Environmental Design for Sustainability
Urban form influences
and shapes the behavior of people using urban spaces, and therefore, an urban
form that shapes peoples behavior and activity patterns in ways that will
increase sustainability is achievable. Urban topology; the spatial arrangement
of various urban elements and the relationships of these elements to one
another, is the fundamental component of urban form (Crawford, 2000; Schoenauer,
1994). A sustainable urban form is one with an integrated and interdependent
land-use and transportation infrastructure that concentrates where we live,
work and play into dense, mixed-use communities around transit stations.
Development is nodal, concentrated in activity centres located throughout
the regional urban fabric, and woven together by trunk and secondary public
transit routes. By reducing the number of possible origins and destinations,
increasing the mix of land-uses available locally, providing a balance of
jobs and housing, and providing a fine mix of both housing types and affordability,
activity patterns can become more concentrated, localized, and therefore,
efficient, making public transit more feasible and inexpensive.
The American Architect and Urbanist
Peter Calthorpe has drawn up a set of guidelines for sustainable urban growth
that are shaped by three general principles:
“First, that the regional structure of growth should
be guided by the expansion of transit, and a more compact urban form; second,
that our ubiquitous single-use zoning should be replaced with standards for
mixed use, walkable neighbourhoods; and third, that our urban design policies
should create an architecture oriented toward the public domain and human
dimension rather than the private dimension and auto-scale” (1993; 41).
Interpretations of sustainability
are generally based on three pillars: economy, ecology, and equity, all of
which can be enhanced by an urban form that is compact, mixed-use and nodal
in structure. Clearly, there are limits to the degree that an urban form
alone can increase each of these three pillars, particularly equity.
Government policy regulating the three pillars of sustainability is also
needed. However, the form and content of the urban built environment can
reduce human impact on the environment in significant ways while enhancing
economic activity and overall equity by increasing access to jobs and resources.
Clustering growth closer together
into more dense and mixed-use communities around transit stations concentrates
activity making the transportation system more efficient, and therefore of
(comparatively) low impact to the environment. Comprehensive and complete
communities can promote local production, or at least provision, for local
consumption, reducing the distance that goods need travel between the producer/retailer
and the consumer, which will in turn reduce the burden on the transportation
infrastructure and move goods more efficiently, safely, and reliably. Clustering
jobs in centres helps support transit, encourages walking and cycling, and
lessons the resources and land required for parking. An effective regional
public transit system will get more cars off the road, allowing for more efficient,
and cost effective goods movement.
Decreasing the number of origins and
destinations and the distances between them reduces congestion, travel and
commuter times, therefore increasing quality of life while reducing incidences
of road rage, an increasingly prevalent stress related societal ill. Research
has also shown that reduced commuter times increases worker productivity (Calthorpe,
1993). In addition to inefficient use of time, congestion also results in
inefficient use of resources, the most obvious of which are gasoline and
oil.
A transportation system based on the
efficient, reliable, and convenient delivery of public transit is more equitable
in that it is communal and public, and therefore targeted towards the entire
spectrum and diversity of users which includes children, the disabled, the
growing aging population, and others who don’t or can’t drive. Equal
access to the regional transportation system will increase as communal, public
modes of transport replace the private, individually oriented mode of the
private automobile.
The provision of a diversity of housing
types and affordability is a crucial element of sustainability. A diversity
of residential housing accommodates the increasing diversity in household
type and size, and also the increasing diversity in residential preferences.
Single detached dwellings, medium density row housing and townhouses, and
high density apartment buildings located together within the same neighbourhood
allows a diversity of people to live within the same neighbourhood. In terms
of sustainability, smaller dwelling sizes and lot sizes are the objective
and contribute to sustainability in a number of ways: First, they consume
less land area, second; they allow for higher densities that support transit,
as well as increased levels of social interaction, third; they require less
material to build and less energy to service, and fourth; they are more affordable
and therefore accessible to a larger section of the population. However, extremely
large-scale skyscraper residential development is un-desirable as it is often
disorienting and socially alienating as residential units are cut effectively
cut off from the street. Ground oriented and above shop medium density developments
are optimal as they are expressed on a more human scale providing a better
balance between privacy and social interaction, density and space. A mixture
of low, medium, and high-density dwellings allows for a diversity of people
with diverse wants, needs, and incomes to live in the same communities.
Currently, many peoples residential
location options are limited by a lack of affordability, and therefore people
can only afford to live in communities far from their work or school, putting
stress on other aspects of individual and community lives. Traffic, lack of
access to amenities and feelings of isolation are becoming increasingly important
issues facing people living in cities. Lack of affordable housing also results
in homelessness.
