Sustainable and Resilient Communities E-Book

Stephen J. Coyle

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Wiley Series in Sustainable Design
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 627

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Many of today's communities face an unprecedented struggle to adapt and maintain their environmental, economic, and social well-being in an era beleaguered by fiscal constraints, uncertainty about energy prices and supplies, rapid demographic shifts, and accelerated climate impacts. This step-by-step guidebook for urban planners and urban designers explains how to create and implement an actionable plan for making neighborhoods, communities, and regions more environmentally healthy, resource-conserving, and economically resilient. Sustainable and Resilient Communitiesdelineates measures for repairing, retrofitting, and transforming our built environments and supporting systems.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Introduction

How to Use this Book

The Action Plan

Chapter Organization

A Synthesized Approach

Chapter 1 - The Built Environment and Its Supporting Systems

Defining the Built Environment

Defining the Supporting Systems

The Two Fundamental Types of Built Environments

The Two Fundamental Types of Supporting Systems

Chapter 2 - The Process of Transformation

Sustainable Plan-Making

The Plan-Making Steps

Chapter 3 - The Physical Built Environment

Sustainable Community Commerce

Building Sustainable Communities: The Ecological Toolkit

Bioclimatic Building Design

Chapter 4 - The Regulatory Environment

Sustainability Planning and the Law

Transforming the Built Environment Through Form-Based Coding

Chapter 5 - Transportation

Sustainable Transportation and Transit Planning—Strategies for Comprehensive ...

An Incremental Approach: Developing a Long-Term Comprehensive Regional ...

Chapter 6 - Energy

The Energy Shift

Chapter 7 - Water

Stormwater Management—Light Imprint Development

Decentralized Wastewater Management

Chapter 8 - Natural Environment

Sustainable Landscaping

Chapter 9 - Food Production/Agriculture

Sustainable Food Systems

Chapter 10 - Solid Waste

Sustainable Materials Management

Chapter 11 - Economics

Sustainable Economic Development: The Longer View

A Sustainable Return on Investment

Chapter 12 - Engagement and Education

Creating and Managing Sustainability for a Municipality - Using Vision and ...

Chapter 13 - Public Health

Ambient Outdoor Air Quality: Community Health

A Holistic Public Health Approach

Appendix

Endnotes

Contributors

Index

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Copyright © 2011 by Stephen Coyle. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Sustainable and resilient communities : a comprehensive action plan for towns, cities, and regions / [edited by] Stephen Coyle. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-470-53647-6 (cloth : acid-free paper); 978-0-470-91872-2 (ebk); 978-0-470-91873-9 (ebk); 978-0-470-91874-6 (ebk); 978-0-470-95022-7 (ebk)

1. City planning--Environmental aspects. 2. Regional planning--Environmental aspects. 3. Community development, Urban—Environmental aspects. 4. Sustainable urban development. 5. Sustainable development. I. Coyle, Stephen.

HT166.S9125 2011

307.1’2—dc22

2010025646

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Foreword

THIS BOOK IS NOT a silver bullet. It does not offer the magic shot that cannot miss—and for that we must be grateful.

Steve Coyle takes urbanism very seriously indeed. He and his colleagues do not underestimate the patient and skillful work that must be done to recover our lost cities and their dismal suburbs, and by so doing salvage what remains of our natural areas. It is the distinct absence of shortcuts that gives me confidence that the advice provided here will actually be effective.

The lifestyle of the American middle class—how we occupy our land, how we circulate, and how large we live—defies easy solutions. We endure brutal commutes and drive even short distances. To buy petroleum we have effectively shoveled overseas the accumulated wealth of three centuries, the only permanent result being the impoverishment of our citizens and the polluting of our environment. We have mitigated for the absence of neighborhood and public realm by building retirement villages and Disney Worlds. What good are silver bullets against this monstrous stupidity?

Despite generous allocations of hope, money and political will, most cities and their surrounding countryside have declined. Conventional wisdom assumes causes that range from misgovernment to disinvestment, inattention, and incapacity for vision to just plain bad luck. Not so! Generations of professional consultants offered their very inventive ideas and too often, alas, their plans were implemented. Recent American planning is not the conventional historiography of a sequence of planners intelligent proposals that were tragically ignored. Actually, it consists of the dutiful implementation of their simpleminded recommendations. The people and the government did their job—it was the planners who failed them.

To explain my aversion to any simplistic proposal, it is enough to list the catastrophic sequence of ideas that has constituted remedial urbanism for the past seven decades. Most of these have proven to be either duds mercifully forgotten or spectacular backfires, the consequences of which are still quite visibly undermining our society.

Chronologically the first and also the worst was the imposition of single-use zoning: the notion that the separation of the places where we dwell from those where we shop and those where we work was necessary. The resultant cartoon of urbanism requires an immense amount of public subsidy to provide the roads and services and an even larger amount of private capital to assure that every adult has an automobile and its fuel. Nothing has ever equaled zoning in idiocy, but there are close contenders. Among these was the rather large mistake of rerouting of the interstate system through the cities, in defiance of President Eisenhower’s conception that high-speed highways should skirt the urban areas. Each highway extension reamed out the delicate urban fabric, eased the escape into the suburbs, and spread dependence on the automobile.

