Oftentimes, the neighbors — especially if they are also newcomers to the area — are happy to see the change, because it means an end to the noxious smells and loud noises of the former tenant, and if they own, an increase in their own property values. For local governments, it means an increase in the tax base. So from a market perspective, everybody wins.

But if you look closer, the math gets fuzzy. Especially in a city like Baltimore where 75 percent of residents over the age of 25 do not have a college degree and unemployment levels hover around 8 percent. For young black men in Baltimore, unemployment is around 37 percent. The roots of this jobs crisis can be at least partially attributed to the sharp decline in manufacturing jobs in our region over the last 50 years, driven by companies offshoring their operations.”

Cook pokes at the underbelly of a more deeply seeded issue for urban revitalization in this country and its all but inevitable evolution into fully gentrified communities (the ones that succeed anyway). Breathing life into underutilized or struggling neighborhoods is a good thing, but when that grass roots effort transforms into complete local displacement in deference to yuppies and Starbucks, a bit of the luster is lost and the lives that ended up being fundamentally improved could be a small portion of the socio-economic spectrum.

A new range of job opportunities for a broader skill level of workers is one great reason to maintain the integration of industrial uses in the landscape. Increased outlets for production of “things” could help keep the populace more diverse and help add stability to communities through localizing their product and resource streams.

It is also important to remember that, in many cases, the industry of today is not the same industry that left the country in the second half of the 20th century. Technology has brought us new ways of making our stuff. CNC fabrication and 3D printing are prime examples of new techniques where products can be made in fewer steps and smaller footprints than it took fifty years ago. Our means of manipulating materials like plastic, glass or concrete are swiftly changing, making adjacency to these operations less of an issue than it might have been to live next to an ironworks or leather factory 50 years ago.

The change in what the fabrication process requires is also affecting who is doing the making. Automated means of fabrication can help more designers be fabricators as well. This faction of the creative class includes designers of furniture, illustrations, industrial products and even artists–a legion of urbanites that contribute an irreplaceable tone and perspective to the urban condition while they support small business. Studio space for these residents is key to their art form and it can quickly become a financial impossibility for neighborhoods that have traded all their shop square footage for shiny new condos. Pushing creative workspace to the outskirts of cities could seem attractive in the beginning, but it could ultimately contribute to a migration of the creative class that most urban grass roots efforts were originally trying to entice.

Neighborhood Value at the Scale of the Neighborhood

When looking at the possibility of a single property it can be easy to lose site of its contribution to the neighborhood that provided its value in the first place. Sustaining that communal value becomes the collective responsibility of every block rather than one or two key landmarks. Keeping new development as a mixture of diverse and integrated uses can be a good baseline for pairing fiscal improvement with cultural resilience.

There is no reason why we could not see more artisan industrial uses directly integrated with both commercial and residential program types. Live/work archetypes do not have to only take the form of a home office or collective work space beneath residential apartments. On the contrary, the unit on the second floor of a row house could sit comfortably over a furniture outfit or artist’s studio with doors that roll open to the sidewalk to engage potential customers. Modern residential modules can be difficult to shoe-horn into older buildings with deeper floor plates, but an exterior of apartments wrapped around an interior of production space for creatives could be a viable option.

Zoning may have to get smarter in order to help communities navigate through these changes and spot the differences between opportunities and pitfalls. In the short term, there could be developers who point to the more difficult task of integration and the perceived sacrifice of upfront sales for “less marketable” spaces, but the longer view could host the creation of communities whose value is maintained through a diversity of both program types and residents–something much harder to restore once its gone.

Image Credits: carnagerobitics.com , bigbluesaw.com , vermontfurnituremakers.com

The post Dear Cities, Don’t Count Industrial Out Yet appeared first on Intercon.

Photo by EFFEKT

The rate and degree of evolution for building types and development patterns around the world may be one of the most critical decisions facing the fate of the biosphere over the next century. While a growing number of voices can point to the decidedly unsustainable nature of the settlement patterns of many different cultures, proposals that offer a significant step towards the dynamic equilibrium of sustainability are harder to come by. One developer/architecture team has recently rolled out a vision that does more than toggle the mainstream model, but proposes the framework for a cultural shift built around goals of balance.

Together, entrepreneur James Ehrlich and Danish architecture firm EFFEKT have created the ReGen Village as a model for small communities that utilize planning and technology for some bold steps towards self-reliance while minimizing its negative environmental impact.

Ehrlich, author, serial entrepreneur and the founding force behind Regen Villages, became impassioned by the growing possibilities of stepping outside of what has become our traditional grid-based model for development centered around remote consumption.

“My original inspiration goes back over a decade ago as I was filming case studies on organic and bio-dynamic family farms, learning a great deal about where the strongest communities in the world are born and nurtured, around where healthy food is cultivated,” Ehrlich explains. Eventually he became involved with Stanford University’s team for the forward-looking Solar Decathlon competition that taps the minds of students and teachers for sharpening the bleeding edge of energy positive living.

