Smart Growth Principles

Sustainable Urbanism, as articulated by Doug Farr in his book of the same name, includes three components - application of smart growth principles, transit-oriented new urbanism design of communities and neighborhoods, and use of high performance infrastructure and buildings. The first component is a reference to the 10 principles identified in 1996 by the Smart Growth Movement:

1. Create a range of housing opportunities and choices
2. Create walkable neighborhoods.
3. Encourage community and stakeholder collaboration.
4. Foster distinctive, attractive places with a strong sense of place.
5. Make development decisions predictable, fair and cost-effective.
6. Mix land uses.
7. Preserve open space, farmland, natural beauty, and critical environmental areas.
8. Provide a variety of transportation choices.
9. Strengthen and direct development toward existing communities.
10. Take advantage of compact building design.

Farr suggests that smart location focuses new development on land that is immediately adjacent to existing development and on infill sites. However, as you can see by reviewing all 10 principles, smart development is more than just a consideration of location. There are overlaps with new urbanism design concepts, including: walkability, involving stakeholders, creating a sense of place, providing a mix of land uses and preserving open space and critical environmental areas.

There are those who continue to espouse and create suburban and exurban neighborhoods and communities where autos rule. There are others who are quite vocal in opposing smart growth, reacting regressively and emotionally to what they perceive as the end of the American dream and loss of property rights. These perspectives, which need to be understood to be overcome, beg the question - is more of the same sustainable over time?

Metro Area Carbon Footprints

A recent study, conducted by the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, compiled partial carbon footprints for the 100 largest metropolitan areas. The study compared 2000 and 2005 data describing passenger and freight highway transportation and energy consumption in residential buildings. Note the use of the word “partial” - the footprints don’t include emissions from commercial buildings, industry, or non-highway transportation. In addition, much has happened since 2005 to increase awareness of and response to levels of carbon emissions. Nonetheless, the exercise provides useful baseline and trend information and provides perspective on the sustainability of metropolitan areas.

The trend information

1. Carbon emissions have increased approximately 1% per year since 1980 in the U.S.
2. Carbon emissions increased more slowly in metropolitan America than in the rest of the country between 2000 and 2005.

Per capita emissions were found to vary by metropolitan area, reflecting the impact of development patterns, availability of rail transit, fuel used to generate electricity, pricing of electricity and weather. High density cities with good rail systems fared well. Lower density cities with high heating and cooling loads and those that rely on coal to generate electricity suffered.

Surprises emerged from the rankings. Los Angeles fared well – the region’s freeways and autos were apparently offset by increased rail ridership and a mild climate. Madison, Wisconsin fared poorly, notwithstanding the area’s often-recognized livability, quality of life and high percentage of bike ridership. In Madison, it was the harsh winter, lack of rail transit and reliance on coal that created high per capita emission levels.

The study recommends a number of targeted policies that are directed at reducing per capita carbon emissions in metropolitan areas:
1. Promote more transit and compact development options.
2. Work toward more efficient, regionally planned freight operations.
3. Require home sellers to provide historical energy cost info and allow homeowners to finance. energy efficiency improvements using energy savings.
4. Use Location Efficient Mortgages and other incentives more aggressively.
5. Issue a challenge to all metropolitan areas to develop and share innovative approaches.

The perspective on sustainability

Notwithstanding the rather incremental approach to the recommendations, the underlying analysis did serve up a number of factors that affect carbon emissions across contemporary metropolitan areas:

• Location and weather


• Density of development


• Availability of transit options


• The interplay between development and transit


• Efficiency of freight systems


• Fuel used to generate electricity and unit pricing

Metro areas with high heating and/or cooling requirements really have no choice but to improve performance. This means attention on a number of fronts: effective community and neighborhood design, siting of buildings and use of passive design techniques, implementation and enforcement of energy efficient building codes, and use of efficient hvac and lighting systems.

While not the best housing solution for everyone, high density developments served by public transit have to be a significant part of the housing mix. There is recent evidence that exurban property values and sales have suffered disproportionately as a result of higher gas prices. Other evidence suggests that demand for housing in transit-oriented developments is increasing. These changes - perhaps trends - also represent incremental thinking that assumes little change in transportation and communication technologies at least in the near term.

