Green Buildings and Construction
The Urban Village: New York, 1948
Monday, May 26, 2008 / KW
Returning to our theme of sustainable city design, here is an intriguing article from the website of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development titled, "Building Better Cities: Cities as Villages." A couple of key passages:
According to the UK Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE), the concept of an urban village is where a settlement is small enough to create a community in the truest sense of the word — a group of people who support each other — but big enough to maintain a reasonable cross section of modern facilities and amenities.
Such villages are usually created within existing neighborhoods, but they can be created on abandoned brownfields or on greenfield sites. Walking determines their size — usually measured in terms of a 10 minute walk from one side to the other. . . .
These villages can improve existing communities by combining housing, commercial, employment centers and schools together. By blending these components into one community the village design overcomes many of the problems that arise with today's reliance on urban monoculture, i.e. single-use developments such as large housing tracts, gated communities, industrial-commercial zones, etc.
The article goes on to describe the environmental and social advantages of these "cities made out of villages" and discusses projects along these lines currently under way in the U.S., Canada, Britain, and China.
As I read the article, I couldn't help feeling that something about it sounded vaguely familiar (and indeed the authors concede that "the idea of an urban village is hardly knew"). Then the specific source of the sense of familiarity hit me. This is a long, wonderful paragraph from E.B. White's classic 1948 essay "Here Is New York":
The oft-quoted thumbnail sketch of New York is, of course: "It's a wonderful place, but I'd hate to live there." I have an idea that people from villages and small towns, people accustomed to the convenience and the friendliness of neighborhood over-the-fence living, are unaware that life in New York follows the neighborhood pattern. The city is literally a composite of tens of thousands of tiny neighborhood units. There are, of course, the big districts and big units: Chelsea and Murray Hill and Gramercy (which are residential units), Harlem (a racial unit), Greenwich Village (a unit dedicated to the arts and other matters), and there is Radio City (a commercial development), Peter Cooper Village (a housing unit), the Medical Center (a sickness unit) and many other sections each of which has some distinguishing characteristic. But the curious thing about New York is that each large geographical unit is composed of countless small neighborhoods. Each neighborhood is virtually self-sufficient. Usually it is no more than two or three blocks long and a couple of blocks wide. Each area is a city within a city. Thus, no matter where you live in New York, you will find within a block or two a grocery store, a barbershop, a newsstand and shoeshine shack, an ice-coal-and-wood cellar (where you write your order on a pad outside as you walk by), a dry cleaner, a laundry, a delicatessen (beer and sandwiches delivered at any hour to your door), a flower shop, an undertaker's parlor, a movie house, a radio-repair shop, a stationer, a haberdasher, a tailor, a drugstore, a garage, a tearoom, a saloon, a hardware store, a liquor store, a shoe-repair shop. Every block or two, in most residential sections of New York, is a little main street. A man starts for work in the morning and before he has gone two hundred yards he has completed half a dozen missions: bought a paper, left a pair of shoes to be soled, picked up a pack of cigarettes, ordered a bottle of whiskey to be dispatched in the opposite direction against his home-coming, written a message to the unseen forces of the wood cellar, and notified the dry cleaner that a pair of trousers awaits call. Homeward bound eight hours later, he buys a bunch of pussy willows, a Mazda bulb, a drink, a shine — all between the corner where he steps off the bus and his apartment. So complete is each neighborhood, and so strong the sense of neighborhood, that many a New Yorker spends a lifetime within the confines an area smaller than a country village. Let him walk two blocks from his corner and he is in a strange land and will feel uneasy till he gets back.
Now there's a self-sustaining community.
White's description still holds up pretty well with reference to the typical New York neighborhood, although many of the details have changed. There are no more radio-repair shops or ice-coal-and-wood cellars, of course, and most neighborhoods in New York now boast a sushi place and an exercise center as well as, alas, a Starbucks.
But the neighborhood ecology White describes, which as far as I know simply grew up with the city over the generations of its development, seems to me a pretty good model for what some of today's best urban planners are now trying to create deliberately. (Although I notice that White's neighborhood size parameters — two or three blocks on a side — are actually smaller than those suggested by the urban planners; his neighorhood would take only five minutes or so to walk rather than the ten minutes they mention. White is more realistic, I think. A pizza shop five minutes away is worth the walk; stretch it to ten minutes and I bet the amount of business they draw will be cut by 80 percent.)
Some of the best ideas for sustainability are to be found by looking backward — or, in some cases, all around us...so long as you know where to look.
The Sustainable City — Ecological Dream or Technocratic Nightmare?
Friday, April 25, 2008 / KW
I'm fascinated by this article from Globe-Net News about the future of urban design — specifically, about the wave of "sustainable city" projects now being built in some of the world's fastest-growing regions, from China, India, and Korea to the Gulf states of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. And while the little boy in me thrills at the science-fiction stylishness of some of the architects' renderings of these cities of the future (of which the picture above is a sample), another part of me wonders whether the promises now being made about these projects have even a chance of being fulfilled.
To explain my built-in biases: I'm a New Yorker from the generation that visited the 1964 World's Fair as children and marveled at the late-post-war visions of urban futurity on display at places like the General Motors pavilion, with its models of gleaming high-rise cities where cars glided soundlessly on highways suspended in space — mid-century versions of Corbusier's famous vision of the "Radiant City."