Then, close upon that mistake came the HUD program that demolished and replaced “slum” neighborhoods with superblocks of town houses and high-rises and the promise of “greenery, light and air.” The resulting social damage is nearly incalculable. Then, apparently to raise our spirits and distract us from things going wrong, along came the festive space needles topped by rotating restaurants (now usually closed); then came the sports stadiums, many now obsolescent, the hulking convention centers and dont forget the aquariums, all of which are still losing money today. There were also the trashy public plazas and river walks, empty except during the festivals that artificially induce attendance. The “pedestrianized” main streets that emulate suburban malls, of which almost two hundred desiccated their shops and have already been ripped out. There then came the defeatist secessions from the inner city: the indoor “Rouse” malls, today depressingly downmarket and the equally dowdy underground passages and elevated bridges, now used only under threat of climatic extremes. Even the ultimate silver bullets, the Olympics and the World’s Fairs, would now be utterly forgotten but for the lingering physical and financial holes that are their legacy to the host cities.

But what about the “Bilbao Effect,” that famous attempt to recreate the Guggenheim Museum that put that unknown Spanish City on the map? Unknown to whom? Only to those ignorant of Spain. The charlatans who still propose “starchitecture” always fail to point out that Bilbao was already a very livable, prosperous, sophisticated and beautiful city before the Guggenheim landed. The building did alert the world to the fact, but that is all it did. A new “Bilbao” in, say, dismal Phoenix, would have had no effect at all. Most subsequent “Bilbaos” have not lived up to their billing as “catalytic projects.” A good city supports a cultural institution and not vice-versa. Even small benevolent interventions like the now popular subsidized “artist’s housing” do little beyond putting roofs over the artists’ heads.

The same goes for ubiquitous “open space” projects—the current darling High Line in New York attracted pedestrians not alone for its terrific design, but because it is embedded in the superb and affluent urban fabric of Manhattan. Elsewhere, scores of highly designed new parks stand quasi-abandoned because of the lack of supporting urban context.

The effect of such projects on their cities has been no greater than the ancient cave paintings of antelopes on the next day’s hunt.

But enough wishful thinking! Enough pushing silver bullets on hopeful municipalities! Wherever planning has succeeded, it has involved the patient reweaving of the urban fabric into whole cloth: socially, physically, economically, and administratively. That is what makes the difference, and that is precisely what this book is about.

ANDRÉS DUANY

Acknowledgments

THIS BOOK REPRESENTS the combined efforts of contributing authors, editors, illustrators, researchers, and others who supported my work during a yearlong endeavor. At the top of the list, I remain ever grateful to my associate Daniel Dunigan, who co-managed the book development process and authored two brief but important sections.

First, I wish to thank the following people whose contributions appear throughout these pages: urbanist, architect, and retail expert Seth Harry; sustainability-savant Michael Mehaffy; building efficiency guru Erin Cubbinson; innovative architects Gaither Pratt and Sara Hines; attorney, regulatory expert, and author Dan Slone; Rick Pruetz, author and authority on transfer of development rights; form-based code master Sandy Sorlien; co-authors Dana Perls and Daniel Dunigan; transit-oriented development specialist Sam Zimbabwe; transportation planning experts Trent Lethco, Jim Daisa, and Professor Norman Garrick; sustainable streetscape and watershed engineer Paul Crabtree; masters of alternative energy Jon Roberts, Cyane Dandridge, and Jeannie Renne-Malone; Light Imprint development designer Tom Low and the supporting Duany Plater-Zyberk and Company crew; and decentralized wastewater proponents Eric Lohan and Will Kirksy.

My gratitude extends to sustainable landscaper John Harris, green landscape architect Katie O’Reilly Rogers, and architect Jane Martin; sustainable food authority Lynn Peemoeller; and organic agriculturists and educators Raoul Adamchak and Sibella Kraus; doctor of waste recycling and reuse Daniel T. Sicular with associate Jeff Caton; economic revitalization authorities Dave Leland and Chris Zahas; and our sustainable return on investment John Williams; deputy city manager and community educator Susan J. Daluddung; air quality authority Anthony Bernheim; and progressive public health experts Karen Mendrala and Karen Shore. Not all contributors survived the final editing process, including sustainable agriculture and ranching leader Ann Adams and foreign contributors Jaydean Boldt, Steven Branca, Stephen Goldie, and Frank Schaffarczyk. I remain indebted to you all just the same, and hope for an opportunity to work with you in the future.

A volunteer in our early, internal editing effort deserves my exceptional gratitude. Corey Limbach used his practical development experience to transform content-rich but often disorganized materials into worthy contributions; his edits were invaluable. Editor/contributors Dana Perls and Daniel Dunigan worked tirelessly sorting and reviewing text and images, helping to organize and assemble the manuscript, assisted by editor Robin Silberman. Daniel Dunigan graciously rendered some hand-drawn images in Chapter 1 and led the research, selection, and photo-customization of appropriate images. He provided countless suggestions for improving the book’s form and substance. The development of this book would have been impossible without him. I extend special thanks to Senior Editor John Czarnecki, Assoc. AIA, Editorial Assistant Sadie Abuhoff, and Production Editor Amy Odum at John Wiley & Sons, for editing and publishing this book. Wiley provided a rare opportunity, based on my simple outline.

