Managing regional growth to fight climate change

Measuring the effect of regional growth on carbon dioxide emissions is likely to be on the cutting edge of planning in the next decade. It has only been attempted in a handful of places in the last year or so (New Urban News will report on one such effort in the Seattle region in an upcoming issue). Techniques and tools are being developed, but perhaps the biggest challenge is to get officials from various jurisdictions to work together. The Baltimore region has taken the first steps in this process using an innovative climate change action method called Cool Spots developed by Criterion Planners of Portland, Oregon.

With support from the Baltimore Metropolitan Council, the Urban Land Institute, and the University of Baltimore, planners from the City of Baltimore and five suburban counties — Baltimore, Howard, Carroll, Harford, and Anne Arundel — gathered for digital charrettes in  September and October 2008. In a digital charrette, participants sketch their scenarios in software, instead of on paper, and the software gives them immediate feedback on how well their design is accomplishing their goals.

Regional sectors
The group, representing jurisdictions with 3 million people, covering 2,200 square miles,  used Criterion’s  Index software to apply the Transect-based method that divides regions into sectors of  preserve, reserve, and growth areas. No development is allowed in preserves, development is discouraged in reserves through transfer of development rights and other techniques, and development is promoted in intended growth and infill areas. The growth areas are then designated as community types, which in turn are divided into walkable Transect zones.

Baltimore area planners achieved close to 90 percent agreement on the preserve/reserve/intended growth designations, according to Jud Malone of the Urban Land Institute, who helped organize the planning effort. The plan designates 42 percent of the region for growth and 58 percent is left for open space and carbon sequestration, Eliot Allen of Criterion says (see plan below). If planners wisely select the growth areas and pick the appropriate Transect zones, a region can significantly reduce future greenhouse gas emissions, Allen explains.  He calls development zones that meet such criteria “Cool Spots.” They can cut automobile use by 25 percent and carbon emissions by 25 to 40 percent, he says. The Cool Spots method is downloadable at www.crit.com/documents/cool_spots.pdf.

Reductions in carbon emissions can only be achieved, however, if jurisdictions change zoning laws and make the necessary investments in mass transit and street networks.

The Baltimore region has a long way to go before achieving that goal. While planners agreed on the growth and preservation designations, the fine-grained planning that will determine specific Transect zones  and Cool Spots— that is to say urban cores, centers, neighborhood general areas and suburban areas —  is still to come. The Metropolitan Council will have to come up with  additional funding , Malone says. The major accomplishment so far was to establish a degree of collaboration between planners in the region that did not exist before, he says. “At this point we have turned the ship a few degrees and we can see it heading in a new direction,” he says. “I feel comfortable that we have accomplished some fairly significant things that will take a few months to unfold.”