Tuesday: Unity and Sustainability

This lecture was by Doug Farr, who heads Farr Associates, the firm that is conducting a review of our zoning codes. Des Plaines will be very fortunate if this kind of thoughtful design makes it to our streets.

Tuesday: Unity and Sustainability

via Time Tells by vmichael on 4/29/09

...and then it was back downtown for Doug Farr's lecture on Sustainable Urbanism, which was well worth it. He has written the book on the subject and over the last dozen years has built a practice that stresses not only green designed buildings and historic preservation, but the "integrated design" of the new planning, which stresses a systemic analysis of buildings, landscape, and human conduct. His biggest point is that we are still used to thinking about sustainability and green as a product choice, when in fact technology in all its marvel can only accomplish half of the goal. The other half must come from altered human conduct. And humans are problematic. You produce a more efficient car, and humans drive it more. Produce a more efficient house, we make it bigger. The net gain in terms of emissions, energy use, etc. ends up being nothing. Doug showed a funny slide from The Onion newspaper where the headline said a majority of Americans favored public transit for other people. It is like building highways - the more you build, the more they drive. Farr's goal is to get us driving like we were in 1970 - maybe 4,000 miles a year. Driving was fun then. Now we drive over 10,000 miles a year and it is a chore. He compared it to drugs and alcohol - you do it a few times and it might be fun. You do it a bunch and it is a debilitating addiction....

And the way we design buildings is code-driven, which is ultimately lawsuit-driven. Our building codes are designed to protect people from fires and structural collapse, issues which affect a few thousand lives a year. Meanwhile, up to half a million people a year die from obesity - Americans add a pound a year after age 30. A simple walk to a train station or up a few flights of stairs could halt that trend. Again, Farr had a funny slide showing an escalator going up to a fitness center.

At any rate, Farr is a national leader at looking at the interrelationship of these issues. LEED began as a checklist for buildings and for the last five years Farr chaired LEED for Neighborhood Development, which is developing a more integrated approach to development that addresses these issues. The LEED ND guidelines have been studied by the Center for Disease Control and found to also promote more healthy living.

And there is a preservation angle as well. As we began to drive more, we devalued buildings and the landscape. Their details and appearance just didn't matter the faster you drove, and especially as driving became a chore and addiction rather than a treat and a joy. It isn't just that we devalued historic buildings - we devalued ALL buildings.