Doug Farr presents “The Greening of Urban Design” March 17, 2009

By Tiffany Green

I had the pleasure of attending an event hosted by Park Pride, Livable Communities Coalition, APA Georgia and the Congress for the New Urbanism - Atlanta featuring Douglas Farr this week in Atlanta. Doug Farr is the founding principal and president of Farr Associates, an award-wining architecture and urban planning firm identified by the New York Times as "the most prominent of the city's cadre of ecologically sensitive architects." Farr Associates holds the unique distinction of being the first in the world to have designed three LEED Platinum buildings. Doug is on the board of the Congress of the New Urbanism, serves on the BioRegional Development Group board of directors, and was the founding chair of the LEED for Neighborhood Development project.

Doug Farr’s presentation on “The Greening of Urban Design” is a great primer on Sustainable Urbanism. He defines Sustainable Urbanism as:
Walkable transit served urbanism integrated with high performance buildings and high performance infrastructure.

Sustainable Urbanism is also the title of his seminal book that is a must read for everyone interested in this planet but especially students and elected officials in the short-term. I have been contemplating getting a LEED Certification during the last few weeks as I have attended a number of Green Industry events but I was not sure which one to study for and which would have the widest impact during this Green Revolution. Doug’s discussion solidified for me that the LEED-ND (Neighborhood Development) is the way to go based on my background and interest in policy, community engagement, education, architecture and design and also because he posed a strong question to us all regarding the “The Silos of Sustainability”. He asked whether we can make the systematic changes to our conduct by focusing just on green buildings and green technologies? Consider these facts that Doug shared:
• We are the first generation to have a reduction in life span compared to our parents.
• There will be 100,000,000 Americans by 2050
• We exceeded one “ecological footprint” in 1975. In the USA we presently consume the energy equivalent of 5 planets
• In California, 89% of the time children are indoors
• By age 25, the average American has spent one year in their car
• By 2025, we will drive approximately 1 light year or 5,865,696,000,000 miles. In 2000, US driving equaled 2,700,000,000,000 miles.
• There are 40,000 LEED professionals but only 800 LEED buildings
• From 1940 to 2000 Household size and density decreased from 3.5 persons to 2.7 persons versus square foot per house increasing from 1000 sf to 2000sf

We all still want to behave as we have but more efficiently yet the efficiency gains cannot keep pace with the construction of bigger and bigger homes with fewer people in them who want to consume more and more energy with their sedentary lifestyles. The increase in obesity of young children is another indicator that we cannot just add some green widgets on buildings and change all our light bulbs to become sustainable. We must change our behavior, land use policy and move towards settlement patterns that allow for getting our basic needs met through walking.

Doug’s challenge about “The Silos of Sustainability” is a hard and necessary question for us all. “Working on the problem within silos won’t get us there” as he passionately stated. Sustainable Urbanism can out compete sprawl by 2030 if we take a systematic approach. The solutions are going to take at least a generation or two to put into place. We need to start working on the hard problems first and then all the technology will follow. Presently, we are doing the reverse…we are changing our lightbulbs and driving Priuses but is that really having an impact on our quality of life? And too often elected officials and planning departments are not informed about sustainable designs so the green community design plans take years of fighting to get approval then years to build while many communities are increasingly calling for a more systematic approach to sustainability. As this past elected demonstrated, elected officials have got to get on board or get out of the way because we are running short on time, energy and dare I say, patience.

My own experience is also telling. It has been a difficult adjustment for me having moved from Minneapolis to Atlanta. In just 6 months, I have driven 10,000 miles and I work from home. I have a 97 Acura that had ~ 92,000 miles when I arrived in Atlanta. Now I am over 102,000 miles. Just two days ago, I needed to get my bike lubed up for the spring. I had to drive 14 miles to the nearest bike shop. Now I guess that may be typical but it should not be and cannot be typical going into the future. I would like to move into the city soon because I would prefer to walk, bike and take transit. I did a little research about Clayton County where I live and its bus system and was floored to learn that the buses do not begin running until 7am and then they stop at 7pm. This posed a couple of questions, how can a county promote itself for economic development in this day and age when people are dependent on cars? and how can you get to a job by transit if they do not run until 7am? This is especially challenging in a county whose school district lost accreditation, has excessive foreclosures and reduction in property value by ~25% in the last year. It's still a great place to live and many counties and cities are facing similar challenges as we move toward Sustainable Urbanism.

Doug suggested the following as tenets of world domination of sustainable urbanism:
1. Establishing weights and measures to make sustainable urbanism a commodity
• We need more media attention on community development and the “soft stuff” such as outreach and changing behavior.

*It took about 8 years to make smoking passé because of media messaging (HINT, HINT) **Amsterdam’s tagline is “Living more Driving less”

2. To reverse climate changing sprawl a reversal of code regulations is required. We must replace minimums with maximums and make use of “form based coding” which takes the written zoning code and revamps it to emphasize visual diagrams and forms of buildings over the uses inside. It will increase public understanding and create better buy-in.

3. Creating a national campaign for Sustainable Urbanism to run parallel to the 2030 Architecture Challenge to create carbon neutral buildings.

“Once driving became excessive, the value of design and architecture diminished” Doug Farr

*Audio quality is okay but you can hear the presentation.
Doug Farr Presentation Part 1
Doug Farr Presentation Part 2