Richard Register of Ecocity Builders has created a rendering of the de-urbanization of now sprawling Denver, CO. TDR could help achieve this end with the benefit of reducing vehicle miles traveled and thus, carbon emissions and restoring needed farmland.

When local governments want to encourage density and prevent or undo suburban sprawl, one of their most powerful tools for doing so may be transfer of development rights (TDR) programs. The loss of farmland to suburban development and the subsequent loss of forest to farmland is a big piece of the climate change problem. TDR programs have the potential to become a major part of the solution both by increasing density and thus, decreasing vehicle miles traveled per person, and by preventing said deforestation.

How TDRs work
At first, a region may be completely devoted to agriculture. However, over time, as a region’s farms face development pressure from a growing urban area, pressure to develop makes preserving such farmlands economically inferior to developing the land. When left to traditional zoning, market pressure often causes low-density development, aka suburban sprawl.

At this point, regional government leaders can decide to preserve their agricultural spaces. Under traditional zoning the only option would be to tell some farmers that they cannot sell their land for development. Instead the government can institute a TDR program. Farmers in a less dense corner of the county can sell their development rights to builders in an area designated for more density.

Benefits
TDR programs are very useful because they offer landowners a way to recapture some lost economic value when a property is down-zoned from residential use to agricultural use for preservation purposes. TDR programs do not replace zoning, but a well-constructed TDR program reduces the demand for zoning variances, since developers will use the market to secure additional development rights.

TDRs also offer a way to fund development that is beneficial to an entire region using free market forces. As regions begin to address their greenhouse gas emissions, TDRs can play a vital role in increasing density and decreasing per capita emissions from vehicle miles traveled in a region. Moreover, developers benefit from the certainty that TDR programs offer around zoning laws. Instead of incurring the costs and risks of negotiating for variances, developers can exceed certain zoning regulations simply by purchasing development rights from other property owners.

While zoning rules can change over time and with new administrations, TDR programs discontinue development rights forever so that public values such as open space and historic buildings can be restored and permanently protected.

The Process
While TDR programs hold a lot of promise for reducing the farmland lost to suburban development each year (and the subsequent loss of forest to create more farmland), TDR programs only work in conjunction with strong zoning ordinances and good comprehensive planning. Building political consensus on zoning issues is always a challenge, but vitally important.

The Challenges
Successful TDR programs start with strong comprehensive plans. TDR programs may be more complicated and expensive to implement than traditional zoning, as local governments must oversee deed restrictions, easement documents and other related documents. Since successful programs require community buy-in, local governments must market the program to citizens, real estate professionals, lawyers, assessors and planners.

As parts of the U.S. like Flint, Michigan begin to de-urbanize, local governments may see new opportunities to use TDR programs to fight deforestation and sprawl and thus, climate change. While this process may not be as swift as Joseph Conrad’s invading jungle, it has the potential to solve many of our largest problems simultaneously.

Source: Jason Hanly-Forde, George Homsy, Katherine Lieberknecht, Remington Stone, Cornell University

Freiburg is known as an ecocity. The newly built neighbourhoods of Vauban and Rieselfeld were developed and built according to the idea of sustainability. The citizens of Freiburg are known in Germany for their love of cycling and recycling.

This past December, as climate talks in Copenhagen commenced, I sat in talks in Istanbul listening to local government representatives, building professionals and academics discuss concrete actions that can and have been taken to reduce greenhouse gases in cities around the world. The 8th annual Ecocity World Summit posed a compelling alternative to the fights and frustrations that mired the climate talks of Copenhagen in conflict. Cities represent about 75% of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, and the birth of the “eoocity” concept a few decades ago may have marked the beginning of our most tangible solution yet. From recycling, wastewater treatment and green building to smart urban planning, public transit and renewable energy generation, ecocity plans and ideas have emerged with a list of seemingly “no-brainer” action items to pursue.

While in theory, the “ecocity” may seem like a very straightforward concept, in practice the challenges prove tough to transcend. The urban and suburban sprawl that plagues regions in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand may seem like an almost insurmountable barrier to reducing carbon emissions. However, in Istanbul, a city of 13 million and growing, sprawl is compounded by the fact that much of the development is unplanned. This is also true for other mega-cities like Rio de Janeiro where families often add stories to their own homes, creating unsound structures that may collapse during natural disasters. Such unplanned settlements also make it difficult to create underground tunnels for a metro system, as there may be no record of where gas and electricity lines run underground. Traffic and a lack of environmental practices like wastewater treatment are also a major issue for such megacities.