“I was literally blown away at this idea that we could essentially redefine the subdivision development industry toward regenerative and resilient thinking,” Ehrlich confessed. “My thoughts were, if we can just add some high-yield organic food production, water harvesting, clean energy generation and storage and waste-to-resource management – we could develop these communities further into the peri-urban and rural areas as a better hope for humanity cramming into megacities.”

Building an Ecology

Initially, the design team began framing their design problem where all development efforts should start: what about the current status quo doesn’t work. When it comes to how and where we build, the list is not a short one. In describing their project, the team highlights the fact that humanity currently uses 42% of our planet’s surface area for farming and, in the process, allow it to be the leading cause of deforestation across the globe. Not only do we then ship that food all over the place, but also end up throwing a embarrassing amount away. The firm came to the same conclusion as author John Mandyck who points to over 1 billion tons of global food waste every year in his book Food Foolish.

The shelter of our homes comes with amazing levels of consumption for resources and energy that are usually being transported from as far away as our food. The size and scale of the systems in place to provide these basic necessities are often used as reasons why they cannot be changed, but crafting a new system on a smaller, more local scale could offer a glimpse into the possibilities for reversing the trends of consumption and their repercussions. Rather than a development base centered around consumption, EFFEKT was tasked with designing a model around sustainably producing the resources needed for its own survival.

The premise of the project revolves around meeting the needs of sustenance that we all enjoy: shelter, food, water and community–along with the energy that all of these interconnected components require. The design team took systems like vertical farms, aquaculture, and hydroponics to be the anchors of food cultivation and paired them with a variety of energy sources in order to achieve the goal of net-positive for the community. Rather than a single source, the combination of solar photovoltaics, solar thermal, wind power and biomass can operate in tandem for increased control and reliability.

“ReGen Villages is all about applied technology. We are simply applying already existing technologies into an integrated community design, providing clean energy, water and food right off your doorstep,” says Sinus Lynge, co-founder of EFFEKT.

The result is a design for living built from this industrial ecosystem rather than trying to force an ecosystem’s participation into an outdated framework. “We like to think of ReGen as the Tesla of ecovillages. We want to make it easy, convenient and accessible to choose a sustainable lifestyle off the grid,” says Sinus Lynge, co-founder of EFFEKT.

Photo by EFFEKT

Weaving a New Community Fabric

The design team’s inaugural model starts from the point of providing a residential community, rather than taking the best selling residential homes in the world and working from the assumption that it represents the holistically best option. The detachment from an existing suburban base helps free a new community building exercise from the baggage of an antiquated status quo. Ehrlich notes that, “The very nature of regenerative design thinking is to constantly be looking at the output of one system as the input of another. It’s also that the bi-products of these outputs produce a public good or generative asset that is beneficial.”

Each of these pillars become part of a web whose co-dependence mandates that removing any piece could damage the integrity of the whole–a mentality holding more similarities to an ecosystem rather than common first world development models. Following that mentality, each one of those basic needs is produced by more than once source. This redundancy helps to ensure reliability at all times. Instead of coming from one farm source, food is spread among small livestock, aquaponics and heated greenhouses. This is further supplemented by the fact that growing food is designed as an integral part of every home.

Power production is given the same inclusive presence, not segregated out to the periphery where acknowledgement of its necessity can become compromised. The distributed nature of multiple energy types (wind, solar & biogas) has all the trimmings of a balanced micro-grid (more on those: here) to help ensure that power is always available even when only working from renewable sources.  Community spaces like playgrounds, community learning centers and social dining are dispersed throughout the circular array of various housing modules that range from one to three stories tall, but all of which include protected exterior space and areas for growing food.

One could imagine how the village of 100 homes could support the vast majority of its own basic living needs while producing relatively little waste. Ehrlich’s search for the proper site to serve as the pilot for his community ultimately drew his gaze across the Atlantic for both his site and his designers. “Realizing that Silicon Valley was a bit myopic in this kind of infrastructure thinking, I made the decision to use Northern Europe as a test bed for market research and design thinking from a Scandinavian perspective. It was at that moment that I met the EFFEKT architecture group and thus began our global framework architectural partnership together, as they had a deep interest in pursuing design thinking for the benefit of humanity and were dedicated to supporting this vision anyway they could.”

Ehrlich points to developing nations as eventually being prime examples for how these small communities could flourish to offer a higher standard of living with a lower-impact alternative to simply harvesting a Western suburban model developed over the past half-century. Given the two choices, it is easy to see why the ReGen option could be appealing.