I am especially grateful to Andrés Duany for his own collaborative publications on building resilient and healthy urbanism, his continued leadership and generosity in sharing ideas, designs, regulatory codes, and plans for repairing our towns and cities. Finally, I remain in the debt of my wife, Jane, my daughter Leiko, and son Nick for their continual encouragement and inspiration, even as they forge their own tangible efforts to make our world better, brighter, and more resilient.

Introduction

How to Use this Book

This book explains how to develop and implement an action plan to make your neighborhood, community, or region more environmentally and economically healthy, habitable, and resilient. The book introduces two basic development patterns and supportive systems that constitute our built environment, and describes their features, benefits, drawbacks, and performance characteristics.

The built environment—villages, towns, cities, counties, and townships—includes seven essential supporting systems:

1. Transportation—mobility of people, goods, and services

2. Energy—community and building electrical power

3. Water—supply, waste, and stormwater

4. Natural Environment—biological resources and landscapes

5. Food Production/Agriculture—urban/urban edge cultivation and production

6. Solid Waste—garbage, refuse, and sludge

7. Economic—industries, jobs, and financing

The Action Plan

From the built environment through each supporting system, we describe the people and processes necessary for moving from low-performance, high-carbon places and supporting systems to the high-performance, low-carbon models. We instruct you on creating, refining, and implementing an actionable plan—a set of policies, programs, codes, projects, best practices, technologies, and tools. We identify the people and other resources necessary to create and activate the plans with an involved public. This customizable process enables you and your community to assemble a planning team; research and assess your current state of sustainability,a both collectively and by each individual element; set timely and measurable performance goals and objectives for each; and propose, evaluate, and select the best methods before launching an implementation plan and monitoring its results. With this process, the plan will be reflective of and supported by the community.

We use the following steps to organize these strategies:

1. Define the Project Type

2. Determine the Means

3. Prepare the Team

4. Select the Tools

5. Prepare the Place

6. Prepare the People

7. Develop Goals, Objectives, and Performance Metrics

8. Develop the Strategies

9. Develop the Action Plan

10. Implement the Action Plan

11. Funding, Policy, and Technical Resources

Chapter Organization

Each chapter includes detailed approaches, methodologies, strategies, or interventions consistent with each chapter’s theme, followed by a set of concise actions that describe specific strategies, programs, and best practices; its features, performance expectations, benefits, rewards, risks and drawbacks; first and lifecycle costs; and propensity for support or resistance to adoption and implementation.

A Synthesized Approach

Virtually every city and county across the country will, sooner or later, need to plan for its sustainable future or its very economic, environmental, and social survival. As one approach, this book will assist jurisdictions, large or small, to plan for economic, environmental, and energy resiliency, health, and appropriate self-sufficiency by informing and instructing. By targeting those responsible for directing, advising, planning, managing, implementing, and monitoring sustainable policies, strategies, programs, and actions, the book will enable jurisdictions to assess their current state of sustainability; set timely performance goals and metrics; propose, evaluate, and prioritize or select appropriate measures; and produce implementable action plans, reflective of and supported by the larger community.

Chapter 1

The Built Environment and Its Supporting Systems

Defining the Built Environment

Stephen J. Coyle, AIA, LEED Town-Green, Townworks + DPZ

The built environment consists of the physical structures and organization patterns of buildings, blocks, neighborhoods, villages, towns, cities, and regions. The built environment requires the support of each of the seven essential systems of physical infrastructure, resources, and operational components essential to the survival and health of each place.

Figure 1-1

The City of Santa Barbara, from its 1786 Mission dedication and acquisition by the United States in 1846, remains a vital center of education, tourism, technology, health care, finance, agriculture, manufacturing, and local government.Katie O’Reilly-Rogers

Defining the Supporting Systems

The supporting systems consist of the following:

• Transportation

The technologies, infrastructure, and vehicles that comprise the system responsible for the circulation or mobility of people, goods, and services

• Energy

The system for the design, management, and supply of energy sources required to power devices, equipment, industries, buildings, infrastructure, and communities, and includes its generation, storage, conveyance, conservation, and efficiency

• Water

The technological and infrastructure system that supplies, treats, and conveys potable water; collects, treats, and disposes and/or recycles wastewater; and collects, treats, and discharges and/or recycles stormwater from regional watershed to the plumbing system

• Natural Environment

The ecosystem of biological resources, landscapes, habitat, and other natural resources providing a continuous state of environmental health and sustenance

• Food Production/Agriculture

The system that plans and manages the community food supply produced by local and regional agricultural, ranching, and forestry sources

• Solid Waste

The technologies, facilities, and vehicles that comprise the system that collects, treats, disposes of and/or recycles residential, commercial, industrial, and institutional waste

• Economic

The economic system that supports the health, maintenance, and survival of the built environment, defined in this context as the economic strategies, policies, programs, and activities administered in support of the other systems

The Two Fundamental Types of Built Environments

Across the country, our built environments are generally composed or organized in two fundamentally different ways.

