I spent a lot of time thinking about the Mueller development a few weeks ago (considering a blog post that hasn’t materialized yet), and one of the main themes I kept coming back to was incremental improvement vs systemic redesign.  In the context of urban development, the former essentially means making modest (although not necessarily insignificant) changes to the existing development paradigm, while the former means completely rethinking the system from the ground up, from the financing model to the energy systems to the interactions between tenants. Mueller is clearly in the incremental improvement camp, and viewed from that perspective it is a highly successful project; the developers and designers have done an excellent job of adding ‘green’ features where it’s easy, pushing the typical building style towards something more sustainable and bringing as many stakeholders on board as possible (the city, neighborhoods, big box retailers, community organizations, etc).  Mueller is about as successful an example of ‘New Urbanism’ as you could imagine.

I mention this because there was a post a few days ago on WorldChanging titled “57 Million Chances to Get Housing Right”, discussing the potential impact of substituting sustainable developments for typical developments over the next few years:

he National Research Council’s Transportation Research Board calculated the greenhouse gas savings if new housing was more compact and put homes close to jobs and other amenities. “Driving and the Built Environment:  Effects of Compact Development on Motorized Travel, Energy Use, and CO2 Emission,” a report requested by Congress and published last week, determined that 57 million US homes will be needed by 2030 to accommodate population growth and replacement housing. … So what are the benefits to the climate? According to this study, they were fairly modest. Assuming:

• 75 percent of development is compact…
• leads to residents driving 25 percent less…
• the result is vehicle miles traveled, fuel use, and CO2 emissions of new and existing households would decline up to 8 percent by 2030, increasing to up to 11 percent by 2050.

In order to achieve more substantial progress, a second report identifies 4 primary ‘roadblocks’:

1. Inadequate infrastructure: a lack of public transit, insufficient, or aging utilities, and under-performing schools in city centers and other areas that are prime locations for sustainable development.
2. An uncertain regulatory process: myriad local government requirements, planning and zoning restrictions, fire and other code limitations, extensive project-specific environmental review processes, and local opposition (“no growth” advocates and unhappy neighbors).
3. Higher economic costs: a typically more expensive construction process, longer permitting time, and additional infrastructure burdens make sustainable development in existing neighborhoods less economically competitive than constructing in undeveloped areas.
4. Skewed tax incentives: local governments prefer to permit large single-use retail buildings to maximize sales tax revenue and minimize infrastructure costs, rather than mixed-use development.

And this is why I mention the incremental/systemic issue; a thousand new urbanist developments like Mueller won’t make half as much impact as a few systemic changes.  Our systems were not built to promote sustainable cities, and the first thing you learn in economics is that incentives matter.  In order to implement the massive changes which are needed in our built environment, we need to fundamentally restructure the incentives which influence them.  As helpful as Mueller and it’s type of development are, they are struggling against multiple systems which undervalue such developments.

In the short term, systemic change may be as difficult to implement as massive incremental changes, but from the perspective of a developer or designer who is hoping to generate change there is one key difference between incremental and systemic proposals; systemic proposals at a small scale can become models for new systems at larger scales.  The data above shows that applying ‘New Urbanism’ universally is an inadequate solution; it is an insufficient model for systemic change.  What we need are new perspectives capable of fundamentally reducing our energy consumption and encouraging long-term planning by individuals, proposals that not only take advantage of higher-quality infrastructure but supplement it as well, proposals which are not only profitable, but which encourage business practices which will be sustainable in the long term.  In my opinion, even a modestly successful proposal which addresses these aspirations is more valuable than another highly successful New Urbanist development.

It looks like there was an interesting late submission to the Re:Vision Dallas competition by Little Diversified Architectural Consulting, which seems to address a lot of the ideas we were hoping to integrate into our own proposal; there’s extensive green space, an attempt to create a diversity of experience and address the issue of verticality, and a decent amount of systems thinking.  They seem to be using fairly well-understood systems (greywater treatment, PV panels, green roofs etc), but it’s at least nice to see more people presenting these elements as a central aspect of a design proposal.

More eye candy after the break

I posted earlier about the development process, trying to express some ideas that have been floating around the office regarding how buildings are financed, designed, and built.  What was lacking from that post was any consideration of what happens once the building has been built.  As builders, architects tend to think of buildings as artifacts, objects to be photographed and admired.  This approach ignores the reality that architecture is an element in the dynamic process of human society.

Stepping back to consider architecture as a process allows us to consider a much wider variety of concerns; the lifetime cost of building maintenance, the environmental impact of powering the building, the cultural flows that the building mediates, etc.  Let me touch on a couple such topics before getting into any ideas about how things might be improved.

One of the biggest shocks I had after graduating from architecture school and working in an office was that architects don’t generally work at the same scale as we’re trained to in school.  My design eduction emphasized creatively approaching a site and considering what mix of uses would be appropriate, investigating demographic trends, exploring how architecture can influence cultural development, and proposing new types of build environments.  It quickly became clear that most architectural firms do little or none of that; they are hired essentially to provide window-dressing for a project which is dictated primarily by either a developer’s market analysis or an institution’s project brief.  While there are plenty of counter-examples, the majority of buildings seem to be built in a system in which the architect is not the primary decision-maker as to what should be built.