Photo by EFFEKT

“Community” in Different Languages

The basic composition of ReGen’s model sets the stage for a plausible, sustainable function at its suggested scale: the village. While this certainly makes sense as a place to start the intervention and test hypotheses, it seems like the design basis of a constructed (and balanced) ecosystem is built on tenets of sustainability that can, and arguably should, be infused into all of our development goals–including those with higher densities. This raises the inevitable questions of whether or not there are opportunities for ReGen Villages to evolve into a denser, perhaps more urban, model that could host not hundreds, but thousands of inhabitants?

“This is such a great question,” says Ehrlich. “I spend most of my time lecturing on the desperate need to focus on the peri-urban and rural areas as the last great hope for humanity. This thinking is not original of course, I derived most of this thesis from the 2013 UNCTAD report “Time to Wake Up” – with 80 scholarly papers all pointing to the same or similar conclusion about small communities in the aggregate producing more organic food and clean energy and water, than large mono-culture farms. I have many colleagues on campus and around the world that are focusing on urban resiliency, which of course is critical to the hundreds of millions of people who live in big cities.

I believe however, that we can create these lily pads of regenerative and resilient small communities all around the world, especially on the outskirts of big cities and even further out into the rural areas that we can create a real steam valve for these brittle megacities, where some percentage of humanity will increasingly choose to live further away from. In other words, we can create mid-density ReGen Villages as we move forward, where the aggregate of these small communities start to look like larger off-grid towns for instance.”

Indeed, it seems possible that the underpinning goals of the ReGen model could be retooled for a slightly denser model that includes more people and program types. One thing that the model currently avoids is commercial or retail program; arguably important facets to our current definition of community that exists outside the bare essentials of shelter and food. One could make the argument that these components are more extraneous than current, first-world culture may believe, but the fact remains that they represent the foundation of our economy with substantial contribution to our current way of life–a reality that may not be quick to change any time soon.

But does it really have to? While the ReGen thesis may never be conducive to an “urban” landscape as we currently understand it, the construction of vibrant towns does not seem to contradict its goals of self reliance. Beyond being palatable to a larger audience, a truly sustainable model for development may need to reach higher densities for a world that is a ways away from being population neutral.

Photo by EFFEKT

It Takes a Village

The roll out of the ReGen model appears to be assuming a blank slate, using a tablua rasa as the canvas for deploying its series of technological and programmatic elements that will work in unison to support a community of residents. Looking at the existing landscape of the U.S. and the inefficiencies of its persistent development models, a first glance could say that ReGen offers less opportunity for a country that has so many existing buildings (including very old buildings) and entrenched infrastructural systems. America’s contribution to global sustainability has to include substantial measures for its existing building stock.

That being said, the ReGen model still works off of a series of individual systems that, as the authors note, already exist. The trouble in mainstream thinking has been how to better integrate these systems into our existing development patterns for new construction, but this could be searching for the answer to the wrong question. A model like ReGen sidesteps this potentially faulty starting point to mine the possibilities of a community built around the goal of self-reliance and how much our models may have to change to accommodate a sustainable lifestyle in the first place.

A fascinating caveat to Ehrlich’s model is that, in some ways, ReGen is trying to market a process as much as a product. The acquisition of suitable land parcels through the development arm paired with a prototype design is really only the beginning. “ReGen’s team of regenerative platform technologists contract with local architecture, construction and engineering firms in each country and region to adapt and optimize the village model to the local conditions. ReGen Villages then remains in every project, managing these regenerative platforms as a concierge level of services to residents, by aggregating data and building algorithms that improve daily thriving mechanisms,” the partnership explains.

With a built village in place, it is certainly possible that the lessons learned could be extracted and applied to the scalar task of implementing the same concepts into different settings–even the existing built environment. With prototype deployment set for Europe and Asia, it will be fascinating to see how the models fair in regular use and what tactics can be harvested from them as they evolve over time.

Images Courtesy of EFFEKT

The post ReGen Village Design Pushes for Self-Sustenance appeared first on Intercon.

Without a doubt, there are many examples of why growth at all scales has improved the quality of life and security for billions of people, but we have reached the point where there are numerous examples where rampant growth models can disregard quality or safety for the sole attribute of feeding themselves. In some instances, the nature of goals crafted around growth can evolve into restrictions that necessitate additional growth not for continuous improvement, but merely for survival–a spiral of perpetual growth for its own sake. As we enter an age of technological maturity and reach a population of over 7 billion people, the time has come to reassess the dangers of not only fostering, but promoting unbridled and unproductive growth.

The Way We Eat

An easy place to begin is the treatment of our agricultural system. As an area that has seen immense increase in production yields over the past century, food systems across the world have been retooled to focus on how to consistently produce more crops per acre with little focus on how those quantities relate to what the environment can sustainably support.

In his book Third Plate, author and chef Dan Barber points towards an example of this phenomenon in the evolution of the chicken farming industry in the United States. Barber outlines the difficulty in running a chicken farming business that is both small scale and profitable given the backdrop of a consumer public that has evolved with a growing acceptance of increased quantities of lesser-quality meat.

