Urban Design and Planning

Worldchanging Architects, Planners, Artists and Animators: The International Living Building Institute, in partnership with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, has announced a new design competition: Living City. They invite you to

create a new global vision: a breathtaking, compelling model for the future of civilization. Unleash the power of your imagination to envision a city capable of thriving through the centuries – one that will heal the land and prove that the human species can in fact live, in the words of E. O. Wilson, as ‘part and parcel with creation’.

The competition is framed as a response to our current, prevalent dystopian models of the future, and is a chance to create a positive, ecologically grounded vision of the future that will help shape our collective consciousness. These are the general guidelines:

Our Living City Design Competition is an act of optimism, grounded in our belief that we already have the technical tools and collective wisdom we need to achieve true sustainability. But before we can bring our cities into balance with the ecosystems they inhabit, we must understand what that balance would look like. This is where you come in.

Each Living City Design Competition team will envision a city that meets all of the Imperatives of the Living Building Challenge (Version 2.0), including its specific requirements for density, shading, urban agriculture, transportation, energy and water use. The end result must be rooted in solid ecological and architectural principles and explicitly aligned with the Living Building Challenge 2.0.

Submissions are due on February 1, 2011. The full criteria for submissions will be available June 15, 2010. Click here to download a PDF of the competition brief, which includes information on entry fees and prizes. Contact Joanna Gangi with inquiries.

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Worldchanging Filmmakers, Artists, Students, and Water Enthusiasts: Our friends at Ecotrust are now accepting submissions for the Stories From Our Watersheds contest. The competition invites filmmakers from the Pacific Northwest region (Oregon, Washington, Idaho) of the United States to produce low-cost, 10 minutes-or-less digital films that capture the benefits of community-based watershed and habitat restoration.

Filmmakers are encouraged to focus their creativity on making a film that recognizes and reinforces the nature-human relationships that form the fabric of communities. The film is not meant to be a political statement. It may result in that, but that cannot be its sole purpose. Films that focus on expressing a feeling about a place – a sense of place, a mood – will be given special consideration. Films must look at how watershed restoration influences and affects human life in ways including: local job creation, community-building, and hands-on learning opportunities.

The contest is managed by Ecotrust on behalf of the Whole Watershed Restoration Initiative (WWRI), a collaborative effort between Ecotrust, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board, the Pacific Northwest Region of the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and others.

$3,500 is up for grabs for filmmakers in two categories: 21-and-over, and 20-and under. The deadline for submissions is July 19, 2010. For more information see the contest website.

(For more on Ecotrust from Worldchanging see Resource: Watershed Locator; Resource: P&P; and Creating a Community Supported Fishery.)

Image of man in Cedar River Watershed courtesy of Flickr photographer Soggydan Dan Bennett under the Creative Commons License.

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(Posted by Amanda Reed in Urban Design and Planning at 2:52 PM)

by Michael Eliason and Aaron Yankauskas

Many locals consider Seattle a ‘green’ city – and compared to most of the United States (sadly) it is. Unfortunately, the steps required to achieve carbon neutral don’t seem appealing to most living here. So it has been very encouraging to see the development of a city like Freiburg, where CO2 reduction is more than just pandering, where public transportation is done effectively and efficiently, where low-energy housing is taken seriously and near-zero development for public buildings is even mandated.

Although Freiburg may not be the greenest city or even the first to reach carbon neutral by 2030, it does provide a strong model for green policy. While Vauban, saw a lot of press in the last year, the rest of the city – including the development of another eco-neighborhood, Rieselfeld - seems to have been largely ignored. This post attempts to shift the focus to some of those qualities that make Freiburg a livable and green ‘solar city.’

Green Roots

In the last few decades, Freiburg has been pushing the eco-theme rather successfully. In part, this has been due to the highly educated populace – Albert-Ludwigs-Universität had been the largest employer after the war. Public transportation policies in the early 1970s set the stage for environmentally-friendly transit options. In 1975, a nuclear power plant planned for the village of Whyl, 25 miles northwest of Freiburg, caused a large uproar as citizens protested and occupied the site for months until the project was scrapped. In the ensuing energy vacuum, numerous solar research institutes such as the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy, relocated or were founded in the region. By the mid 80s, the city had passed progressive initiatives to make Freiburg a leader in sustainable energy and in 1996, new buildings on city-owned land would be built to meet niedrigenergie (low energy) standards (max. heat energy of 65 kWh/m²a). Recent laws require new buildings to meet passivhaus standards (15 kWh/m²a) and remodels to meet niedrigenergie standards. Today, green energy industries and research in Freiburg employ nearly 10,000 people.