Historical considerations also present challenges, as the rich cultural heritage of ancient cities demands a certain authenticity of design. Moreover, as cities like Istanbul go to dig tunnels for eco-features like an underground metro, they may discover archeological treasures that force them to stop digging.

In modern cities of intense density like Hong Kong, Tei Pei, and Singapore, a lack of space to erect renewable power generation and urban farming operations create challenges to meeting energy and food demands without importing food and energy. In many developing nations, a lack of laws to regulate pollution and a lack of enforcement for existing environmental laws also create little incentive to move towards renewable energy. Some regions lack the resources to produce renewable energy, forcing them to make a decision between a local energy economy and a clean energy economy.

Approaches to creating an ecocity to solve these problems vary. According to Elizabeth Rapoport of the University College of London, there are three main categories of ecocities. Ecovillages, such as Cerro Gordo in the U.S. are small pastoral communities. Masterplanned ecocities such as Tianjin, China and Masdar, Abu Dabi, are new cities that incorporate ecological principles from day one. Models in already retrofitted ecocities like Curitiba, Brazil and Freiburg, Germany have the greatest potential to transform the already developed world, where builders and planners will have to make improvements on the existing infrastructure and building stock. Taking lessons from other more advanced cities will be an important step in the process if cities want to avoid reinventing the wheel. Conversely, avoiding some of the mistakes that more established cities have made will be crucial for nascent cities in the developing world.

The term “ecocity,” like other trendy terms including “green” and “sustainable” will likely be the subject of abuse over the coming years and decades. While there is no one-size-fits-all solution for the cities of the world, the sooner the international community comes together to define an ecocity that really does live up to the name, the more clear direction and success cities will have in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and pollution while improving the quality of life for their residents. Hopefully the local governments involved in redesigning our cities can learn to work together more effectively than did the participants in Copenhagen. Unfortunately, that’s a low bar.

More than 200 volunteers helped to transform the turf and landscape around Petaluma City Hall into a water-saving area. The project will save the city about 3.5 million gallons of water and $25,000 annually.

All those urbanites growing organic food in the city has a certain appeal for the media, but to the average person, it may feel like a temporary marginal fad at best. So why are city governments around the world taking it so seriously? As it turns out, this trend has the potential to solve some of the worst problems that cities face – namely, climate change and water shortages – with a simple element: Topsoil.

Over the last several decades, many of the rainforests that act as our “carbon sinks” have been slashed and burned to make way for agricultural production. Likewise, grasslands and savannas in Africa and America are routinely burned to make space for agriculture. The farms that consequently inhabit those places feed the world’s cities – from Buenos Aires to Anchorage, Tokyo to Sydney, and everywhere in between. Moreover, as cities expand to make room for sprawling communities, former farmlands are converted to suburbs because land-holders typically sell to the highest bidder – developers. Consequently, more farmland must be created and more wild places (habitat) destroyed to make room for more farms.

The global market for agricultural products has obvious implications for climate change, as carbon-sequestering forests are cleared and products are shipped long distances using vast amounts of fossil fuels. However, what may be less obvious is the solution to feeding the world’s cities without encroaching on our wild lands and carbon sinks.

Most people know by now that forests pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, helping to fight climate change. What might be less apparent is that soil sequesters carbon with far less risk than forests. As temperatures rise due to climate change, bark beetles have begun to infest many of North America’s forests, killing off thousands of acres of forest and priming these vast swaths of land for massive forest fires. Once the trees are dead, one lighting strike or one match will be all it takes to send all that sequestered carbon back up into the atmosphere. If sequestering carbon in forests is our plan, this is quite a gamble.

Healthy topsoil, on the other hand, can soak up carbon with a remarkable rate of absorption and no risk of loss to the atmosphere during forest fires. Collectively, tillage management and cropping systems in the U.S. are estimated to have the potential to sequester 30–105 million metric tons of carbon per year, says R. F. Follett in an abstract on ScienceDirect. Unfortunately, we are losing topsoil around the world at an alarming rate. According to Allan Savory and Christopher Peck of Natural Investment Services, LLC, it is estimated today that our crop and range lands lose 4 tons of soil every year for every person alive. That’s 21 gigatons of soil lost to the sea, lost to productive use on land and releasing vast amounts of carbon (New Scientist, December 2006). Thus, the problem with our current practices lies not only in deforestation, but also in our astronomical loss of topsoil to the world’s oceans because of overgrazing, poor farming practices, resulting erosion, and urban runoff.