Egalitarian Urban Design
The fetishistic dependence on the
private automobile, pressures of private land development, and the wasteful
use of energy and land, are the hallmarks of the marriage between modernism
and monopoly capitalism, and, as discussed earlier, are the organizing principles
underlying the contemporary American city. Dolores Hayden, professor of architecture
and urbanism at Yale University, identifies another, less talked about design
principle underlying the contemporary North America City:
“A women’s place is in the home, ...an implicit
rather than explicit principle for the conservative and male dominated design
professions…. However, women have rejected this dogma, and entered the paid
labour force in larger and larger numbers. Dwellings, neighbourhoods, and
cities designed for homebound women constrain women physically, socially,
and economically. Acute frustration occurs when women defy these constraints
to spend all or part of the workday in the paid labour force. [The] only
remedy for this situation is to develop a new paradigm of the home, the neighbourhood,
and the city; to begin to describe the physical, social and economic design
of a human settlement that would support, rather than restrict, the activities
of employed women and their families. It is essential to recognize such needs
in order to begin both the rehabilitation of the existing housing stock and
the construction of new housing to meet the needs of a new and growing majority
of Americans - working women and their families” (1981; 89).
Hayden proposes ways to make the urban
built environment more responsive to women, particularly working women with
children. She calls for environmental design at building, neighbourhood,
and city wide scales, that better fits contemporary family structure and needs
as well as changes in gender and work roles. “A program to achieve economic,
social, and environmental justice for women requires a solution that, by
definition, overcomes the traditional divisions between the household and
the market economy, the private dwelling and the workplace” (1981; 90). Community
services that locally support the private household, such as day care and
recreational services close by, transit for children and the elderly who
do not drive, the elimination of residential segregation by class, race, and
age, and the maximization of real choices for households concerning recreation
and sociability, can “reinforce [women’s] economic independence and maximize
their personal choices about child rearing and sociability” (ibid). Proximity
to work, day care facilities, schools, shops, and recreational and social
opportunities increases women’s, as well as men’s, access to a wider spectrum
of the urban economy and environment.
Urban Design, Social Interaction, Diversity, and Difference
The rise of private affluence associated
with a sprawling, isolated car oriented urban form has resulted in the loss
of public space and the social and civic activities that take place in them
(Zukin 1995; Davis 1990; Creswell 1996). A landscape designed to drive from
the carport, to the office parking lot, and back again, far from encouraging
or celebrating public life, discards it in favour of a with drawl into isolation
and privacy. This, argues Jerry Frug, results in “purified forms of identity”,
creating “a state of absolute bondage to the status quo” (Sennet, qtd. in
Frug, 1970;134). “A reliance on stability, coherence, and order inhibits openness
to experience: it undermines one’s ability to even absorb, let alone enjoy
the flux and variety the world has to offer” (Frug, 1995; 1053).
In the midst of the ever changing
and shifting forces of globalization, civil society, feminism, and post-modernism,
Leonie Sandercock advances a vision of the city that embraces the increasingly
multicultural make-up of urban environments called Cosmopolis: “…where citizens
wrest from space new possibilities, and immerse themselves in their cultures
while respecting those of their neighbours, and collectively forging new hybrid
cultures and spaces” (2001; 219). This vision can be achieved, she
believes, by bringing together the diverse make up of urban populations into
dense, diverse communities, thus increasing exposure to diversity and difference
and reversing some of the current and past trends of cultural, class, and
age-based segregation and a retreat into homogeneity and isolation.
High levels of public social interaction increase our exposure to diversity
and difference, provided public spaces are accessible to the diversity of
people using cities. Peter Calthorpe’s work asserts that “communities
must be designed to re-established and reinforce the public domain, that districts
must be human-scaled, and that neighbourhoods must be diverse in use and
population” (1993; 15). Calthorpe’s “Pedestrian Pockets” and “Transit
Villages”: neighbourhoods of housing, parks, and schools, placed within walking
distance of shops, civic services, jobs and transit, and having a balance
of residential housing types and affordability will, he envisions, increase
exposure to and interaction with ‘otherness’ as a result of a diverse community
that is pedestrian oriented with therefore comparatively higher levels of
opportunities for social interaction.
Environmental Design for Sustainability: Summary
The opposition to the modernist Corbusian
super blocks and skyscraper developments, and to the sprawling, single use
suburbs inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broad Acre City, was spearheaded
by Jane Jacob’s whose notions of what makes a city liveable are the foundation
of many of the ideas on sustainable urban design outlined above. Cities made
up of compact, well defined neighbourhoods with narrow, crowded, and multiuse
streets, she argues, results in a basic urban vitality that comes from city
users participation in an intricate “street ballet”. The result is a sense
of personal belonging and social cohesiveness, as well as increased safety
resulting from a kind of involved neighbourhood surveillance of public spaces,
or “eyes on the street” (Jacobs, 1961). Although Jacob’s emphasis in
The Death and Life of Great American Cities was social and economic, her ideas
on the importance on compact, mixed-use, transit oriented neighbourhoods have
obvious implications for the natural environment as well.
Over at least the last three decades,
there has been a paradigm shift in ideas on how to manage urban growth and
on the ideal structure and form of urban built environments. The principles
of mechanism, economism, and functionalism synonymous with modernism are being
challenged by more humanist and ecological principles based on diversity,
environmental preservation, and equity. As there is good evidence that urban
sustainability can be significantly enhanced by a more dense, diverse and
human scale urban form, the spatial design and organization of the urban built
environment is a central focus in efforts to foster urban sustainability.
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