27 May 2008
Grand Coalition Can Back Sustainable Neighborhoods
Part two of an interview with Douglas Farr, architect and urban designer
Washington -- Douglas Farr, an architect and urban designer, is the founder and president of Farr Associates, a Chicago-based firm focused on sustainable design in architecture and urban design. He has served as co-chair of the Environmental Task Force of the Congress for the New Urbanism, chair of the American Institute of Architects Chicago Committee on the Environment, and chair of the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Neighborhood Development Core Committee.
Farr recently published a book, Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design with Nature.
Following are excerpts from an April 9, 2008, interview with Farr. In the first part of the interview, he said sustainable urbanism aims to create compact, walkable and transit-served settlements with energy- and water-efficient buildings and infrastructure so the location is more friendly to the environment. (See "Sustainable Urbanism Responds to Market Needs.")
Question: Sustainable neighborhoods are more costly to build than traditional ones, aren’t they?
Farr: When you design a green building you can spend differently the same amount of dollars a traditional building would cost and get a much better outcome. Sometimes, you have to pay premium though. But then you are confident that you will get a building that uses less energy or water or both, and that you can recoup your premium over the life of the building or earlier.
When you design and build a sustainable settlement you can spend more or less money on particular components, shift things around and deliver a design that meets a buyer's budget expectations. But the cost-benefit analysis also must include public benefits. The ultimate goal of green buildings is to become autonomous units: to produce and reuse resources rather than gulp electricity and public resources. This in turn creates opportunities for utilities and public services to downsize. Those opportunities increase greatly when you design an entire sustainable urban system.
Q: How do you expect to overcome obstacles --- resistance from policymakers, developers and entrenched business interests?
Farr: The green building movement as a pioneer provides a model for how to think about sustainable urbanism. Building suppliers, shippers, carriers and other businesses haven’t opposed green buildings. Many large companies have been members of the U.S. Green Building Council from the beginning.
What we need to do is to identify who the moneymakers are under the current system and show them opportunities sustainable urbanism can create. So I think there is potential for a grand coalition. Sustainable urban development is the biggest economic opportunity we have ever seen. Europe and California have proved that you can care about the environment and expand the economy at the same time.
Q: What needs to be done to get more people excited about sustainable urbanism?
Farr: I chair the LEED for Neighborhood Development of the U.S. Green Building Council, which works on the first-ever sustainable land development standards. We finished writing a draft of the rating system in 2007 and called for pilot projects to test those standards. We have received proposals concerning more than 300 U.S., Canadian and Chinese projects. So it is clear there is a lot of interest in sustainable neighborhoods.
Sustainable projects come together when you have a municipality or another unit of government championing the idea, a developer who sees the potential for a market distinction and a planning and design architectural team that is out to prove something. So those projects require commitments from several players.
One way to get people more excited is the 2030 architectural challenge, which aims at dramatic reduction by 2030 in carbon [dioxide] emissions through new ways of planning, designing and constructing buildings and developments. We would like to develop similar challenge for miles traveled by vehicles.
Q: It seems that sustainable urbanism is, to a large degree, about constraints and impositions.
Farr: The more you attend to meeting certain constraints and impositions related to sustainable urban development, the more you improve the overall economy, public health and people’s welfare. What sustainable urbanism promises are lives lived more locally and more in harmony with nature.