“Instead, the end result is a food system that plays out like an ongoing national tribute to Rube Golderg. The overproduction of grain enables the overproduction of chicken, which lowers the price of chicken, which means even more chickens are raised to make up for the declining revenue. That leads to even more unneeded chicken. So it’s fed to other animals that it probably shouldn’t be fed to, like fish (which are increasingly farm raised, in part due to the offshore pollution caused by producing too much grain). And then the overproduced chicken gets dumped to places like Mexico. To compete, Mexico turns to the same kind of system, the get-big-or-get-out system that feeds on itself: produce more chicken at lower prices. Laid off poultry workers seek work in America, often illegally, which drives down wages and helps poultry companies produce… more chicken.”

The one-sided support to this system is that cheaper poultry is available to a wider customer base. Fair enough, but that benefit comes with a series of negative cultural repercussions, the most basic being declining conditions for the animals themselves in industrial-scale chicken farms, leading towards the increase of disease and the subsequent use of antibiotics. Next comes the production of protein with a declining spectrum of taste and/or nutritional value.

From there the trend leads to the purchase of increased amounts of lower priced food, which has been shown to lead Americans to make bigger portions and ultimately throw more food away, leading to fodder for landfills and the production of methane gas. At the macro scale, smaller farmers find it only harder to compete–especially if they are trying to produce a local product of higher quality. These bastions of small business are forced to either grow and reduce costs or  change the focus on their business.

Decades later, even if the industry as a whole has grown, the number of jobs has increased and the country tout a positive contribution to a rising GDP, society as a whole has still produced greater portions of a declining product while degrading the environment and hurting small business.

The Way We Move

Our country’s commuting habits point to another growth-inducing system that has been on the rise for over half a century. The U.S. Census Bureau states that 85.8 percent of Americans still get to work by car, and 76.4 percent drive solo, making traffic on our highways and time spent commuting consistent issues for most of the country–especially around urban centers. By now, we have traded the critical mass of many once-thriving local and regional transportation systems for a dependence on car-centric maneuverability.

When a car is the only reasonable way to complete daily tasks, it is only more frustrating to drivers when traffic stretches out the time of regular trips. The solution to traffic problems is commonly focused on increasing capacity with wider roads in order to alleviate the congestion of a given amount of cars on an existing area of impervious blacktop. Yet as this forum has discussed before (here), the benefits of increasing the capacity of the roads are relatively short lived and ultimately wind up producing larger quantities of the same problems.

History shows us that increasing the capacity will inevitably make driving more convenient, causing more people to drive and resulting in an increase of volume that utilizes new capacity. Eventually, congestion will once again result as more people try to take advantage of the road network until new calls come to alleviate traffic by increasing capacity. From his book Walkable City, traffic engineer Jeff Speck quotes Jan Gehl as saying:

“… In every case, attempts to relieve traffic pressure by building more roads and parking garages have generated more traffic and more congestion. The volume of car traffic almost everywhere is more or less arbitrary, depending on the available transportation infrastructure.”

With a focus on growing economies fueled by development increasingly far away from city centers, the system has taken on a life of its own with an agenda that pushes the need for growth in order to maintain health rather than improve it. Larger highways are not functioning “better” or giving people more pleasurable rides. The temporary relief in traffic is not improving access or opportunity. It is simply reminding people of the service that the infrastructure was supposed to provide and refreshing their memory of that before it fades again into overuse.

Assessing the actual  problem would mean toggling our larger, regional goals for development and the resulting demands on movement and access. Many road projects are not being paralleled with alternative transportation projects that could actually undercut the growth spiral by giving more options and greater flexibility. Our goals for new development are also not incorporating coordinated deployments of both commercial and residential space that could remove  long distance commuters from the road (or commutes entirely) and reduce net vehicle miles traveled.

The Way We Live

Many of us have been part of a rising growth spiral that is much closer to home–literally our homes. The suburban development pattern has matured into a broad market that stretches across the country, occupying countless localities outside of urban cores. The first generation of urban flight and suburban construction became  a new experiment for how people could explore their relationship to the city, their jobs and each other. In many ways, the benefits  of this lifestyle (and there certainly are some) created an idealized image that became synonymous with property ownership and the so-called American Dream.

Engineer and Planner Charles Marohn has spent years studying the effects of suburban municipalities and points to the flaws of the system that make growth necessary in order for these towns to stay solvent. Marohn peels back the rind on common municipal examples that undermine their own strength in his book Thoughts on Building Strong Towns.

Towns that were new in the 50’s and 60’s are now quietly showing signs of their age. Roads and bridges exposed to use and the elements can only be covered with a fresh coat of asphalt so many times. Older schools for local children are either bulging at the seams or are becoming ill-equipped for modern teaching goals and quality of space. Pipe networks used to move water and sewage have useful lives that are consistently blown past with many places in the country still using infrastructure over 50 years old. While the bones of a suburban community could be strong, the extremities represent a new stage of recurring costs that many local governments do not have measures to satisfy. As a result, growth has become an attractive option to finance these shortfalls.