Sustainably designed communities serve multiple functions—shelter, commerce, education, food production—within a walkable or drivable context. Their resilience extends to adaptive and durable buildings accommodative of changing uses to meet shifting market and societal demands. At risk or conventional communities provide multiple uses accessed by auto only. Single-use buildings confined within single-use pods, subdivisions, or strips require replacement or significant renovation in order to repurpose. The resilient and adaptable community was the only type built through the first half of the twentieth century.

The conventional/high-carbon (CHC) community, also known as conventional suburban development,1 emerged in response to the gradual adoption of separated-use zoning, and the decline of mass transit and walking as mobility choices. Over the last 60 years, this development type, fueled by cheap oil, flourished with highway funding relying on a continuous supply of land to develop by building on existing farmland, forests, and drainable swamps.

Figure 1-2

Sprawling Southern Beaufort County, South Carolina, consumes land through the broad separation of residential, commercial, and industrial uses.Josh Martin, AICP, CNU3

The CHC moniker should not be applied to the pedestrian-oriented, pre–World War II suburbs; railroad, subway, and streetcar suburbs; the resort and even industrial suburbs; the single-family house on a tree-lined street, with walkable town center. Automobile dependency defines the CHC.

Resilient/Low-Carbon (RLC), or traditional city, town, and neighborhood development, 2 describes historic settlement patterns that developed throughout the United States from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. RLC settlements developed local commerce, managed available resources, exploited rail and water access, adapted to population growth, and endured from Charleston, South Carolina and Nashville, Indiana to Pacific Grove, California and Forest Grove, Oregon. The RLC most often reflects a continuum or morphing of attributes, as communities outgrew or jumped beyond their original boundaries.

Figure 1-3

A diagram of traditional neighborhood development includes a fine-grain network of connected streets, small blocks, a mix of uses and graduated densities from edge to center, access to transit, and movement of goods. John Massengale, Anglo-American Suburb

Conventional/High-Carbon Built Environments

CHC built environments consist primarily of segregated, low-density (less than four dwelling units per acre), auto-oriented development. Typically organized into clusters of single-use buildings, the single-family residential pods, higher-density apartment complexes, retail strip centers and malls, office and industrial parks, and campus-type school sites are generally scaled to the size and spacing of the local and regional thoroughfare system. The dendritic, or branching, street system yields large “superblocks,” with the undevelopable land or left over property set aside for park land or the “open space” required by regulations or demanded by the public.

Places that exhibit the following development patterns and qualities are typical of CHC:

Figure 1-4

A diagram of conventional suburban development, bisected by a highway and arterial roadway, which separates and segregates land uses except for the old neighborhood area at lower right.Daniel Dunigan

Figure 1-5

The “Edge City” of Oak Brook, Illinois, incorporated as a Village in 1958, represents the suburban development patterns that emerged in force after World War II.Payton Chung

Figure 1-6

An example of low-density residential sprawl in Southern Beaufort County, South Carolina, accessed primarily by long roadways.Josh Martin, AICP, CNU3

URBANIZATION OR DEVELOPMENT PATTERN

Dispersed, Uncontained Growth: Predominately auto-oriented urbanization lacking clearly defined boundaries between the built and natural environments

CIRCULATION PATTERN

Automobile-Oriented: Dendritic, or hierarchical, branched transportation patterns of highways, arterials, collectors, and local streets designed, scaled, and managed primarily around motor vehicles, with minimal pedestrian, bike, and transit amenities

LAND USE PATTERN

Use-Based Zoning:

• Zoning of land and buildings based primarily on the control of uses, with minimal power over the forms or sequence of urbanization

• High-density apartment sites abutting strip commercial development separated from single-family subdivisions by a multilane arterial

PUBLIC RIGHT-OF-WAY/“OPEN SPACE” SCALE AND FORM

Roadway-Oriented:

• Public streets and other urbanized rights-of-way scaled for automobile convenience

• Motor vehicle–oriented corridors formed by multiple lanes, narrow sidewalks, with little or no spatial enclosure for the public space by buildings

• Parks and other public space scaled to adjoining arterial or regional thoroughfares, and the residual parcels between development pods, or as required by jurisdictional regulations or as a condition of entitlement approval

Figure 1-7

Conventional development often yields “no-man’s” parcels between paving and buildings.Stephen Coyle

Figure 1-8

The consumption of land south of Kansas City, Missouri, continues through low-density development patterns and roadway access.Stephen Coyle

BUILDING AND LANDSCAPE SCALE AND FORM

Roadway-Oriented:

• Buildings, landscapes, lots, and blocks primarily scaled to the adjacent thoroughfare system with extended block lengths; sprawling building complexes; and identical, subdivided home tracts, with abundant parking sized for peak periods

• Buildings typically set back from the thoroughfare with little or no spatial enclosure

• Buildings and landscapes developed in relation to the thoroughfare’s physical scale rather than to adjacent structures, local conditions and building traditions, or landscape

Resilient/Low-Carbon Built Environments

RLC built environments, generally compact in form, comprised of pedestrianscale blocks and streets, boast a diversity of necessary and desirable functions. The residential, employment, shopping, and civic uses functions are integrated into mixed-use buildings and blocks. The location, scale, and design of squares, plazas, and parks reflect their importance and value as cultural, commercial, and natural resources. Boundaries between built and natural environments are clearly defined to protect both habitats.