Green Energy

Freiburg has more sunny days than any major city in Germany, which is one of the reasons solar has been so dominant in the region. By 1996, there were over 200 photovoltaic installations within city limits. Private companies teaming up with public entities have resulted in large PV arrays being installed on municipal buildings, schools, the local brewery, new trade hall and even the soccer stadium (yes, Freiburg has a soccer team – SC Freiburg!). While living there in 2003-04, we saw a number of houses with solar collectors or photovoltaics. During a visit in 2009, we were stunned at the number of private installations – it seemed to be almost every other house. The city has even set up an online database for suitability of roof top solar installations – many cities could benefit from a similar tool.

While solar is heavily visible in Freiburg, it only provides a small fraction of the electrical needs – wind is also a viable option for the region. In 2003, five windmills were installed – although these have become quite contentious. Additionally, regional legislation has made it difficult for private development of wind power, causing Baden Württemberg to lag behind most other Bundesländer. Without wind power, the city will be hard pressed to meet their renewable energy goals of 40% CO2 reduction by 2030.

Reiselfeld and Vauban both have cogeneration plants and are among the 90 small-scale combined heat and power plants (CHP) supplying 50% of the city’s electricity.

Green Transportation

Quick and efficient tram and bus lines (V.A.G.) allow for rapid movement around the city and surrounding suburbs. Regional transportation lines cover 1,900 miles of network and nearly 2/3 of residents live in the catchment area of a tram stop. Renewables are utilized to power the trams (80% hydro/20% solar + wind). The city center is a Fußgängerzone (pedestrian zone) and has been car-free since 1973. Instead of parking spaces for cars, heavily patronized cafes and shops spill onto sidewalks and streets. Nearly 90% of the 30,000 university students take public transportation or bike. Freiburgers really enjoy biking, which is easily accommodated by over 300 miles of bike paths and bike-friendly streets, as well as over 8,000 bike parking spaces in the city center. And yes, we know lots of bikers that fell while trying to ride between the rails (ourselves included).

Green Living

While the New York Times made Vauban seem like an enclave of uber-rich suburbanites, this isn’t exactly the case. Nearly 1/3 of the residents are students, residing in the first phase of renovated barracks. Vauban includes a number of passivhaus projects and plusenergie projects and two fairly interesting ‘solar garages.’ While touring the newer projects in Vauban, we saw 2 separate tour groups of architecture students.

Rieselfeld is almost three times as large as Vauban, but doesn’t have the same diversity of projects. Many of the housing blocks seem rubber-stamped (and may have been) but the neighborhood is more diverse and has more cultural activities, including a pretty amazing concrete church complex for both Protestants and Catholics.

The car-free zone in the central district was a great place to live. We have incredible memories of the time spent there, and if the opportunity to go back ever presents itself – we’d definitely be interested. Freiburg is a strong case study in what it takes to make a thriving, functioning green city.

Michael Eliason and Aaron Yankauskas are the founders of Brute Force Collaborative, a blog dedicated to documenting green architects, projects and building techniques. They are Virginia Tech College of Architecture and Urban Studies alumni who cut their teeth moving dirt for a rammed earth house in Virginia, and working long hours in Germany with pfeifer_kuhn architekten (Freiburg) and Chestnutt_Niess (Berlin). They presently straddle the continental U.S. with ‘cubicles’ in Boston and Seattle.

This post originally appeared on Brute Force Collective.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Urban Design and Planning at 2:10 PM)

James Howard Kunstler was the Opening Keynote speaker at the 2010 Living Future unConference. For those of you not familiar with Kunstler's work (as I wasn't), he is an author and journalist who writes and speaks about urban design, energy issues and new economies in a post-oil future. He's a fierce critic of suburban sprawl and the high costs associated with an automobile-centric culture. In his book The Long Emergency he explores the sweeping economic, political and social changes that will result from the end of access to cheap fossil fuels and the impact this will have on the way we live, work, farm and build.

