Sustainable and Resilient Communities: A Comprehensive Action Plan for Towns, Cities, and Regions

418 Pages·2011·42.53 MB·English

by  Stephen J. Coyle

SUSTAINABLE
AND
RESILIENT COMMUNITIES
A Comprehensive Action Plan for Towns, Cities, and Regions
STEPHEN COYLE
Foreword by Andrés Duany
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SUSTAINABLE
AND
RESILIENT COMMUNITIES
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SUSTAINABLE
AND
RESILIENT COMMUNITIES
A Comprehensive Action Plan for Towns, Cities, and Regions
STEPHEN COYLE
Foreword by Andrés Duany
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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Copyright © 2011 by Stephen Coyle. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Sustainable and resilient communities : a comprehensive action plan for towns,
cities, and regions / [edited by] Stephen Coyle.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-470-53647-6 (cloth : acid-free paper); 978-0-470-91872-2 (ebk); 978-0-470-91873-9 (ebk);
978-0-470-91874-6 (ebk); 978-0-470-95022-7 (ebk)
1. City planning--Environmental aspects. 2. Regional planning--
Environmental aspects. 3. Community development, Urban—Environmental
aspects. 4. Sustainable urban development. 5. Sustainable development. I.
Coyle, Stephen.
HT166.S9125 2011
307.1’2—dc22
2010025646
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Contents
Foreword vii ACTION Sheets
Legal Impediments Survey—Dan Slone 129
Acknowledgments ix
Transfer of Development Rights
—Rick Pruetz 133
Introduction xi
The SmartCode—Sandy Sorlien 137
GHG Emissions Inventory and Forecast
Chapter 1 The Built Environments and Its —Daniel Dunigan and Dana Perls 141
Supporting Systems 1
Defi ning the Built Environment 1 Chapter 5 Transportation 145
Defi ning the Supporting Systems 2 Sustainable Transportation and Transit
The Two Fundamental Types of Built Planning—Strategies for Comprehensive
Environments 3 Regional Transportation Plans and Transit-
Oriented Development
The Two Fundamental Types of Supporting
—Sam Zimbabwe 145
Systems 13
An Incremental Approach: Developing a Long-
Chapter 2 The Process of Transformation 25 Term Comprehensive Regional Transportation
Plan—Trent Lethco 159
Sustainable Plan-Making 25
ACTION Sheets
The Plan-Making Steps 25
Transportation for Livable Communities
—Sam Zimbabwe 165
Chapter 3 The Physical Built Environment 59
Transit-Oriented Development
Sustainable Community Commerce
—Sam Zimbabwe 168
—Seth Harry 59
Spectrum of Change Tool Trent Lethco 171
Building Sustainable Communities:
Parking—When Less Is More
The Ecological Toolkit—Michael Mehaffy 68
—Norman Garrick and
Bioclimatic Building Design
—Wesley Marshall 176
—Erin Cubbinson 77
Green Streetscapes for Local Streets
ACTION Sheets
—Paul Crabtree 180
A Sustainable Commercial Framework
Multimodal Network and Connectivity
—Seth Harry 86
Planning Program—Jim Daisa 185
Neighborhood Resource Center
—Michael Mehaffy 90 Chapter 6 Energy 189
Green Renovation—Gaither Pratt 93
The Energy Shift—Jon Roberts 189
Attainable and Resilient Housing
ACTION Sheets
—Sara Hines 96
Awareness for Communities about the
Environment—Cyane Dandridge 201
Chapter 4 The Regulatory Environment 101
Housing Energy Program—Cyane Dandridge
Sustainability Planning and the Law
205
—Dan Slone 101
Energy Effi ciency and Renewable Energy in
Transforming the Built Environment Through
New Building Design
Form-Based Coding—Stephen Coyle 114
—Jeannie Renne-Malone 209
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Chapter 7 Water 213 Chapter 11 Economics 321
Stormwater Management—Light Imprint Sustainable Economic Development:
Development The Longer View
—Duany Plater-Zyberk and Company 213 —Dave Leland and Chris Zahas 321
Decentralized Wastewater Management A Sustainable Return on Investment
—Eric Lohan with Will Kirksy 227 —John Williams 332
ACTION Sheets ACTION Sheets
Regional Watershed Management Planning Downtown Revitalization
—Paul Crabtree 239 —Dave Leland and Chris Zahas 342
Chapter 8 Natural Environment 243 Chapter 12 Engagement and Education 345
Sustainable Landscaping—John Harris 243 Creating and Managing Sustainability
ACTION Sheets for a Municipality—Susan J. Daluddung
Sustainable Landscaping: Building Green 345
Assets—Katie O’Reilly Rogers 255
ACTION Sheets
Plant *SF—Jane Martin 260
Green Your Ride—Susan J. Daluddung
A Diversifi ed Carbon Sequestration and
352
Cellulosic Biofuels Program
—Daniel Dunigan 264
Chapter 13 Public Health 357
Chapter 9 Food Production/Agriculture 269 Ambient Outdoor Air Quality: Community
Health—Anthony Bernheim 357
Sustainable Food Systems—Lynn Peemoeller 269
ACTION Sheets A Holistic Public Health Approach
—Karen Mendrala 370
Urban Orchards—Lynn Peemoeller 284
Urban Agriculture—Raoul Adamchak 287 ACTION Sheets
Urban Edge Agricultural Parks Creating Healthier Communities Through
—Sibella Kraus 291 Policy Change—Karen Shore 380
Chapter 10 Solid Waste 295
Sustainable Materials Management
Appendix 383
—Daniel T. Sicular 295
ACTION Sheets
Home Composting—Daniel T. Sicular 309 Endnotes 391
Commercial and Institutional Recycling:
Targeting the Top Waste Producers
Contributors 394
—Daniel T. Sicular 313
GHG Emissions Benefi ts of Recycling and
Organics Management—Jeff Caton 316 Index 398
vi Contents
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Foreword
THIS BOOK IS NOT a silver bullet. It does not offer the magic shot that cannot
miss—and for that we must be grateful.
Steve Coyle takes urbanism very seriously indeed. He and his colleagues do
not underestimate the patient and skillful work that must be done to recover our
lost cities and their dismal suburbs, and by so doing salvage what remains of our