Figure 1-9

The typical big-box retail format requires visible, easy access to roadways and automobiles.CNU.org

Figure 1-10

The masterplan for Fairview Village, a new development by Holt & Haugh, Inc. in Fairview, Oregon, and designed by Lennertz & Coyle with Bill Dennis.Lennertz & Coyle

URBANIZATION OR DEVELOPMENT PATTERN

Places that exhibit the following patterns and qualities are typical of RLC built environments.Compact and Bounded: Physically contained, pedestrian- and transit-oriented urbanization with graduated densities and clearly defined boundaries between development and nature, though agriculture can be integrated into both

CIRCULATION PATTERN

Connected and Multi-Use: A fine-grained, interconnected, multimodal transportation network with a balance of motor vehicle, pedestrian, bike, and transit amenities

Figure 1-11

The traditional neighborhood at top contains a fine-grain network of “complete” or multiuser streets as opposed to the suburban pattern of disconnected roadways below.Duany Plater-Zyberk and Company

Figure 1-12

The New York City Highline, a linear park built on the former Westside elevated rail bed, provides an attractive, convenient, and cool walking experience.Shulie Sade

Figure 1-13

A rendering of a proposed mixed-use redesign of Main Street, Mercer Island, by Bill Dennis, was part of a downtown planning charrette by Lennertz & Coyle.Lennertz & Coyle

LAND USE PATTERN

Form-Based Zoning: Allocating land uses based primarily on the control of or influence over the physical form, intensity, and arrangement of buildings, landscapes, and public spaces that enable land or building functions to adapt to economic, environmental, energy, and social changes over time

PUBLIC RIGHT-OF-WAY/“OPEN SPACE” SCALE AND FORM

Pedestrian Scale and Form:

• Public streets and other rights-of-way scaled around the pedestrian and transit systems

• Multifunction, multimodal transportation corridors with transit, motor vehicle, bike, and pedestrian facilities, spatially enclosed by buildings and, where appropriate to the urban context, trees

• Parks and other public open space connected to, informed by, and in a hierarchical relationship with the surrounding physical context, development intensities, and natural and landscaped parcels required for normative “place-making,” food production, and/or federal, state, or local regulations configured into environmental resource areas.

BUILDING AND LANDSCAPE SCALE AND FORM

Pedestrian Scale and Form:

• Buildings, lots, and blocks primarily scaled around the pedestrian and transit-oriented thoroughfare or right-of-way, and for nonmotorized activities

• Buildings that front on and align themselves along the pedestrian and transit-oriented thoroughfares, creating a humanscale spatial enclosure

• Buildings informed by the surrounding physical context, the adjacent landscapes, structures, local conditions, building traditions, and the microclimate

Figure 1-14

A pedestrian plaza provides multiple uses scaled for people: a pedestrian way, outdoor seating, and shopping plus emergency vehicle access.Stephen Coyle

Figure 1-15

The landscape along Delancy Street on Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia, exemplifies a context-appropriate response to an urban environment.Sandy Sorlien

The Two Fundamental Types of Supporting Systems

Both the CHC and RLC require the support of seven essential systems of physical infrastructure, resources, and operational components which are essential to the survival and health of each place.

Conventional/High Carbon Support Systems

Support systems for the CHC environment are conventional economic, energy, water, natural environment, transportation, food production/agriculture, and solid waste systems that exhibit the following qualities:

1. Nonrenewable resource-based systems that are wholly or largely dependent on the extraction, processing, consumption, and/or distribution of nonrenewable resources.

2. Inflexible systems that are incapable of or resistant to expansion, contraction, or modification over time.

3. Inefficient systems that directly or indirectly generate waste as a development or operational byproduct.

4. Nonvirtuous systems that directly or indirectly generate harmful byproducts, or are hazardous as a consequence of their development or operations.

5. Temporary systems that are intentionally built for obsolescence or replacement.

CHC TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM

The conventional conveyance system relies primarily on the use of motor vehicles for the mobility of people, goods, and services. This system has directly or indirectly caused or contributed to air pollution, the destruction of cultural and natural resources, the consumption of land for low-density development, and the rise in asthma, obesity, and other maladies resulting from personal motor vehicle dependency.

Figure 1-16

Throughout the country, thousands of deteriorating, auto-dominated corridors require conversion into “complete streets” or multi-use places.Stephen Coyle

CHC ENERGY

Conventional energy systems encompass: the planning, financing, development, acquisition, construction, operation, and maintenance system for the generation, supply, transmission, and management of primarily fossil fuel–generated (coal, petroleum, natural gas) electric energy, with limited renewable power sources. Conventional energy relies heavily on nonrenewable sources, finite resources that will eventually become too expensive or too environmentally damaging to retrieve, as opposed to renewable sources such as wind, biomass, hydropower, and solar energy.

