Sustainable Urbanism and Beyond

A book edited by Tigran Haas
Rizzoli, 2012, 320 pp., $75 hardcover

Four years ago Tigran Haas produced a big, generously illustrated book, New Urbanism and Beyond, in which 68 essayists—many of them architects, planners, or theorists—examined New Urbanism from a multitude of perspectives. It’s one of the most stimulating, wide-ranging books ever published about New Urbanism (see June 2008 New Urban News).

Now Haas, who teaches architecture, town planning, and urban design theory at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, and the University of California, Berkeley, has put together a second volume in the same format: The hefty, illustrated Sustainable Urbanism and Beyond presents 59 essays by 76 authors from across the globe. Like its predecessor, this is a handsome production—but it’s much more worrisome about the future.

“Moving from the wasteful life of suburban sprawl toward a tighter, more self-contained, enclosed neighborhood setting and a more connected public transit system” will not by itself solve the world’s resource and climate problems, Haas warns at the start of the new collection. He suggests that New Urbanism, though beneficial, is not enough; we must advance to something more comprehensive: sustainable urbanism.

If you read David Owen’s 2009 book, Green Metropolis, you may have the impression that urbanization is the answer to the world’s energy-consumption and climate-change predicament. Owen made much of the fact that the inhabitants of New York City use energy more sparingly than do the residents of America’s suburbs and exurbs. That may well be true, but the more relevant comparison is this: Urban agglomerations worldwide consume resources more voraciously than do poor rural areas, especially those in “underdeveloped” countries. Moreover, rural people in much of the world are rapidly moving to city-regions, exacerbating the strains on ecology and society.

Urban regions, Haas says, are “the main aggregate source of environmental degradation on the planet.” If the world’s population grows as projected (to 8 billion by 2030 and 9 billion by about 2050) and if cities remain “as greedy as they are now,” says Haas, many urban areas will bear the brunt of extreme weather, rising seas, shortages of critical supplies, and other disturbances.

Harald Kegler, chair and co-founder of the Council for European Urbanism, says what’s needed now is “a New Urbanism that stands for a climate-oriented, socially balanced city.” Haas says that to “avoid the looming environmental disaster,” societies require “one of the greatest cultural and technological transformations” ever undertaken in the planning, design, maintenance, governance, and use of cities.

Are we prepared? Certainly not yet. “Our response to date has been characterized by a bizarre mix of paralysis, denial, and tokenism,” observes Michael Mehaffy, an Oregon new urbanist who has worked both in the US and overseas.

This book was inspired by a conference on “Climate Change and Urban Design,” held in Oslo in September 2008. Mehaffy, who participated in the conference, points out that by most measures, Europeans have just half the carbon footprint of Americans; the US would do well to learn from them. But, he acknowledges, even a European way of life will be unable to “mitigate the coming crisis.”

Richard Sommer of the University of Toronto says the US possesses “entrenched and deeply held proclivities toward freedom of movement and association.” This being the case, he doubts that Americans as a whole will make “a more compact yet ultimately less mobile form of city” their goal. As Sommer sees it, leaders such as Andres Duany have expressed hope that by instigating a change in the tastes and market-based choices of middle-class Americans, new urbanists may be able to produce a change in the psyche of the country. Sommer doubts that the desired transformation will really happen.

Difficult choices

What alternatives are available? One, proposed by individuals in environmental science and ecological modeling, entails composing cities in ways that Sommer says “defy many of architecture and urban design’s most cherished precepts.” Other individuals, working in the vein of the late MIT dean William Mitchell, think “we can redesign and reengineer our transport infrastructure to be more multiscaled, multifaceted, and digitally networked to real-time analysis of our patterns of movement,” Sommer relates.

Peter Calthorpe writes that “compounding layers of design must be integrated”; contributions from efficient buildings, well-located transit-oriented development, and planning at a variety of levels must all be combined. As he sees it, “only a whole systems approach, with each scale nesting into the other, can deliver the kind of transformation we now need to confront climate change.” (He seems to disagree with Sommer’s contention that a green society would require the sacrifice of valued mobility.)

Peter Newman, Timothy Beatley, and Heather Boyer argue that great progress could be made through a combination of renewable energy, reforestation, rooftop planting, neighborhood-based power and water systems, locally-based economic development, and other methods. Their essay, like many others in the book, identifies places and programs that readers can turn to for more detailed guidance. Also worth thinking about is a set of 15 principles of Green Urbanism presented by Steffen Lehmann of the University of South Australia. He organizes Green Urbanism into three main categories: energy and materials; water and biodiversity; and urban planning and transport.

Improving corridors and downtowns

While some essays probe overall sustainability, others explore smaller, more discrete topics, often very skillfully.

• Architects Victor Dover and Joseph Kohl discuss “the strip corridor challenge,” which their Coral Gables, Florida, firm has been pursuing for years. Hundreds of convincing illustrations have been produced to show how the nation’s generic, automobile-dominated commercial corridors can be transformed into “walkable, urbane avenues and boulevards,” they write. With chagrin, they report, “we did not realize how long it would take to see the first projects mature. It turns out that watching a corridor evolve can be like observing a glacier retreat....” The largest obstacle is the transportation bureaucracy, they say. In some jurisdictions, the “transpocracy” was fortunately “the first to fall,” they note. Dover and Kohl tell about progress in what’s probably the most successful corridor-shapeup in the country—the Columbia Pike in Arlington County, Virginia. They exhort: “Get impatient and be persistent.”

• Urban planning consultant Jeff Speck presents “best practices in downtown revitalization, new urban style.” He advances a “General Theory of Walkability,” founded on this simple but often underappreciated fact: “The pedestrian is a delicate creature.”

• Chicago architect Doug Farr tells about his “aha” moment in the early 1990s that eventually led to introduction of LEED-Neighborhood Development—“likely to be the dominant tool for promoting sustainable communities in the twenty-first century.”

• English architect and urban designer Paul Murrain makes a spirited attempt to show that the idea of creating a “neighborhood edge” around each traditional neighborhood development harms urban continuity and inhibits development of commercially thriving main streets. The “neighborhood unit,” from which the idea of a physical edge sprang, is an unfortunate borrowing from Clarence Perry circa 1929, Murrain asserts—persuasively, in my view. He maintains: “An edge in the sense of reinforcing separation is irrelevant and indeed totally subversive to the nature of a greater and more inclusive urbanism.”

British planning professor Peter Hall presents an illuminating “unified theory of the dynamics of development” — a clear and concise guide to the economic prospects of various kinds of cities.

Duany proposes a “general agreement on architecture” aimed at overcoming some of the longstanding hostility between new urbanists and the modernist establishment. His premise is that “the rupture between the academy and the New Urbanism, based on a matter so trivial as the look of a building, can surely be overcome by method and by forbearance.” I wish him luck.

There’s a lot of lively, pointed debate in Sustainable Urbanism, and there are quite a few stimulating tangents like Murrain’s. These help relieve the grimness that inevitably attaches to the book’s sometimes unstated central idea: Humanity has failed to fully tackle “’the greatest crisis in the history of mankind and the greatest threat to the natural eco-balance of our planet and our built environment.”

“Most policymakers are confident that there is still time for successful action,” says Peter Droege, a professor at the University of Liechtenstein and president of Eurosolar. For all our sakes, let’s hope they’re right.