natural areas. It is the distinct absence of shortcuts that gives me confi dence that
the advice provided here will actually be effective.
The lifestyle of the American middle class—how we occupy our land, how
we circulate, and how large we live—defi es easy solutions. We endure brutal com-
mutes and drive even short distances. To buy petroleum we have effectively shov-
eled overseas the accumulated wealth of three centuries, the only permanent result
being the impoverishment of our citizens and the polluting of our environment. We
have mitigated for the absence of neighborhood and public realm by building re-
tirement villages and Disney Worlds. What good are silver bullets against this mon-
strous stupidity?
Despite generous allocations of hope, money and political will, most cities and
their surrounding countryside have declined. Conventional wisdom assumes causes
that range from misgovernment to disinvestment, inattention, and incapacity for
vision to just plain bad luck. Not so! Generations of professional consultants offered
their very inventive ideas and too often, alas, their plans were implemented. Recent
American planning is not the conventional historiography of a sequence of planners
intelligent proposals that were tragically ignored. Actually, it consists of the dutiful
implementation of their simpleminded recommendations. The people and the gov-
ernment did their job—it was the planners who failed them.
To explain my aversion to any simplistic proposal, it is enough to list the
catastrophic sequence of ideas that has constituted remedial urbanism for the past
seven decades. Most of these have proven to be either duds mercifully forgotten or
spectacular backfi res, the consequences of which are still quite visibly undermining
our society.
Chronologically the fi rst and also the worst was the imposition of single-use
zoning: the notion that the separation of the places where we dwell from those
where we shop and those where we work was necessary. The resultant cartoon of
urbanism requires an immense amount of public subsidy to provide the roads and
services and an even larger amount of private capital to assure that every adult has
an automobile and its fuel. Nothing has ever equaled zoning in idiocy, but there are
close contenders. Among these was the rather large mistake of rerouting of the in-
terstate system through the cities, in defi ance of President Eisenhower’s conception
that high-speed highways should skirt the urban areas. Each highway extension
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reamed out the delicate urban fabric, eased the escape into the suburbs, and spread
dependence on the automobile.
Then, close upon that mistake came the HUD program that demolished and
replaced “slum” neighborhoods with superblocks of town houses and high-rises
and the promise of “greenery, light and air.” The resulting social damage is nearly
incalculable. Then, apparently to raise our spirits and distract us from things going
wrong, along came the festive space needles topped by rotating restaurants (now
usually closed); then came the sports stadiums, many now obsolescent, the hulking
convention centers and dont forget the aquariums, all of which are still losing mon-
ey today. There were also the trashy public plazas and river walks, empty except
during the festivals that artifi cially induce attendance. The “pedestrianized” main
streets that emulate suburban malls, of which almost two hundred desiccated their
shops and have already been ripped out. There then came the defeatist secessions
from the inner city: the indoor “Rouse” malls, today depressingly downmarket and
the equally dowdy underground passages and elevated bridges, now used only un-
der threat of climatic extremes. Even the ultimate silver bullets, the Olympics and
the World’s Fairs, would now be utterly forgotten but for the lingering physical and
fi nancial holes that are their legacy to the host cities.
But what about the “Bilbao Effect,” that famous attempt to recreate the Gug-
genheim Museum that put that unknown Spanish City on the map? Unknown to
whom? Only to those ignorant of Spain. The charlatans who still propose “starchi-
tecture” always fail to point out that Bilbao was already a very livable, prosperous,
sophisticated and beautiful city before the Guggenheim landed. The building did
alert the world to the fact, but that is all it did. A new “Bilbao” in, say, dismal Phoe-
nix, would have had no effect at all. Most subsequent “Bilbaos” have not lived up
to their billing as “catalytic projects.” A good city supports a cultural institution and
not vice-versa. Even small benevolent interventions like the now popular subsi-
dized “artist’s housing” do little beyond putting roofs over the artists’ heads.
The same goes for ubiquitous “open space” projects—the current darling
High Line in New York attracted pedestrians not alone for its terrifi c design, but
because it is embedded in the superb and affl uent urban fabric of Manhattan. Else-
where, scores of highly designed new parks stand quasi-abandoned because of the
lack of supporting urban context.
The effect of such projects on their cities has been no greater than the ancient
cave paintings of antelopes on the next day’s hunt.
But enough wishful thinking! Enough pushing silver bullets on hopeful
municipalities! Wherever planning has succeeded, it has involved the patient re-
weaving of the urban fabric into whole cloth: socially, physically, economically,
and administratively. That is what makes the difference, and that is precisely
what this book is about.
ANDRÉS DUANY
viii Foreword
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