CHC WATER SYSTEMS

Conventional water supply systems deliver water (potable and nonpotable) via engineered hydrologic and hydraulic components. They tend to increase supply volumes to meet expanding demand, rather than to first decrease demand, and require intensive energy demands for pumps and other supply-related equipment.

Conventional stormwater systems collect surface runoff into surface waterways or storm sewers for eventual discharge into the watershed. This process can cause ecological damage from inadequate removal of contaminants (e.g., petroleum products) or sewer overflow flooding, contributing to soil erosion and habitat destruction. Runoff from artificial fertilizers, industrial discharge, and sediment from development degrade and contaminate groundwater. Conventional watershed or drainage basin management attempts to remove, restrict, or prohibit the quantities, rates, and concentrations of chemical, physical, biological, and other harmful constituents that are discharged from point sources into the stormwater.

Figure 1-17

Conventional coal power plants produce major quantities of greenhouse gas—up to three times as much as natural gas—and emit particles that adversely affect human health.Arnold Paul

Figure 1-18

The Arizona Aquaduct, a water-to-the-desert scheme, and the adjacent, water-use-intensive development, reflect conventional water management strategies.Paul Crabtree

Conventional wastewater systems: (1) separate inorganic solids from the wastewater; (2) gradually convert dissolved biological matter into microbial biosolids or sludge; (3) neutralize, dispose, and/or reuse biosolids; (4), chemically or physically disinfect effluent; and (5) often discharge the treated effluent into the watershed (i.e., aquifers, rivers, lakes, or oceans) causing potential ecological damage. Conventional processes may not adequately sequester heavy metals, and the sludge can contain manmade organic compounds of which even low levels can have an unpredictable adverse impact on the environment and the potential for reuse.

Figure 1-19

Conventional stormwater infrastructure often channels runoff rather than managing the water for reuse or recharge.UCSC Storm Water Management Program Environmental Health and Safety Department

Figure 1-20

The conventional wastewater treatment plant consumes water, power, and chemicals.Paul Crabtree

CHC NATURAL ENVIRONMENTAL SYSTEM

The spread of wasteful resource extraction practices and low-density and single-use urbanization has reshaped and destroyed natural landscapes, biological resources, and environments. The expansion of human activities into the natural environment has reduced, fragmented, damaged, and isolated water habitats and other natural resources.

CHC FOOD PRODUCTION/AGRICULTURE SYSTEM

Conventional food production consists largely of monolithic crop production that relies heavily on petroleum-based fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, and other chemical and technological advances, including mechanization, which has directly and indirectly damaged the health and resilience of the natural environment from water supplies to air quality, harmed the health of human and other biological resources, and may threaten the economic viability of smaller-scale farming and ranching.

Conventional agriculture has damaged the ecology and productivity of approximately 24 percent of worldwide land, including topsoil depletion, groundwater contamination, the decline of family farms, farm laborer health problems, increasing costs of production with rising oil costs, and the decline of the integrity of rural communities. The practice of transforming diverse ecosystems into agricultural monocultures limits an environment’s resilience and health immunities without continued human intervention. Both the scale of the intervention of industrial agriculture and the variety of species grown, like sugar cane, can deplete huge areas of rich soils and spread harmful chemicals into the air, the surrounding soils, the watershed, and beyond.

Figure 1-21

Poor logging practices degrade the natural environment, the watershed, and destroy wildlife habitat.Jim Reeve, May 26, 2007

Figure 1-22

The agricultural sprawl in the San Luis Valley of Colorado diverts water and power from traditional crop-growing areas.Paul Crabtree

Figure 1-23

Conventional landfill practices degrade the underlying soils and watershed, and emit large quantities of methane.Stephen Coyle

Conventional livestock production consumes 70 percent of all land used for agriculture worldwide, generates 18 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, and represents a significant cause of deforestation and reductions in biodiversity in the Amazon basin and Africa.3

CHC SOLID WASTE SYSTEM

A solid waste system collects, separates, transports, and disposes of residential, commercial, industrial and institutional solid or semi-solid, nonhazardous waste with minimal waste recycling, reduction, or reuse efforts. The conventional approach treats most waste as materials destined for disposal through landfilling, with the recognition of the adverse consequences of the conventional practice, both up and down the waste stream. The conventional generation, collection, treatment, and disposal of waste contributes to environmental pollution, the accumulation of toxic wastes, the degradation and depletion of natural resources, destruction and depletion of soils and water, the generation of harmful airborne particulates, and the release of methane and other greenhouse gas emissions.

CHC ECONOMICS

The municipal economic system focuses on increasing community prosperity by increasing the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. Economic growth implies an increase in quantitative output measured by the rate of change of gross domestic product per year—the aggregate value-added by the economic activity within a city or county’s borders. Conventional economic growth requires the generation of waste and fossil-fuel dependency to maintain economic output, with emphasis on maintaining or growing both land development and tax base and personal income rather than focusing on conservation, adaptation, and self-sufficiency.

