Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design with Nature

By Douglas Farr

John Wiley & Sons, 2007, 304 pp., $75 hardcover

Americans love to celebrate “our robust range of life choices,” Chicago architect and urban designer Douglas Farr writes in this potentially important book. We express satisfaction about “being able to pick where we work, whom we live with, where we shop, and how we play” — all the while failing to deal with the obesity epidemic, global warming, and many other unhealthy trends. “Our lifestyle, to put it simply, is on the wrong course,” Farr declares.

Farr’s response — Sustainable Urbanism — is one of many books laying out remedies. What makes his volume stand out is that it combines expertise in New Urbanism with a thorough understanding of environmental issues and techniques.

The past dozen years have produced a spate of books about how to create communities that are sociable, comfortable to get around in, and physically attractive. They’ve also generated numerous books about “green” design. Farr, who has chaired the committee that devised the US Green Building Council’s LEED-Neighborhood Development rating system, weaves together both of these crucial threads. The result is the most comprehensive, technically informed volume available on how to design and build places that are environmentally responsible and also gratifying to inhabit.

Part One presents “the case for sustainable urbanism” and offers hope that a “grand unification” of urbanism and green design is at hand. Farr defines the new synthesis, sustainable urbanism, as “walkable and transit-served urbanism integrated with high-performance buildings and high-performance infrastructure.” This sounds on the mark; it reflects recent progress by America’s most ambitious new urbanist practitioners.

Part Two presents “the process and tools for implementing sustainable urbanism.” Here the going gets slower. Farr’s book may attract some general readers, but in this section the array of techniques and methods is formidable — a lot for anyone to  absorb. It explores image preference surveys, charrettes, a “Smart Neighborhood Analysis Protocol” from Toledo, Ohio, a “sustainable city plan” from Santa Monica, California, a regulating plan and form-based code, incorporation of sustainability into codes, covenants, and restrictions, and an RFP for a sustainable urbanist developer. All of these are useful subjects, but they have the effect of turning the book into an encyclopedia or a reference volume — something a person dips into here and there rather reading from cover to cover.

Part Three, “Emerging Thresholds of Sustainable Urbanism,” looks at how to increase density and how to explain and illustrate it. Raising density in urban areas while protecting countryside is an imperative the US will have to embrace if the nation is to accommodate tens of millions more people without disrupting the environment. This section is packed with discussions of transit-supportive densities, car-free housing, biodiversity corridors, neighborhood layout, “third places,” economic benefits of locally-owned stores, Complete Streets, management of travel demand, car sharing, indoor and outdoor wastewater treatment, district energy systems — and more. It’s nothing short of daunting. Some of the topics are essential, but I felt overwhelmed. I wished Farr had stuck to a simple, more basic approach: telling the reader how to generate development that is both urbanistic and environmentally sound. A number of the techniques seem related to urbanism or to ecology but not to both.

Part Four consists of case studies — lessons learned from built infill and built greenfield development and information about infill and greenfield projects that have not yet been constructed and in some cases may never be. It surprised me that one of the built greenfield projects profiled in this section is Civano, in Tucson, Arizona. Civano is described as “a good example of the results achieved when a project is able to capitalize on a sustainable design-friendly political climate.”

Granted, Civano’s first neighborhood, master-planned by Moule & Polyzoides with Duany Plater-Zyberk and Wayne Moody, blends urbanism with desert ecology. However, the author’s hope that “the original Civano standard will be upheld” in later neighborhoods is at odds with the dilution that has already occurred. A development team committed to New Urbanism was dismissed in 2002, and new urbanist ideas were largely abandoned by Civano’s subsequent developers.

Nevertheless, the case studies as a whole are fascinating. After 200 pages on every conceivable ingredient of sustainable urbanism, the reader gets to see the results of combining New Urbanism and green techniques — at BedZED in London, England; Glenwood Park in Atlanta; the Holiday neighborhood in Boulder, Colorado, Christie Walk and Newington in Australia; High Point in Seattle; and elsewhere.

Jump-start for reform
More than three dozen contributors, many of them prominent in New Urbanism, contributed essays to the book. Farr says his objective is “to jump-start this reform movement of the built environment” and make sustainable urbanism “the means to shift the American lifestyle toward sustainability over time.”
The green movement and New Urbanism are both on the rise, so perhaps his hopes will be rewarded.

Sustainable Urbanism — if its mammoth range of topics does not deter readers — could go a long way toward cementing an alliance between the two camps. Though the contents are a lot to digest, the book could spur environmentalists to focus more on settlement patterns — a crucial issue for our future.

Some European countries are far ahead of us, mandating many of the practices this book advocates, as Farr points out in an epilogue. The time is ripe, he insists, for the US to “adopt sustainable urbanism as our generation’s moon shot.”