Despite his generally engaging, joking, and convivial flair as a speaker, much of Kunstler's talk had a pretty gloom and doom tone -- He presented various facts and figures, and scary outlooks of some of the disasters the United States (US) will face if nothing is done to prepare for the end of cheap oil.* At a conference where the theme was all about hope and creating action for a sustainable future, his general pessimism was a strange beginning. However, it seemed that Kunstler’s reputation as someone who doesn’t pull any punches was exactly what conference organizers were looking for as a strategy to push people beyond wishful thinking and into hopeful action. As Joel Sisolak said when introducing Kunstler: “His kind of honesty is the only way to prepare ourselves for a living future.” My impression of what Sisolak meant by this was that if we were courageous enough to look unflinchingly at all the difficult and scary aspects of reality facing us today (peak oil, climate change, water scarcity, etc.), and then appropriately apply our skills and intelligence to solutions, then we as citizens, architects, urban planners and builders could transform pessimism into optimism, hope into action, and build cities and communities that will thrive in a post-oil and warming world.

*Note: Kunstler’s talk was entirely ‘United States’ focused in its discussion, but his forecasts for the future and suggested framework for thinking about solutions are globally relevant, as is the larger message from the conference to face the challenges of those forecasts head-on and build a better future. In the rest of this post the use of “we” refers to an ‘American’ “we” unless otherwise noted.

What follows is a summary of the key insights I thought Kunstler made about what the barriers are to productive responses to a challenging future, and what actions we can take to build a livable future.

THE PROBLEMS WE FACE
In order to respond to problems, we need to know what the problems are, but according to Kunstler, identifying problems is precisely what we’re not doing well; we’re having “trouble constructing a coherent consensus about where we’re at and how to move forward.”

For Kunstler our primary problem in America is that our social and political conversation is focused on “sustaining the unsustainable.” We’re doing all kinds of things to artificially sustain our current way of life, without accepting that the current way of life is itself the source of our larger problems. For example, instead of accepting that the era of what Kunstler called “happy motoring” is over, we’re talking about developing electric cars and opening up more places to drill for oil. Both of these approaches only serve to support, or sustain, an infrastructure and pattern of development that is based on cars, which is ultimately unsustainable.

The reason we can’t see, accept, or act on our primary problem of trying to sustain the unsustainable is because of what Kunstler called our “psychology of previous investment.” He described this psychology of previous investment as a psychological barrier to change that has been formed by our national financial and personal investment in cars and suburban development: “We invested all of our WWII income, savings and wealth in an infrastructure for daily life that has no future, and now we’re stuck with it. That in turn has provoked a psychology of previous investment; we are unable to even imagine letting go of these investments, regardless of their quality. We’ve even invested our identity in these places. Having made these investments, we can’t really imagine letting go of them.” This is the great rub. Our money and our identity are tied to an unsustainable model of life so intricately that we can’t see our way out. In order to start addressing our number one problem (cars and sprawl) we need to face this psychological barrier.
This is an urgent issue, because, as Kunstler pointed out, in a post-petroleum world we won’t “have the resources to continue to run suburbia [and] the psychology of previous investment is probably our biggest obstacle to doing anything about it.”

SOLUTIONS VS. INTELLIGENT RESPONSE
Once we understand our psychological barriers to change, we can see our problems and respond intelligently with workable solutions. Kunstler made an interesting distinction between “solutions” and “intelligent response.” He thinks that most people who talk about ‘solutions’ are really saying “give us a bunch of solutions so we can continue living the same way we’re living” now. In contrast, he said, intelligent responses are solutions that respond to “the circumstances we face” and come from an understanding of the underlying psychology of problems and the reality or limits of what solutions can do. For example, in Kunstler’s view, electric cars are a ‘solution’ to the end of “happy motoring,” but also a waste of time and resources; an ‘intelligent response’ would be to plan and invest in “walkable communities that exist in meaningful relation to productive agriculture.”