“Economics explores the choices people make when resources are limited. Urban economics studies the intersection of economics and geography.”

—Arthur O’Sullivan, Urban Economics, 7th ed.

Resilient/Low-Carbon Support Systems

Support systems for the RLC environment include economic, energy, water, natural environment, transportation, food production/agriculture, and solid waste systems that exhibit the following qualities:

1. Renewable resource-based systems that, over time, are capable of achieving full dependency on, and supporting and enhancing the health of its renewable resources.

2. Flexible systems that are capable of or responsive to expansion, contraction, or modification over time.

3. Efficient, zero-waste systems or systems that directly or indirectly generate renewable waste as a development or operational byproduct.

4. Virtuous systems that directly or indirectly generate beneficial impacts as a consequence of their development or operations.

5. Durable systems that are built to last.

RLC TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM

The sustainable transportation system makes a net positive contribution to the environmental, social, and economic health of the community by providing safe, convenient, efficient, and diverse means of mobility. The resilient and healthy mobility system reduces tail pipe emissions and improves vehicle energy efficiency; employs intelligent thoroughfare design; facilitates the use of public transit, low/nocarbon fuels and vehicles, and transportation demand–management technologies; promotes low/no-tech/healthy modes like walking and biking; provides economic and environmental alternatives that encourage more efficient passenger and freight movement; and reduces consumption of nonrenewable fuels. At the scale of the corridor, neighborhood, and block, the “complete” or multi-modal street provides mobility choices capable of accommodating changing functional demands.

Figure 1-24

Del Mar Station designed by Moule Polyzoides Architects and Urbanists represents a pedestrian- and transit-oriented development.Tom Bonner Photography

Figure 1-25

The Wall Street Journal Green House of the Future design by architect Steve Mouzon incorporates both traditional and contemporary resource -conserving and -producing features.Steve Mouzon

Figure 1-26

The Fresno Water Tower symbolizes a water management tradition of conservation and efficiency.Paul Crabtree

RLC ENERGY

The sustainable energy system serves the municipality and community primarily through renewable and limited fossil fuel–generated electric power. The sustainable /low-carbon energy system focuses on conservation and efficiency measures to reduce demand before the development of renewable power, such as solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, and microbial, as well as interim power storage.

RLC WATER SYSTEMS

The sustainable/low-carbon water supply system focuses on conservation measures to reduce water demand, and on increasing the efficiency or performance of infrastructure and plumbing fixtures and devices, plus the reclamation of wastewater to meet nonpotable demand.

Figure 1-27

A Portland, Oregon, “green street” rainwater garden captures runoff and allows a gradual discharge into the ground. However, the rainwater infrastructure still partly connects to the sanitary waste piping, which degrades the performance of both systems. Paul Crabtree

The sustainable stormwater system mimics or approximates the cleansing function of nature by integrating stormwater collection and discharge into building, site, street, park, and other areas of development, or through the conveyance, temporary retention, treatment, and/or discharge into aquifers or other watershed elements. The sustainable system employs green roofs, landscaped planters, swales and rain gardens, and subsurface drains to constrain, disperse, and reduce the quantity and increase the quality of stormwater on and off site, replenish groundwater, and restore healthy watershed function.

At the regional scale, the resilient stormwater system works with the regional and local topography by configuring development around where, when, and how the stormwater flows. Since the downward flow of water through a watershed carries the effects of nature and human activities, the sustainable watershed removes, restricts, or prohibits the quantities, rates, and concentrations of chemical, physical, biological, and other harmful constituents that are discharged from point sources into the stormwater through both environmental restoration activities and healthy development design, management, and practices. It employs permeable pavements, compact development, and the restoration of natural drainage basins that help maintain a natural hydrologic balance in the watershed.

Sustainable wastewater systems use biological processes instead of or with minimal chemical inputs to treat waste, minimizing both the quantity of and need for chemical treatment through natural systems, and reduce energy use. By reducing or eliminating the discharge of treated effluent into the watershed (i.e., aquifers, rivers, lakes, or oceans), they reduce or eliminate potential ecological damage and decrease the water demand. Sustainable systems include modified or constructed wetlands that provide aerobic biological improvement to augment or replace secondary sew-age treatment, and employ cellular, instead of monolithic, design to accommodate fluctuations in influent volume or compositional changes, adding or omitting cells without disturbing the entire ecosystem.

Figure 1-28

A resilient sanitary wastewater system uses a constructed wetland for final effluent biological treatment and dispersion.Stephen Coyle

Figure 1-29

A redwood forest lining a state highway in Northern California provides mobility while preserving the natural environment.Stephen Coyle

A recycled or closed loop wastewater system treats and purifies all or part of the effluent sufficient to produce nonpotable water for landscape and agriculture, dust control, and fire fighting, and/or to reintroduce potable water back into the municipal’s water supply source through replenishment of the aquifer, wetlands, or other water source. The beneficial reuse of wastewater from domestic and industrial wastewater discharge requires specialized treatment to produce high-quality reclaimed water for use as nonpotable water or to supplement the potable water supply. At the municipal scale, the transformation from waste to potable supply requires a political and cultural shift rather than a technical breakthrough since the engineering is both feasible and safe.