Whether they are new towns sprouting up in subdivided farmland or historic towns anchored by a tight center, municipalities can use some common tactics in order to encourage growth and bolster their treasuries and perform necessary maintenance of existing infrastructure. A number of incentives can be used for enticing developers to erect new neighborhoods and sometimes a few of these immediate liabilities can be thrown on the bill as well. But all too often, developers are willing to build infrastructure of roads and services that are ultimately turned over to the management of the municipality upon completion, only adding to an infrastructure maintenance load.

In exchange for a short term increase in tax revenue, the town has now inherited more assets that have a lifespan that Marohn averages at around 30 years. This is compounded by the fact that the tax revenue of new residents will rarely cover the cost for replacement of the infrastructure built to serve them. The cycle continues itself with upcoming costs met by fostering more low-density growth with its own respective infrastructure.

Marohn reflects on the “bailout” nature of suburban development:

“If it “doesn’t make sense” for the people that live along a dead end road to pick up the cost of maintaining it, what does make sense? In the Ponzi Scheme that is the financing of America’s suburbs, that would be the local government, that magical entity that, while it is made up of a collection of neighborhoods of people, is somehow expected (and in the first life cycle is able) to provide more services and amenities than those people are willing to pay for.“

Growth Spirals in Nature

Though manufactured growth spirals have proven to be something that humanity can create and nurture rather well, we are not the only examples of these occurrences on the planet. Nature shows us instances where evolution comes to mistakenly favor runaway growth, often to the detriment or collapse of a species.

One common example used by biologists for citing detrimental growth is known as the “Peacock Effect.” A large tail of attractive feathers, proved to be an early evolutionary trait for males to entice the affection of Peahens, grew  to represent a healthy and well-fed specimen. In its early stages, weaker Peacocks would be dismissed in order to promote strength in the species and aid in its broader survival.

However, as tails began to grow so did their requirements for nutrients along with their weight. The continuously increasing size of an eye-catching fan would eventually weigh down the bird and only make it an easier catch for predators. Over time, this lead to populations of Peacocks declining even as their tails continued to grow–a practice that could have driven the species to extinction if not saved (some could say “bailed out”) by humanity for wanting to preserve the beautiful birds.

A great article in the Harvard Business Review by Christopher Meyer and Julia Kirby looks at the causes for these occurrences and leaves insight to their answers.

“You might wonder how it is that other species escape their own runaways. Why does the giraffe’s neck not become impossibly long? Why no towering rabbit ears? That’s because what went on with the peacock is an aberration: an interesting mismatch in the processes of natural selection (the criteria by which nature decides what makes an individual fit enough to thrive and reproduce) and sexual selection (the criteria by which the opposite sex of the species makes that call). In species that remain viable across millennia, these two selection processes are aligned—they have to be. Any misalignment serves to run a species into the ground, sooner or later.”

Unwinding Growth Spirals

The existence of so many examples can prompt the question of how to break the cycle. How do we unwind the self-fulfilling spiral that only builds its own momentum while baking itself into the powerful inertia of social norms?

The propagation of western culture suffers from similar problems of  misalignment and have attached qualities to our hopes of thriving and reproduction that can exacerbate the weight of our own growth.  The cultural link between ever-increasing ownership of homes, spread farther apart can lead us to be crushed by the weight of infrastructural and environmental obligations that we cannot meet. When we employ singular metrics like GDP as a skewed measure of our country’s overall success, we are promoting monetary growth above other, more fundamental projects and needs that stretch across borders of socio-economic class barriers. How long is it before we fall prey to the fanfare and elegance of our short-sighted success?

The answer may lie in focusing on the source of “misalignment” that helps perpetuate our contribution to a system that may be broken. All too often this kind of dissonance results from our keen ability to misjudge the merit of a practice by increasing the amount of time between its benefits and its inevitable costs or repercussions. The more we can take an action that we may already know to have questionable foundations and delay its response to the next generation, the less critical its solution seems to appear.

Whenever possible, we should be promoting a holistic appreciation for quality that can be sustainably maintained for the foreseeable future and beyond.

Image Credit: artof4elements.com

The post The Danger of Growth Spirals appeared first on Intercon.

One of the results of an increasingly national, if not international, economy is the rise of larger organizations to outbid smaller competitors with standardization and greater access to resources. We can see it everywhere from the clothes we wear, to the homes we buy and the food that we eat. One vibrant battleground is the retail environment where more and more small business owners can wind up being unable to compete with larger entities for survival in the face of rising rents. Contrary to popular belief, in order for more privately owned shops to survive (and the contribution they provide), neighborhoods need proactive measures of support rather than counting on market forces to do all the heavy lifting.

