Advanced community design models are emerging to provide some of the greatest opportunities for reducing fossil fuel use, climate-disrupting emissions and traffic congestion, while also offering affordable, high-quality lifestyles.
Envision living in a community that offers an abundance of local shopping, services and entertainment. The community is focused on a mobility center well connected to the region with transit and vanpools. The need to drive to work and other destinations is minimized. When you do drive, it is in an electric vehicle charged at your house or a fast charge station located in the mobility center park-and-ride.
CityLAB, an urban design think tank at the University of California, Los Angeles, took on the challenge of design-inspired infrastructure earlier this year with the creation of WPA 2.0: Working Public Architecture. [3] Inspired by the Works Projects Administration of the 1930s — the largest and most effective of the agencies created by the Roosevelt administration — WPA 2.0 has so far included a global design competition, a multidisciplinary symposium and (coming in February) a web exhibition.
Doug Farr is an architect and planner who wrote the book Sustainable Design: Urban Design with Nature. In this talk, Farr discusses how LEED certification of buildings can only do so much since it doesn’t take into account how buildings are integrated sustainably with its surroundings. He argues that we need to think differently about we organize our cities – more densely in more compact, complete, and walkable neighborhoods – to design sustainability into the way we live. The video is an hour and 20 minutes long, but may be worth it for the ideas and case studies presented about planning and architecture design.
As part of his presentation at the Creative Places and Spaces conference, David Buckland showed this silent video prepared by global engineering firm Arup. Called Infrastructure in an Ecological Age, at 30 seconds into the video it shows the transformation of a typical city (Manchester in this case) into a green wonderland of rooftop food production, smart bus systems, turning buildings into photovoltaic and algae generators. It is all doable, too: a bright green city.
Gensler’s winning design, co-created with 4240 Architecture, transforms Chicago’s abandoned Bloomingdale rail line into a three mile long greenhouse and hydrogen generator that provides 10 acres of farm land year round, powers city schools, and creates a beacon for the city.
Off-Grid Scenarios: solutions for the endless city was recently chosen by Mark Linder of Syracuse University, Stanley Tigerman of Tigerman McCurry Architects and Sarah Whiting of Princeton University as “best in show” at UIC, an annual award given to the top project of the school. The studio, which was led by Alexander Lehnerer of the ETH Zurich, was titled Chicago Rules: inclusionary regimes within the American city.
Residents of a German village can turn on a street light like they would a reading lamp: whenever they need to.
Dörentrup, located 320 kilometres west of Berlin, has adopted an energy-saving program that lets someone use a cellphone to turn on a street light by dialling the code number found on the lamppost.
We’ve looked at how dense urban areas compare with sprawling areas in terms of per capita emissions and we’ve also looked at whether Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) and gas consumption is higher in areas that sprawl than in compact areas. In both cases studies have shown what we might suspect: areas that sprawl have more climate changing emissions, bigger and less efficient vehicles.
The words “air pollution” may sound archaic or inflated. There is a sense that air has gotten dramatically cleaner and is not as worrisome a problem as some other environmental issues. Air rarely makes national news anymore, unless it’s about dirty air in another country, or unless there is speculation that a brown cloud is creeping over from China, dirtying the air in California – a theory that has yet to be proven. More accurately, America is dirtying its own air in cities from Los Angeles to Pittsburgh.