RLC NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

The sustainable natural environmental system protects biological resources in the natural environment, and seeks to restore or expand the habitats, resource lands, forests, grasslands, and wilderness that exist. The fully functioning natural ecosystem contains a diversity of species in accordance with their microclimate and geographical setting, within a geological and hydrological context. The conservation and restoration of U.S. forests and other natural ecosystems help sequester enormous quantities of carbon (1.6 billion tons4), and contribute to the preservation of biodiversity and watersheds while providing sources of building materials and renewable energy. At appropriate scales and intensities, natural environments and ecosystems can thrive within the built environment.

“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”

—Chinese Proverb

RLC FOOD PRODUCTION/AGRICULTURE SYSTEM

Sustainable agriculture produces food both within and beyond the built environment without damaging or depleting renewable resources or polluting the surrounding environment, integrating environmental health, economic profitability, and social and economic equity. It employs crop rotation, green manure, composting, biological pest control, water-conserving irrigation, and non-fossil-fueled mechanical cultivation to enhance soil productivity, control pests, cultivate fields, protect the water supply, and exclude or limit the use of petroleum-based fertilizers and chemical pesticides, plant growth regulators, and livestock feed additives.

Sustainable agriculture and ranching, to the extent feasible, produces food for local consumption, in the form of home, business, school, and community gardens, and appropriately sized, diversified farms, supplying the majority of their region’s food without resource depletion.

“Organic agriculture is a production system that sustains the health of soils, ecosystems and people. It relies on ecological processes, biodiversity and cycles adapted to local conditions, rather than the use of inputs with adverse effects. Organic agriculture combines tradition, innovation and science to benefit the shared environment and promote fair relationships and a good quality of life for all involved.”

—International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements

Figure 1-30

Fruit and nut orchards can provide a source of food, habitat, rainwater recharge, and minimal carbon sequestration.Blaine Merker, Royston Hanamoto Alley & Abey, Landscape Architects

RLC SOLID WASTE SYSTEM

The sustainable solid waste system returns materials to the economic mainstream for reuse, recycling, and composting, and residual materials are used as resources to create clean renewable energy. Sustainable waste management ranges from planning for “zero waste,” waste energy management and energy efficiency, to renewable energy generation and water conservation. Best practices include the reuse and recycling of building materials, and the reduction or elimination of nonrecyclable materials from manufacturers, distributors, and other upstream sources, through materials recovery and recycling facilities (MRFs), and the composting of renewable waste.

A food, soiled paper, and yard trimmings recycling and composting poster helps promote and educate the public in this best practice.Golden Gate Disposal and Recycling

RLC ECONOMICS

The sustainable/low-carbon municipal economic system focuses on increasing community prosperity through the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services that minimize or eliminate waste and reliance on nonrenewables. This system enhances the health of renewable resources both in municipal operations and in the community as a whole through conservation, efficiency, adaptation, and self-sufficiency. A sustainable economy relies on maintaining an adequate supply of renewable resources as well as reducing energy consumption and greenhouse emissions.

The Next Step: The Step-by-Step Process of Transformation

Exaptation describes shifts in the function of a trait or feature during evolution. Bird feathers initially evolved for temperature regulation then later adapted for flight. The exaptational traits of RCL communities described above include connectivity, compactness, diversity, and completeness. Planning or transforming communities in the face of uncertainty—economic upheavals, climate change, the auto’s demise or the rise of electric vehicles—demands the inclusion of qualities or traits capable of shifting functionality to accommodate change over time. These assets would ideally scale from roofing materials to entire buildings, blocks, and neighborhoods.

Chapter 2 delineates a customizable process for developing and implementing a sustainable community plan. The sequence of steps include assembling a planning team; researching and assessing the current conditions by category or system; setting timely and measurable performance goals and objectives for each; and proposing, evaluating, and selecting appropriate actions. The team then forges an implementation or action plan, reflective of and supported by the community.

Our current economic pattern, to paraphrase attorney and energy blogger Jeff Vail,5is fundamentally unsustainable because a hierarchical structure requires perpetual growth. A resilient, adaptive community economy should be less hierarchal and more locally self-sufficient by leveraging developments in distributed, open-source, and peer-to-peer building, manufacturing, and food production.

Chapter 2

The Process of Transformation

Sustainable Plan-Making

Stephen J. Coyle, AIA, LEED Town-Green, Townworks + DPZ

Transforming a low-performance, high-carbon community into the high-performance, low-carbon place requires a rigorous process and a comprehensive plan. We’ve organized the process into a series of sequential steps, each comprised of tasks, methodologies, examples, and other supporting information. This sequence can be modified and tasks rearranged or deployed concurrently in response to local conditions and desires. The process can and should be customized and calibrated to fit each application and context to most effectively improve, reconfigure, and repair the built and natural environments and the systems that support them.