Recently, I was having a conversation with a West Village resident talking about the opening of the second location of a sandwich shop called Il Bambino, designed by new architecture firm DCP. Her excited response was, “I’ll take anything that isn’t a chain pharmacy or a bank!” reflecting an increasingly noticeable reality in the swiftly rising rents in New York that are slowly changing the face of neighborhood streetscapes.   

No neighborhood seems immune with examples of casualties ranging from the quiet mom-and-pop shop all the way to Danny Meyer’s Union Square Cafe, which refused to renew its lease after its landlord more-than-tripled the space’s rent to $650,000 a year. Even spots like the former 5th Avenue home of celebrity chef Bobby Flay’s Mesa Grille has remained empty for over two and a half years after being in business for two decades. The landlord reportedly doubled the asking price per month.

While one could use the “efficiency of the free market” as justification for this trend being a consumer-driven choice, there is a growing number of sources that are saying the deck is increasingly stacked against unique, small business owners. A recent article by Oscar Perry Abello over at NextCity framed the depth of the issue on how the game plays into the hands of the outlets of larger corporations. It is not uncommon that “Signing a national brand tenant can even be the difference between getting financing or not getting financing for a commercial or mixed-use development project.”

A Lackluster Landscape in the Wake

As retail rents continue to climb in the city, the repercussions that are already becoming apparent are two-fold: the first is the slow but steady loss of neighborhood business that have helped to define the city and its individual neighborhoods for decades. The second is an increasing number of vacant storefronts as landlords wait for the tenant that can meet their rent goals. This combination is doubly-detrimental, fostering not only the loss of character, but also discouraging overall foot traffic. No one likes walking down empty streets.

The thought that this evolution is being driven by retail consumers doesn’t really hold water. At some point, even a restaurant that is full from open until close can only afford so much in rent and still charge prices people are willing to pay for food. While some credit could be given to the rising sale prices of high-end residential properties in the city, the two are not inexorably linked and trade (historically) in different orders of magnitude.

If the rash of overly optimistic landlords continue to spread at the cost of the urban experience then the question is: Will the market right itself? Maybe not–at least not in time. The cultural devastation would need to reach a point of such intensity that momentum of appreciation for authenticity would need to start from some version of scratch. Urban areas can take a more proactive stance to equalize the playing field.

Using the Zoning Code

Zoning can be an effective tool to serve as a filter for the kind of neighborhood that will be created within its parameters. In the same way that zoning can be used to promote the things we want, it can also be used to corral the things we don’t want.

Most zoning ordinances contain provisions to allow productive adjacencies of complementary uses or restrict potentially disruptive ones.  Adult movie establishments and concrete plants are traditionally separated from healthy, mixed-use neighborhoods due to their negative effects on a pedestrian environment. While the cozy vestibule protecting a string of corporate ATMs is not the same as a strip club, there is an argument to be made that their contribution to a walkable environment is limited. En masse, they are probably detrimental.

The zoning code could easily be changed in order to create a new use group of establishments that operate under the umbrella of national corporations. After that, limitations to tweak their rate of propagation could include variables like size, frequency or proximity to other uses.

San Francisco’s “Formula Business Ordinance” presents itself as a reassuring pilot for a mechanism that gives a degree of control back to the local community for determining the face of its own future. The policy move requires “formula” business with over 11 stores worldwide to file for a special use permit in order to get permit approval from the Planning Commission. The criteria for consideration include the existing concentration of other chain retail in the area, the prevalence of similar goods and services already in the area, neighborhood compatibility and retail vacancy rates–all important metrics for how a new generation of tenants will affect the futures of the ones already there.

Can I See Your License Please?

Another option could be creating license requirements for national brands with a certain amount of them allocated out to neighborhoods depending on their size. Most municipalities, and sometimes their individual neighborhoods, require license approval for the sale of alcohol. This allows places to control how much booze is being poured within town limits as well its effects on the dynamic and feel of the neighborhood.

National chains could fall into a similar category. By requiring licenses to be obtained for nodes of a larger conglomerate, the metrics for attracting, starting and maintaining those businesses change. By only having a fixed number of licenses per neighborhood, the percentage of business taken by certain types of corporations becomes limited–promoting competition between other large companies that can afford the battle rather than steamrolling smaller operations.

Ground Floor Retail Needs Curating

The design and planning communities often talk about creating “places” in lieu of simply infilling with space. Though I am not particularly a fan of the term “placemaking,” the goal of making authentic, unique and walkable environments that are inherently linked to their locale is a good one. When it comes to ground floor retail though, an increasingly important component is changing the mentality of how and why those spaces are filled.