The development ecosystem has become defined by a couple primary actors; clients, developers, investors, institutions, builders and regulatory agencies.  Decisions as to what should be built is made by these actors, then architects and engineers are commissioned to implement these decisions.  I see a lot of benefits to this ecosystem, it is good at responding to market forces, partitions risk to appropriate parties, and works well in the free-market economy.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t do a great job of addressing objectives which are not easily monetized; coherent communities, sustainable building practices, innovation and others.  My feeling is that to change the outcomes of development, we must first change the ecosystem in which development occurs.

From worldchanging:

Existence is the ultimate proof of the possible. Every time a bold new project is tried, and works, we advance our sense of the achievable. Given how much transformation we need in order to meet the challenges we face, we need many more attempts at innovation, and we’re not getting them. The achievable is not advancing quickly enough.

…

In his recent Long Now talk (MP3 here), economist Paul Romer tells a story. In the early 1970s, China was stuck in a societal inertia after the death of Mao. However, right next door, Hong Kong (administered by the British) was a thriving city-state based on trade and innovative manufacturing. Chinese leaders decided to see if they could copy Hong Kong’s success on a limited scale, and set up four “Special Economic Zones” where foreign investment was encouraged and capitalism was unconstrained. The experiments were so successful economically that their rules soon more or less became the guiding principles of the Chinese miracle. As Romer says, “Hong Kong was the most successful economic development program in history.”

In many ways, the Global North is as hamstrung in the face of bright green challenges as China was in the face of capitalism. What if the answer is a sustainability and social innovation equivalent of China’s answers: a sort of “Special Innovation Zone”?

Imagine a place — perhaps a shrinking city, or a badly savaged brownfield neighborhood — where laws were set up to strip rules and regulations down to a do-no-harm minimum (maintaining criminal laws and protecting health, safety, workers’ rights and civil liberties, but perhaps limiting liability and certainly slashing red tape and delays) allowing for wild deviations from existing patterns for buildings, systems and operations. Imagine a free-fire zone for sustainable innovations, where new approaches could be iterated and tested rapidly, and, when they work, sent to proliferate outside the Zone. Conversely, some of the freedom might paradoxically come from imposing boundary limitations that can’t yet be made practical or survive politically outside the Zone, such as bans on broad classes of chemicals or strict greenhouse gas emissions limits.

There’s also an interesting comment from Sean FitzGerald:

And now I realise why I find WorldChanging so frustrating.

The biggest barriers to social innovation are values, belief systems and world views.

Until you have a transformation of consciousness at all levels of society – individual, community, business and government – those institutional, legal and regulatory barriers will stay in place.

WorldChanging keeps pumping out innovative technologies, processes and systems and all I can think is: “Great, but it will never be implemented in time to save civilisation unless *we* change.”

…

I keep hearing from the technological optimists “All we need to do is swap out oil-based transport for electrified transport” or “All we need to do is retrofit our urban environments into paragons of sustainability” or now, “All we need to do is change the regulations that are holding innovation back”.

But it’s not “All we need to do.” You skip right over the very important step of having to change people first (or concurrently, at least). Until we change people’s values the latest, greatest sustainability-enhancing widget, technological breakthrough or grand social plan will stay on the drawing board.

To which ‘Brad’ comments:

True, Sean, the institutional, legal and regulatory barriers Alex describes derive from values, belief systems and world views, and it is those that need to change.However, in order to change those, you need to be able to propose a constructive vision based on differing world views by way of example.

Which gets to the heart of why this seems like an interesting idea to me; it allows the development of new models.  I see a lot of potential pitfalls here, most of the ‘restrictive’ building codes cities adopt are responding to catastrophic failures in the past – throwing these out opens the door to all sorts of unanticipated consequences.  The chinese free zones that are mentioned had one enormous benefit; they were duplicating a model which had already been tried and shown to work.

After watching ‘Up’, some enterprising people over at Deputy Dog went and found a set of images of houses stuck in the middle of development sites.

Not sure what to say about these – I just find them amusing.

After reading Tom’s post and thinking about it a little, I started to wonder what would be the best way to go about participating in the recent spirit of change.  The traditional way to do this is to join a PAC or an industry group or give money to representatives in hopes of securing some access.  But that was before the internet.

Lawrence Lessig is a professor at Stanford, and has been one of the guiding influences in the copyleft movement.  He’s recently stopped working on intellectual property issues (he hates that term btw) and has started focusing on the influence of money on politics (a nice way of saying pervasive corruption).  His primary tools of influence?  Web pages.

His first page is Change Congress, a home base of sorts for people interested in dealing with the corruption issue.  It’s mostly a quick way for people to register their support, make dontations and get their representative’s contact info.

More recently, he’s started OpenGovernment.org, which seems to be aimed at persuading the new administration to use technology to open the governing process to the public as much as possible.

Obama’s campaign itself has been an excellent example of how the internet can facilitate grassroots movements – it was designed to be highly interactive and to facilitate irl meetings between supporters while providing easily accessible information regarding ‘the cause’.  After the election he put up the cleverly named Change.gov which I haven’t spent much time looking over, but seems to be an attempt to transform the vibrant campaign web community into some form of governing community.

So where am I going with all this?  The internet provides an ideal method to integrate advocacy, petitioning, community organizing and fundraising.  If we can develop a concise and attractive message, it should be extremely easy to get that message out.  Why limit ourselves to local representatives when we can work at multiple scales simultaneously?

I mentioned the Big Picture Blog in an earlier post, and when I went to see what they had posted lately, found a wonderful set of photos of Dubai.  Dubai is such a surreal place, I just hope it doesn’t end up looking like this in 50 years.

Skyscrapers intersperced with the original urban fabric