Green Council seeks action on sustainability

A sense of urgency ran through the Green Architecture and Urbanism Council held in Alexandria, Virginia, and Washington, DC, just after Thanksgiving. Like other councils, this one was an independently organized meeting of peers (many of them CNU members) and a great place to learn about — and probe — cutting-edge approaches to a problem demanding the coordinated attention of new urbanists. The scope of the problem — the planetary threat posed by rising carbon emissions — and the evidence that a crisis can’t be averted without a major shift to compact, mixed-use development, led to a series of inspired presentations. The council also left many of the 125 attendees focused on clarifying New Urbanism’s relationship to human sustainability and on intensifying the movement’s environmental influence, resulting in several resolutions both formal and informal advocating future action.
The first resolution followed the presentation of a comprehensive set of principles or canons of sustainable architecture and urbanism prepared by CNU co-founders Elizabeth Moule and Stefanos Polyzoides and CNU board chair Hank Dittmar, the chief executive of The Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment. The draft document, presented to the council with the title the Nature of Building Canons, amplifies the sustainability inherent in New Urbanism in general and in the Charter of the New Urbanism in particular, making it more explicit. Following a broad call for a wholly sustainable new design culture addressing the most basic human needs — shelter, food, water, and energy — it declares that sound places from the scale of the building through the region should maximize human interaction, energy, and creativity, thereby fusing a high quality of life with sustainability. It affirms that many essential characteristics of sustainable construction are timeless. Buildings should be well-crafted, inspired, and beloved, and contribute to a “culture of permanence,” say the authors. The design of streets must shape a positive public realm to encourage shared pedestrian and vehicular use. At the same time, the document doesn’t shy away from more technical prescriptions concerning such matters as on-site water management, renewable energy sources or handling of construction waste. It includes principles and prescriptions for scales ranging from the region to the building and physical infrastructure.

consensus in principle
Although council attendees identified a few thorny issues to resolve — whether the document’s call for both horizontal and vertical walkability was too strong a discouragement of Manhattan- or Vancouver-style green development, for example — the set of principles was well received. After offering suggestions, participants resolved unanimously to endorse the Canons in principle as “guiding best practices” concerning environmental sustainability.  The vote, like the rest of the council’s Saturday session, took place in a regal hearing room of the Cannon House Office Building next to the US Capitol. “We’re injecting ourselves in a debate worthy of the room we’re in,” said Moule after the vote.
Dittmar recalled that he had moderated a session at an early CNU Congress on New Urbanism and the environment and encountered the overwhelming message that making urbanism more green wasn’t much of a concern compared to making environmentalism more urban. “Now the sentiment is ‘Yes, we are green’ and ‘Yes, we have to raise our game.’ ” The authors are now working on revising the draft document and will recirculate it in the coming months. Watch for updates in CNU’s monthly e-newsletter and at CNU.org.
Although the set of sustainability principles is intended as a stand-alone document that complements the Charter of the New Urbanism, the discussion surrounding the document sparked a proposal to amend or supplement the Charter itself. In Washington, Galina Tahchieva, Duany Plater-Zyberk’s director of town planning, expanded on a suggestion she made days earlier to a listserv to supplement or revise the Charter to clarify sustainability as a  “’universal’ aspect of our theoretical and practical efforts” —  a scale which New Urbanism must address, much like the existing scales of the Charter from the region to the building and block. She offered the proposal as a resolution stating:
This Council recommends that the Charter of the New Urbanism be supplemented or revised to include our understanding of sustainability: social, economic, and environmental. For more than two decades our movement has been practicing and building sustainable urbanism. We build human settlements that are part of nature and exist in symbiotic relationship with the agrarian countryside and the eco-systems. We achieve benevolent growth and development through the multidisciplinary collaboration of experts to create sustainable synergy between the natural and the manmade. While we acknowledge that social and economic sustainability are crucial for moving our society forward, environmental sustainability is the urgent matter to emphasize in our work.
The proposal passed at the same time as the resolution regarding the Canons. And although efforts to amend the Charter in recent years to address issues such as housing affordability and the rural-to-urban Transect failed to produce versions that generated enough support to be presented to the full Congress for ratification, several experienced urbanists including CNU board members Stephanie Bothwell, Ellen Dunham-Jones, and Doug Farr formed a committee to work with Tahchieva in crafting the intended amendment. The group has been reviewing drafts and expects to have a draft ready to share with CNU’s board and membership in February. CNU will likely use CNU.org to give amendment supporters an opportunity to make their case and share the draft for review. New surveying software could allow members to express whether they believe such an amendment or revision is worth exploring.
A busy third day of the council included several proposals receiving informal support from participants. These included the following: a recommendation that the Charter Awards, which has recognized green projects in the past, incorporate Green Urbanism Awards; a recommendation that the standards of the Building Research Establishment (UK) be studied and incorporated perhaps within a future rating system (the BRE bills itself as “a world leading research, consultancy, training, testing and certification organization delivering sustainability and innovation across the built environment and beyond”); a call for a green database or resource for the common use by all CNU members; and a recommendation for CNU to form alliances with public agencies and institutions at the local, state, and federal level to fund sustainability research and development, as well to raise the public understanding of the new urbanist experience as it relates to the theory and practice of sustainable growth.
While these ideas will be considered as part of the implementation of CNU’s strategic plan, supporters are encouraged to bring them to the New Initiatives Forum at the Austin Congress. Another green-minded effort — CNU’s Low-Impact New Urbanism Initiative — got its start at last year’s initiatives forum in Philadelphia.