As part of his idea of an intelligent response, Kunstler stressed that we “get real” about what solutions can really do. He used alternative energy as an example. He said that alternative energy can’t be used to keep the current American life running as it is on into the future: “No combination of solar, wind, algae, or dark matter, will allow continued suburban development and commerce as usual to work.” That’s not to say that we shouldn’t invest in alternative energy, but the key is that “we’re going to be disappointed by what these things can do for us. We’re not going to maintain America by running on these things. We’ll have to make a new America.”

One other criticism Kunstler’s had of most ‘solutions’ was that they’re often based on what he called “techno triumphalism,” an ideology based on the grandiose idea that technology can fix any problem. He said this was a dangerous idea to have because a lot of problems don’t have technological solutions. Additionally, Kunstler criticized techno triumphalism for being enmeshed within a larger, overarching idea that there is some mythological “they” who will come up with something that will allow “us” to continue business as usual.

For Kunstler, any solution, technological or otherwise, that supports business as usual, or sustaining the unsustainable, is ineffective. Action must instead be generated through intelligent responses to the consequences of reality.

KEY SOLUTIONS (OR KEY INTELLIGENT RESPONSES FOR A LIVABLE FUTURE)
I agree with Kunstler that recognizing our psychological barriers to change and identifying our larger social and environmental problems are the first part of the process of building a livable future. Then, of course, we’ve got to get to work. Here are three key things Kunstler suggested we do as intelligent responses to the problems generated by past auto-centric development and a future of limited oil supplies.

*Downscale and Re-Localize
Kunstler stressed that we need to downscale and re-localize our housing, commerce, industry and food production. The most important piece of that agenda is to ditch suburban development, which he thinks will either become retrofitted towns, salvage yards, slums or ruins in the future. Instead of suburban sprawl, he said we need to design urban centers with edges that meet productive farmland. In commerce we need to say good-bye to big box stores and create integral economies and societies (although he said he didn’t know how we could do this yet). In industry he said we need to start making things locally again and stop relying on “plastic salad shooters from China.” In agriculture we need more human attention and less diesel fuel.

*Rediscover the Public Realm
This was the piece of advice that most resonated with me: Kunstler said it's time for Americans to rediscover the public realm and our sense of place, and take it back from the automobile. He criticized much past suburban and urban development as “places not worth caring about” (here he showed a picture of a typical street intersection) and inherently lacking value but masquerading as valuable (when describing America’s glut of retail, he pretended to speak as the store: “look at me I’m a clown. buy this shit that’s inside of me!”

He said that future urban development should look to Europe – human scale, finer details, smaller increments. These suggestions reminded me of the work of Gehl Architects. They have a similar set of criteria for designing pedestrian oriented, culturally vibrant, sustainable city spaces, which they promote to designers and cities around the world (for an example of how Gehl’s methods might be implemented in Seattle to create a more walkable and inviting downtown, see this article).

*Restore the National Railroad System
And finally, Kunstler recommended one immediate action we can take immediately that would have positive impact now and into future: restore the passenger railroad system. Psychologically this is an important undertaking, because, according to Kunstler, we need a project that we can do as a nation that will demonstrate to ourselves that we are competent. From a future planning perspective he argued that it’s necessary in order to ensure cross-country travel when cars and airplanes are no longer viable. Kunstler advocated for restoration of our existing railroad system rather than investment in a new high speed rail system because he doesn’t think we’ll have the capital to complete such a project, and it also makes sense to use what’s already in place. I like what he said about the comparatively slow speed of regular rail travel: “American’s would be deliriously happy to get from Seattle to Salt Lake City at 80mph, if it was on time.” True.

PARTING THOUGHTS
At the beginning of this recap I noted that Kunstler’s talk seemed a bit out of place at a conference about building hope for the future and learning about solutions based actions in the built environment. From a tone perspective that still seems true, but I think this quote from James Cascio’s article Peak Oil and the Curse of Cassandra, offers some perspective on what kind of value Kunstler’s “we’re all doomed” tone can offer. He wrote:

...the peak oil Cassandras -- Kunstler included -- are perfectly positioned to trigger the kind of anxiety-induced focus needed to accelerate a move away from petroleum dependence. What I hope to suggest to them, therefore, is that they need to keep in mind that there's another scenario besides global doom and blind optimism -- a scenario in which their warnings work.