Then I got a little older, saw how the post-war high-rise apartment projects dotting New York's outer boroughs had become pockets of loneliness, crime, and decay. I read how attempts to build entire cities along modernist visionary lines (like the centrally-planned Brasilia) produced lifeless, boring failures. And I read Jane Jacobs, who explained how the technocratic dream of the centrally-planned city was really a quasi-fascistic nightmare that destroyed neighborhoods. (This is obviously a somewhat simplified whirlwind summary of the issues.)
I became a convert to what I understood to be "the new urbanism," which was all about human-scale, mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods that captured some of the charm, variety, and freedom of traditional city communities like Jacobs' beloved Greenwich Village.
Today of course human civilization is at a crossroads due to global warming, peak oil, population growth, and the challenges of rapid development in what used to be called the Third World. Around the globe, tens of millions of people are pouring into cities in search of economic opportunity, meaning that hundreds of new or enormously expanded cities will be sprouting up in the next twenty or thirty years.
This creates a wonderful opportunity for us to try to leverage the advantages of higher-density living by trying to construct the world's first truly sustainable cities, using all the latest knowledge and technologies for energy conservation and renewal, waste recycling, efficient transportation, and so on. The idea that urban planners, in cooperation with governments and businesses, are already designing and building such sustainable cities is truly exciting.
Yet the images I am seeing and the descriptions I am reading make me a little nervous.
The artists' renderings of such cities-in-the-making (or re-making) as Dongtan, Guangzhou, and Harbin in China, Gugaon in India, Songdo City in Korea, and King Abdullah Economic City in Saudi Arabia (the one pictured above) look a lot like "Radiant Cities" right out of the old Corbusier playbook — right down to the isolated high-rise dwellings that, in my experience, relatively few people actually want to live in.
These supposedly sustainable cities of the future, with their glittering towers and pristine open spaces that appear devoid of humans, look all too much like the regimented visions of the mid-century planners whom Jane Jacobs wrote about so scathingly. The fact that these cities are being built in countries with authoritarian regimes strikes me as another worrisome symptom.
I'd like to be unreservedly enthusiastic about this new trend, and it's quite possible I am at least partially wrong. Herbert Girardet, a widely-respected expert on urban sustainability, is a consultant on the Dongtan project and has written glowingly about its potential as a truly eco-friendly city:
Dongtan's design is based on the principle that all its citizens can be in close contact with green open spaces, lakes and canals. Its buildings will be highly energy-efficient, and the city will be largely powered by renewable energy — the wind, the sun and biomass.
Most of Dongtan's waste output will be recycled and composted. The bulk of its organic wastes will be returned to the local farmland to help assure its long-term fertility and its capacity to produce much of the city's food needs. Chongming's existing local farming and fishing communities will have significant new marketing opportunities with the development of Dongtan, ensuring a high degree of local food self-sufficiency and enhancing the island's long-term environmental and social sustainability at the same time.
It sounds good! And surely something like this is what we need to build in order to house the hundreds of millions of people who will be joining the world's urban population in the next generation.
It's probably dangerous and misleading to lump the various "sustainable city" projects together (as the Globe-Net News article does). It's quite likely that some will prove to be really sustainable — in human, social, political, and esthetic terms as well as in technological and economic terms. But I suspect that some others may fall prey to the problems that have plagued past attempts at heavy-handed, top-down, utopian city planning, ending up as vast, lifeless ghost towns that no one with free choice would willingly inhabit.
I hope this post will attract a few comments from people with deeper knowledge of the subject than I have.
Teaching Your Company To "Think Sustainability": It's the Systems, Baby
Thursday, August 30, 2007 / KW
Another fine post by Joel Makower at his blog Two Steps Forward — this one dealing with the complexities of greeen construction.
You've probably encountered the sound-bite version of the story, which was based on a survey conducted by the World Business Council on Sustainable Development. The sound-bite, which was widely picked up in the mainstream media, said that real estate executives and developers wildly overestimate the costs involved in sustainable construction — and greatly underestimate the benefits.
Interesting and significant in itself. But give Makower credit for digging deeper and uncovering the less-noticed story, which lies in the fact that the chief obstacles to green building lie not in high costs or even in misperceptions by developers but rather in the complex decision-making systems involved in construction planning.
These systems disperse responsibility and create perverse incentives, as individual players in the building game find it easier (and sometimes more profitable) to take traditional paths-of-least-resistance rather than trying new technologies that could save energy, reduce pollutants, and otherwise benefit the environment. Makower quotes Bill Sisson, Director of Sustainability at United Technologies: "It's sad, but in many cases you find the marble in the lobby gets higher preference to a new higher-performing chiller or mechanical system because of who makes the decision, and which one is valued more."
Joel's entire piece is, as usual, well worth reading, especially if you're involved in construction decisions. But it indirectly raises a broader point that applies to anyone pursuing sustainability strategies. Whether you're focusing on environmental issues, community relations, workers' rights, or the entire range of sustainability challenges, you'll almost certainly find yourself interacting with several company departments as well as people and organizations outside your company.
And that means that developing and implementing sustainability strategies will be more challenging than you think — more challenging, certainly, than simply vowing to "do the right thing" or even to "incorporate sustainability concerns into every decision." It also means examining your internal and external systems to understand how choices typically get made. Who makes each decision? What is the context in which decisions are considered? How are options framed? Whose input is routinely considered? How is the "rightness" or "wrongness" of a decision judged, both before and after the fact? Are managers penalized for long-term thinking and rewarded for short-term thinking?
The answers to questions like these will help you figure out whether and how you need to redesign your decision-making processes. That can be a thorny, complicated, and politically-sensitive challenge in itself. But it's also essential. Because unless you get your decision-making systems right, all the good intentions in the world won't carry you very far.