Finally, as directed in the Architecture 2030 Blueprint, the subject of an earlier article, coal power plants have to be replaced with cleaner means of generating electricity.

Subsequent articles will examine other perspectives regarding sustainable development patterns and changing technology.

Is New Urbanism necessarily a model of sustainability?

Homes in Middleton Hills, WI from Web site - right

Utah's TRAX light rail - lower right

New Urbanism has become an important model for developing new neighborhoods, communities and towns, and for designing for the infilling and redevelopment of existing neighborhoods and communities. The Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), formed to promote the principles of new urbanism, counts 320 completed projects in the U.S.

The application of new urbanism planning principles is intended to build community by creating environments in which the impact of the automobile is reduced and the scale of the place provides walking access to neighborhood and community-serving commercial and institutional uses such as schools, churches, post office, markets and shops. At the neighborhood level, new urbanism draws on Traditional Neighborhood Design concepts, including narrow streets designed to reduce the speed of traffic, garage access from rear alleys, and small front yards and functional porches that encourage interaction with neighbors.

At the level of individual structures, design standards assure the construction of homes and other buildings that support the intended look and feel of the place. Owner associations typically enforce the rules and provide services so as to assure maintenance of the community and associated values.

Developments like Seaside in Florida, and the others reviewed in previous posts on the subject, are successful to varying degrees in implementing these principles. They are very appealing places that have been received favorably by people who want to live or vacation in them. On the other hand, does that mean that they are necessarily sustainable? While I have visited a small sample of the entire new urbanism project universe to date, I've seen enough to have some concerns:

1. While autos have been downplayed within new urbanism communities, thousands of automobile trips are generated each day getting to, from and through each of these communities.

2. Many of these communities were designed without alternative or mass transit options in mind. Even if there is a transit option in the plan, it may be years before it takes form.

3. I have yet to visit a new urbanism community where significant numbers of jobs are located in the community.

4. It is only lately that energy efficiency has become a design criterion at the level of the individual building in these communities. However, current green building standards are too low to have the impact needed to meet even the interim standard of 50% reduction in fossil fuel use in buildings by 2010 as advanced by the Architecture 2030 Challenge. (More about the Challenge in subsequent posts.)

5. New urbanism projects are challenged to include housing that is affordable to start and that remains so over time. As a result, diversity in terms of age, race, and income level is often lacking in these neighborhoods and communities. Yet, it is an important principle, articulated in the Charter of the Congress of New Urbanism. According to a CNU survey, 234 of the 320 existing new urbanism projects are considered market rate projects. Only 15% of these projects included affordable housing in their mix.

While I am firmly in the camp of the new urbanists, believing that its principles provide strong counterpoint to the realities of urban sprawl, much work needs to be done to make the model truly sustainable. In fact, the CNU has a number of initiatives in place to focus resources and bring about the changes needed in building codes, transportation and land planning, and consumer attitudes and habits to address these concerns. During my travels I plan to visit as many of the new urbanism neighborhoods and communities as practical, with this perspective as a lens.

New Urbanism is now a pervasive model

Alys Beach pictured at right, Loreto below right

Seaside was the start of what has become one of the most significant models for development of the built environment. While its roots are in Walton County, Florida along the beautiful Emerald Coast, the impact of new urbanism can be found in neighborhoods and communities throughout the country and abroad.

Duany, Plater-Zyberk (DPZ) developed the concepts involved and has pretty much owned the space since designing Seaside in 1980. Recently, they returned to Walton County as designers of the newest project in the County, Alys Beach. This new urbanism community has also embraced regional green building standards of construction.

I was surprised to learn that Alys Beach is a DPZ design. The community is starkly white, apparently influenced by styles seen in Bermuda and Antigua, Guatemala. Perhaps purposefully different from the DPZ-designed Seaside and Rosemary Beach, what is off-putting is the very fact that it is so completely disconnected from the other vernacular references in the area. To buy in, lots are offered at $400K and finished residences at $1.9M.