Cultivating a successful streetscape should be a full-contact sport and one should assume it takes more than simply building a space and handing it over to who can pay the most rent the fastest. Andres Duany, Jeff Speck and Michael Lydon hit the topic home succinctly in what I think is one of the stronger points made in their book The Smart Growth Manual:

“Main streets often exist in direct competition with malls, shopping centers, and other centrally managed retail agglomerates. To hold their own, they must incorporate certain design and management techniques applied to the best retailers… leasing must be coordinated and proactive, the right mix of shops–useful, competently run, and mutually supportive–will not occur by chance.”

I could not agree more. Examples of what happens when failing to operate by this mantra are literally everywhere, both inside and outside of urban areas. The state of affairs at Westwood’s University Station complex says it all. What was meant to be a progressive example of Transit Oriented Development with unique retail shops under apartments turned into a strip mall of chains with standardized apartment blocks around it.

In order to achieve or maintain the memorable street experiences that people love, the landlords, businesses, municipalities and the residents must all stop assuming that the market will manage the space into success. These constructs need to be carefully monitored and the means for keeping them vibrant need to evolve in response to the times and changing market forces.

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It would be fair to say that the baseline of sustainability in building construction is rising. Whether it is due to improving technology, updated building codes or the slow but steady growth of consumer demand, we are in the process of making buildings tighter and smarter. At the same time, the nature of proactive lobbying in the beginning of the millennium has led to many of today’s common measures being attributes that are easy to fight for with limited resulting gains. For all the time spent on toggling technologies of a systems-oriented approach to sustainability, there are still simpler aspects of building design that could bring large lifecycle savings to resource use. One of them is parking.   

I was recently involved in the early stages of a large, mutli-family residential project. The details are relatively inconsequential outside of the fact that the site resides on the island of Manhattan. Though decidedly still in the beginning of the process, there are important programmatic decisions that will ultimately shape large aspects of the project and its energy footprint. The decision of whether to have parking and if so, how much, has energy repercussions on par with most other measures when it comes to a net reduction beyond a code-compliant building.

New York City is well aware of its problems with congestion and acknowledges that the streets can only hold so many cars at a time. Given that this particular site is zoned residential without a commercial overlay, there is no inherent parking requirement. On the contrary, the city caps the number of allowable spaces in response to a portion of new development–in this case 35% of the number of new residential units as a number of the new units were located within the retained portion of an existing structure. For this example, we can assume 19 new parking spaces for the building for a look into how that amenity relates to the energy footprint of the building.

Anyone who is buying newly constructed real estate in Manhattan can tell you it is a lifestyle of amenities. The premium of real estate is based just as much on what is within the walls you occupy as what is within walking distance. Of the things that people are apparently willing to pay lots of money for (views, terraces, walk in closets) a dedicated space to park a car may be one of the most highly valued. For commuters that wish to drive on the island, rates of $400-800 per month are commonplace, but upwards of $1000 are not hard to find. A parking space that a property owner can purchase for his own vehicle… well it’s a luxury few can afford that sends estimated values into the realm of hundreds of thousands of dollars. As a result, it’s not uncommon for those financing new construction to lobby for as much parking as possible. The ownership of this project site was no different.

Parking Footprint is Growing, not Shrinking

200 11th Avenue Courtesy of Selldorf Architects

The focus on improving the mileage efficiency of cars could lead one to believe that their urban energy footprint is shrinking over time, but when it comes to urban centers like New York, the opposite is most likely true. As demand for this amenity rises (and its resulting cost) developers are going out of their way to only make parking accommodations more lavish in order to entice buyers into a higher asking price for a spot. A CBS News article reports that the average residential parking space could cost an additional $136,052.

Some could pinpoint the birth of this new generation of NYC parking accommodations on 200 11th Avenue, designed by Selldorf Architects. The west side tower incorporates a car elevator that allows for access to “sky garages,” a parking space right outside the apartment on each floor. But what started as the rare and unusual is quickly becoming more commonplace.

Courtesy of 443 Greenwich

Projects like the Tribeca Lofts at 443 Greenwich Street begin to re-imagine the garage experience, transforming it from a dark and simple service space that required little more than excavation and concrete into lavish interiors for resident rides. Brick floors paired with herringbone tile on vaulted ceilings bring an image of class to what was normally thought of as a utilitarian space, but all of these components come with a carbon cost of production, packaging, shipment, installation and maintenance. Like many amenities, parking garages are spaces with relatively little traffic, but significant material contributions in construction with systems such as ventilation and lighting that are consistently operating.

Sustainability & Cars?

In a time when sustainability is becoming more widely accepted in urban buildings, cars have been conveniently left out of most conversations or standards created to rate or quantify the “greenness” of a building project. While systems like LEED have historically given points to reserving parking spaces for alternative fuel or electric vehicles, the practice largely skirts the deeper question of how does the latent energy of cars and their operation relate to the sustainable foundations of a building.

