At the same time, the USA has over a billion car-parks, and the number of miles driven per person is increasing every year. So we learn from this that sustainable urban and transport planning does not just affect the environment but public health as well.
Until recently, Douglas Farr, an architect and town planner from Chicago, was chairman of the LEED for Neighborhood Development Projects for four years. This is a committee that has devised guidelines and criteria for sustainable urban development in the USA. The wealth of figures, facts and concrete instructions for action that makes his book relate closely to practice derives from his experience in this post. The basic assumption that our housing estates and cities have to become more sustainable is actually no longer news for European town planners and local politicians. But Farr says that this is completely different in the USA: the concept of sustainable development has never been really fully defined in the USA before, nor has a set of instruments for implementing it been devised. And this is precisely what the author sets out to do: he does not just define objectives and transparent criteria for sustainable urban development, but also proposes concrete steps for putting it into practice.
Sustainable Urbanism is aimed at the situation in the USA, but it is still of interest to European readers: Farr succeeds in presenting the enormous challenge the largest economy in the world is facing in all its complexity. Andrés Duany, the doyen of American New Urbanism, also compares Sustainable Urbanism with Christopher Alexander’s ground-breaking book A Pattern Language. Duany asserts that both represent the same holistic approach to seeing the city as a tissue of architectural and infrastructural patterns on all levels of scale.
Farr’s ideas are also greatly inspired by the ideals of New Urbanism; catchwords like mixed use, density and walkable neighbourhoods constantly crop up in the book. And yet Farr criticises New Urbanism because of its limited scope and its tendency to elitism. He also ascribes similar weaknesses to the existing standards of efficiency in the American building industry, and above all to the ‘Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design’, which has existed since 1996. The initiative is omnipresent in the media, and there are already over 40,000 LEED-accredited planners. But ten years after the start, the number of LEED-certified buildings was still under 1,000. Giving the USA’s annual new volume of 150,000 buildings, this is no more than the veritable drop in the ocean. Farr also points out that, so far, the LEED criteria have focused only on individual buildings, and taken no urban development criteria into account.
Farr’s book argues for an integrated view, covering all aspects of urban development from user involvement in the planning process to road-building and legal regulation of land ownership. Farr is also aware that it will not be possible to change course from one day to the next. He writes, “It took over two generations to create climate-changing sprawl and the interlocking system of finance, land use, transportation, and infrastructure necessary to perpetuate it.”
Sustainable Urbanism consists of four chapters. In the first, Farr defines the criteria of sustainable development and devises a strategy for implementing it. The two following sections explore this in greater depth in about 40 contributions by guest authors. Then the final chapter presents 20 case studies of sustainable building projects in America, Europe, Asia and Australia. Here classical instances of ‘New Urbanism’ like Poundbury in England are set alongside quite un-ideological planning like the Kronsberg district of Hanover. This suggests that urban development will also use quite different images in future in order to give people a home. But style debates and design fashions have very little to do with sustainability. So it is about time less attention was paid to them and more to addressing ourselves to the essentials - again.