From a style perspective, another new coastal project that was influenced by DPZ has greater appeal. Loreto is connected to the historical fishing town of the same name on the east coast of Baja California Sur, Mexico. My attention was drawn to Loreto by a recent article in the New York Times. Several years ago the government of Mexico identified a number of areas that would be developed as tourist destinations. Somewhat belatedly, investment in Loreto has begun, driven by the vision of The Trust for Sustainable Development, a group from Vancouver, British Columbia. Loreto will ultimately have 6K homes on 8K acres situated between mountains and the Sea of Cortez. Prices in Loreto range from $300K to $900K - approximately $350 per square foot.

Closer to home, I've had the opportunity to explore other New Urbanism communities in Wisconsin and Utah. Middleton Hills is another DPZ-designed community, located west of Madison in the city of Middleton. Architecturally, styles include contemporary interpretations of prairie, craftsman and bungalow. One of the intended consequences of new urbanism and its use of traditional neighborhood design is an increased sense of community. A resident of Middleton Hills recently observed that it took 2 hours to walk around the community of 400 homes, not because of the rolling topography but because of the success of the place as a community and the conversations with neighbors that bear witness. As elsewhere, consumer response has been very strong. Available homes are listed at $150 - $250 per square foot.

The first sign of New Urbanism appeared in Utah when a neighborhood was built at South Mountain, at the south end of the Salt Lake valley, more than ten years ago. More recently and more dramatically, Kennecott Land (part of Rio Tinto) kicked off the development of 80,000 acres on the West side of the Salt Lake valley with its Daybreak community. The entire 80K acres has been master planned by Calthorpe Associates, a California planning and design firm that has embraced new urbanism and sustainable design. One of the progressive requirements in place at Daybreak is that all builders have to build Energy Star homes. Consumer demand has been strong and values fall in the range of $150 - $200 per square foot.

Finally, DPZ has also had a hand in designing a mixed-use infill project called Cottonwood Mall on the east side of the Salt Lake valley. This project replaces a tired shopping mall and is owned by Capital Growth Properties. Take a minute to view the extensive list of projects that DPZ has designed using the interactive map on their Web site.

In the next post I will look at the limitations of new urbanism as a development model reflected by experiences to date.

Kohler through the lens of city planning

The planned village of Kohler has long been of interest to me, given my graduate education in City Planning. The tour of Kohler Company's manufacturing facility and Design Center provided an opportunity to spend some time getting reacquainted with Kohler as a place.

Walter J. Kohler Sr., after moving the company from nearby Sheboygan, sought to assure that the surrounding community would grow in an orderly fashion. He traveled to England in 1913 to meet with Sir Ebenezer Howard, who had established his authority on the development of what he called Garden Cities. Howard's book Garden Cities of Tomorrow was an early reading assignment in grad school. His vision of the good city was one in which industrial uses were isolated from residential and commercial uses; trees and grassy boulevards served as boundaries for these areas and a green belt buffered the community from its surroundings.

After visiting Howard, Kohler hired the Olmstead Brothers of Boston to create the first plan for the community. The Olmstead Brothers had previously designed Central Park in New York and the Harvard University campus, among other accomplishments. In 1917 the Olmsteads' initial 50-year plan for the Village of Kohler was adopted The plan guided development until 1977, when the Kohler plan was updated with help from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. The current plan emphasizes environmental sensitivity, encourages the planting of trees, and preserves wetlands and woodlands.

Today, the village of Kohler is a charming and appealing place to live. Sculptures created by former artists-in-residence are integrated into the beautiful landscaping. The town, which benefits from its location at the north end of Wisconsin’s Kettle Moraine, is defined on the south end by one of Kohler’s world-class golf courses, Black Wolf Run.

As a kid I had the impression that Kohler was a company town, with all of the negatives suggested by that label. In retrospect, that was probably unfair. After all, the Kohler Improvement Company was formed in 1917 to build homes that were sold to employees at cost. Middle and upper management have always been precluded from running for Village governing positions to assure an independent voice for the community.

Though unrelated to the planning of the village, Kohler Company's approach in the early 1900's to dealing with immigrant workers is worth noting and considering in the context of the contemporary debate on the subject. The company sponsored Americanization Day in early April. Immigrant employees were taken to the County Courthouse to file papers to become U.S. citizens. Employees prepared for the citizenship test by attending classes in English and American Government that were offered by the company.