This isn't a world where everything goes smoothly and everyone transitions to post-petroleum technologies without any issues; rather, it's a world in which lots of people are convinced that it's too late and are desperate to try anything, to do what's needed, to avoid the "collapse of civilization" scenario that seems all too likely -- and they succeed.

Here’s hoping the attendees of the 2010 Living Future unConference and other designers and builders around the world are so inspired. I hope we succeed. I think we will.

For more on Kunstler, see "Subdivided" an interview with Kunstler in the Sustainable Industries Journal.

Editor's Note: This post is part of our recap of the 2010 Living Future unConference. Click here for more.

Image Credits: Farm/garden courtesy of Flickr photographer emrank, pedestrian (go)light courtesy of Flickr photographer suziedepingu, and Amtrak train courtesy of Flickr photographer Roadsidepictures under the Creative Commons License.

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(Posted by Amanda Reed in Urban Design and Planning at 9:05 AM)

Looking back one, two and five years ago today on Worldchanging:

2009
Built To Last
Here's a great, short (3 minutes!) video on development, sprawl, and transportation. Created by John Paget, it's the winner of the Congress for New Urbanism CNU 17 video contest. And it's pretty cool to boot...

2008
Resource: NRDC Green Enterprise
Julia Levitt reviews the NRDC's green enterprise guide, a manual for making-over your office, which offers an inspiring plan, conveyed sensibly and in manageable chunks...

2005
The Blob! In Delft
The kids over at TU Delft are working on blob-architecture, but none of the research is for green building. It could be a good tool for that, in the right hands: We just need to get more Fuller and less Gehry in there...

Other recent "look backs":
May 11
May 12
May 13

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Urban Design and Planning at 9:31 AM)

This month's edition of YES! Magazine has an inspiring short interview with City Repair co-founder Mark Lakeman.

City Repair, for those who don't know it, is a Portland based volunteer run non-profit. They earned their stripes by helping communities take intersections, parking lots and other unpromising pieces of pavement, and transform them into meaningful social places. Their Projects page has more details on “placemaking,” their excellent Depave spin-off, and other creations.

In the interview, Lakeman emphasizes the way that spaces affect how we relate to each other. Reclaiming an intersection may at first seem to be about beautifying the neighborhood. But really, it is about building community:

"The power of what we do is we start with the idea and the belief that we can make it happen. If it has a social basis, if your primary goal is to build networks and relationships, then you attract all the other forms of capital that begin with the social. That's the magic. That's the key."

It's an elegant and empowering way of looking at the relationship between community and the urban landscape.

"Public participation” can often seem like a market survey. It's done as a way to harvest preferences and opinions from the public. But – whether it is projects like City Repair in Portland, Santropol Roulant and Rooftop Gardens in Montreal, or Green Change in Toronto – every city has examples that show how much more communities have to contribute. As always, the trick is knowing how to link and build up from individual projects to create larger shifts in how our cities are built and lived.

Below are a few excerpts from the interview:

"For most of the history of humanity, we lived and worked in the same places, integrated, and everything we did would deepen our relationships to each other. The greatest product of that way of life was our cultural cohesion and our stories – we weren’t isolated the way that we are now.

But our cities and places are no longer ours. We’re not building our own places; we’re not designing them to fit our own needs. Our lives are zoned like we’re a resource to be managed. We're housed here, and then this is where we work in order to pay for the housing we barely get to live in. Mixed use here. Monocultural use here. Parking garage. Maybe a waterfront here. Park. Park. It doesn't add up. None of them are really whole."

"There’s so much we need to change, but I really don’t think it's going to be all that hard. We just need to say, "There's nowhere to sit around here? Well, we need to create some places to sit. People aren't talking? Then we need gathering places." You look at the problem of a particular place and you address it. People start to get excited; the void starts to get filled. The projects are small, but they keep coming as revelations."

"When did we stop believing we had a say in our own reality? ...

The beautiful thing happening now is that dozens and dozens and dozens of people saying, "Yes, I have my power," and then creating these physical expressions of what it actually looks like."

This piece originally appeared on Alex Aylett's blog, OpenAlex.

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(Posted by Alex Aylett in Urban Design and Planning at 9:19 AM)