Given that, in its current form, the infrastructure of producing and driving automobiles is widely accepted to be detrimental to the environment when compared with other transportation options, the next logical question could be: How much is adding parking spaces to a building offsetting the productive measures that are becoming more routine in architectural projects? When we compare the positive outcome of efforts to reduce things like energy use or water consumption, how do those gains compare with making it a little bit easier to drive–especially in an environment as dense as New York City?

To demonstrate an order of magnitude for the answer, we can look at a single, sustainable metric of energy use and compare that to the embodied energy used in creating and driving a car.

To start, we can use the site Metered New York as a resource for establishing a baseline for building energy use. The site is the creation of the Urban Green Council (the local NYC chapter for the USGBC) and serves as a collection point for the benchmarking data for water and energy that is now required by the city for large buildings throughout the five boroughs. The site puts the median energy usage for multi-family residential buildings built in the last 5 years at 112 kBtu per square foot. Applying that to a design size of roughly 200,000 zoning square feet, which excludes cellar and mechanical spaces, and the result is an estimated annual energy usage of  22.4 million kBtus–not an insignificant sum.

In order to demonstrate the lifecycle costs of an American car, I started with a 2010 study done by the Argonne National Laboratory studying the embodied energy within the production and assembly of modern vehicles (a copy can be found here). The conclusion of the study amounted to an average energy usage of 34,000 megajoules of energy to make a car or about 32,226 kBtu that weighed 3,377 pounds. When held against 22.4 million, that doesn’t seem like a bad place to start.

The average American car drives an average of 12,000 miles a year for ten years. If we use the EPA CAFE standards of a mileage of 27.5 miles per gallon combined with the 4,145 kBtu/mile of energy usage discerned in a previous article (here) it adds up to 49,800 kBtu per year for each car. The cumulative total amounts to 49,800 (of usage) + 3,223 (of embodied energy), or 53,023 kBtu of energy cost per vehicle every year. A few kBtu here and a few kBtu there and all of a sudden we’re talking about real energy.

When tallied for 19 cars, the total springs to just over 1 million kBtu of energy or around 4.5% of the annual energy usage for the building as a whole.  

While one could claim that urban residents most likely drive less than the national average of 12,000 miles per year, there are also a number of other factors that contribute to the latent energy of a car’s footprint on the site. One could start with the fact that many of the cars parked at a high end condominium would not be a standard, 4-door sedan weighing 3,400 pounds. Luxury SUVs carry even greater energy costs for production with less efficient mileage. This still discounts the energy and material needed to excavate down for an additional cellar level as well as the materials needed to construct a garage with 19 spaces including the automotive elevator to get them to and from the street. When all is said and done, it is not outlandish to think that the design team would need to employ proactive efforts to decrease the energy usage of a building by 5% just to break even from a relatively small number of on-site parking spots.

Redefining Green

As the nature of the architectural landscape in urban centers like New York continues to change, so too must our expectations for how we identify and credit sustainable efforts and results. New York enjoys a progressive energy code that continues to raise the bar for new construction–helping to raise the level of performance in new additions to the city’s built environment.

While more efficient heating and cooling systems may use less power to temper indoor environments, the size of apartments could be rising to satisfy a market increasingly made up of end high buyers. Advances in LED lighting will continue to permeate deeper into designs as code reduces the slack in design goals, but the array of amenity spaces that are quickly becoming the standard for enticing new residents, coupled with the provision of on site parking, could be depreciating the progress made on reducing the city’s carbon footprint.

Could it be outlandish to think that the approval of parking spaces for new development could be directly tied to design reductions in the use of energy and water on site? Given the market value of each space to prospective developers, could the city make more progress by having development teams “pay” for new parking spaces with design features that negate their contribution to net energy use?

Especially within the limits of a city containing such a mature ecology of alternative transit options, a more sustainable fabric has to begin to toggle the expectations of a new generation beyond just tweaking the technology of the status quo, but this is not only a problem restricted to metropolises. The sustainable initiatives of new headquarters of both Apple (here) and Google (here) have to be paired with their relatively remote locations and deference to large amounts of space for parking and commuting by car rather than locations close to existing centers of activity to promote, if not bolster, walkable environments.

We are fortunate to live in an exciting time where there has been an influx of effort to find ways of improving numerous buildings systems to reduce energy consumption. There are few traditional building components that do not have a more sustainable counterpart that can be easily replaced. Given that the status quo gives us a baseline so riddled with opportunities for improvement, it is easy to give more weight to a series of smaller technological improvements than they actually deserve in terms of how much of an impact they currently make. Plus, the concept of efficiency is attractive and easily marketable. But too much of the “green” movement revolves around the idea of allowing us to keep doing what we’re doing now, but simply using less energy and maybe saving a bit of money in the process. Looking outside of the realm of systematic upgrades to fundamental, programmatic changes shifts the opportunity for sustainable impact into a whole new gear.

Image Credit: collective-evolution.com

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