Advice from a pioneering source, in print again

One of the venerable titles of the environmental movement, Toward Sustainable Communities, first published in 1992, has been republished in an updated fourth edition. The 384-page paperback, with a new subtitle, Solutions for Citizens and their Governments, was assembled by Mark Roseland, director of the Centre for Sustainable Community Development at Simon Fraser University in the Vancouver area and has a strongly Canadian flavor.

For example, a section examining whether residents of new urbanist communities use their cars less, walk and bike more, interact more with neighbors, and have a greater sense of neighborhood attachment focuses on the experiences of four Canadian developments: McKenzie Towne and Garrison Woods, both in Calgary, Alberta; Cornell in Markham, Ontario; and Bois-Franc in Montreal.

The study, by Ray Tomalty and Murtaza Haider of Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, concludes: ”New Urbanist neighborhoods are more socially connected, walkable and less car dependent than their conventional counterparts. These findings are consistent with those from US studies and suggest that building more neighborhoods with these design characteristics will move our communities toward sustainability.”

In a chapter on land use, urban form, and community design, Roseland says:
In the 30 years since its emergence, New Urbanism has learned important lessons practitioners should take note of. For example, some developments identified as “new urbanist” have been built on greenfield sites without ecological design techniques (such as passive solar) or infrastructure (for example, greywater recycling). ...

The “neo-traditional new town of Celebration I Florida, created by the Disney Corporation, is an example of how early New Urbanism failed to recognize that a community’s form and function [are] primarily shaped by its transportation system, which in that case was the suburban highway and freeways of South Florida... . [Actually, Celebration is in central Florida.]

As well, such developments may be “designed” to encourage a mix of housing types and a diversity of income levels but offer no mechanism to ensure any stock—never mind an adequate, permanent stock—of affordable housing.

For New Urbanism to be sustainable, says Roseland, the lessons above must be taken into account, and energy-efficient land use must be planned. Communities can pursue those objectives, he says, through policies that:

• Encourage greater density through multiple-unit residential developments.

• Integrate work, residence, and shopping.

• Zone for higher density along transit routes.

• Decentralize commercial and community services to reduce travel distances, creating self-contained communities with a better balance between employment and population.

• Place controls on outlying shopping centers, strip development, and urban sprawl.

• Encourage infilling of vacant land in built-up areas.

• Ensure that major public facilities have provision for waling and bicycling access to transit.

• Encourage development of high-quality walking and bicycling facilities.

Though Roseland doesn’t say so, most of that list of recommendations already enjoys substantial support among new urbanists. Whether the recommendations end up being accepted in a particular development, however, depends largely on the developer, the attitude of the municipality, and the perceived market. For example, achieving a balance between housing and employment has been a goal of new urbanist developments in California and some other parts of the western US, where many governments worry about overcrowded highways; by contrast, that idea has received little attention in many projects in the Midwest, South, and East. Roseland would no doubt urge new urbanists to do better. 

The $34.95 paperback, from New Society Publishers, is weighted toward short pieces—there are hundreds of them, on topics ranging from agricultural urbanism, to traffic circles built by the municipality but planted by local residents, to the use of permeable pavement in distinctive patterns, so that people can distinguish between permeable and conventional pavement.

To motivate homeowners to make their dwellings more energy-efficient, the book suggests that the property tax system take into account each house’s energy consumption and carbon emissions—charging less to owners who make their homes energy-efficient.

To make it more useful in a digital age, the book is supplemented by Pando | Sustainable Communities, a continuously updated online source that identifies resources and provides information for researchers and other people pursuing sustainability at the local level. See pando.sc/.