Topsoil is not the only thing we are giving away to the world’s oceans. Fresh water is systematically being diverted from our aquifers in an attempt to avoid flooding. The unintended consequence of our diversion strategy is that we are depleting our aquifers and causing severe water shortages for ourselves and for species that rely on fresh water. The water wars that happen every year in communities around the U.S. have as much to do with our ecological illiteracy as with a drought in any given year. Our cities’ lack of permeable surfaces and topsoil to store the water mean that it’s not sinking into the ground and reaching our aquifers, nor is it being caught and stored for use in the dry season. Instead, this fresh, drinkable rainwater is often contaminated by chemical lawn fertilizers, motor oil, and other products before hitting the asphalt and concrete gutters that will carry it to storm drains and ultimately, to the ocean.

Although the system may seem too set in asphalt and concrete to change, cities are catching on and, along with community-based organizations, pioneering a new pathway to solve many of their woes at once. They are addressing climate change and water shortages (and epidemic obesity) simultaneously by building sustainable local agricultural systems that feed their residents on-site while acting as a giant sponge for both water (to recharge the aquifers) and carbon.

One example of such a city is Petaluma, CA. On October 24th of this year, the City of Petaluma, along with nonprofits Daily Acts, Rebuilding Together Petaluma, and Petaluma Bounty, came together with over 200 citizens to sheet mulch 25,000 square feet of unused lawn at City Hall and install edible landscaping, community gardens, and a rooftop water catchment system. Leaders at the event spoke about carbon sequestration in the soil, replenishing the aquifer, and providing a source of local organic food for city residents. Large-scale private-public partnerships include the City of Detroit and Hantz Farm, which together may soon create the world’s largest urban farm, although it’s unclear what their plans are as far as sustainable farming practices go.

According to a U.N. climate change paper on agriculture last year, by 2030 an estimated 5.5 gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent a year could be avoided by agriculture with about 89% achieved by soil carbon sequestration. Cities have an opportunity to build carbon sequestering capacity, thus potentially qualifying for carbon credits while also reaping the benefits of tax revenues from the sale of agricultural products within their borders. By creating permeable surfaces and building topsoil, cities will also begin to recharge their aquifers, avoiding the water wars with farmers that are so common in today’s system. Perhaps those urban farmers are really onto something.

Vancouver is already known for savvy city planning.

Vancouver’s Mayor Gregor Robertson recently announced an ambitious 10-year plan to make Vancouver the world’s greenest city by 2020.  Robertson presented the plan to the “Gaining Ground-Resilient Cities” conference at the Vancouver Convention Center. Robertson says that Vancouver is still far too reliant on cars and on food from far away, and that every day, the city produces too much waste and consumes too much energy and water.

Its goals are:

• Setting up a low-carbon economic development zone to attract investment for advancing renewable energy, energy-efficient and low-carbon technologies, with the object of creating 20,000 new green jobs.
• Making all new construction in the city carbon-neutral and improving efficiency of existing buildings by 20% by 2020.
• Encouraging greater green mobility by having more than 50% of residents walking, cycling or using public transit to move around the city. (According to Robertson, green travel now comprises 37% of trips).
• Reducing the amount of solid waste per capita that goes to landfills or is incinerated by 40%.
• Maintaining the highest international standards for drinking water but reducing the per-capita consumption of water by 33%.
• Achieving the cleanest air of any major city in the world.
• Becoming a global leader in urban food systems and reducing the carbon footprint of food production by 33%. Robertson wishes to take advantage of the Agricultural Land Reserve surrounding the city.
• Giving every citizen easy access to nature by providing “incomparable access to green spaces” by expanding “the world’s most spectacular urban forest in Stanley park” so that by 2020 every person would live within a five-minute walk of a park, beach or greenway. Another 150,000 trees will be planted in the city within the next 10 years.
• Reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 33% from 2007 levels.  (According to Robertson, Vancouver currently produces less than five tons per capita – only a few European cities beat that).
• Reducing the ecological footprint of Vancouver by 33% on the way to realizing the “one-planet footprint.” Robertson said the city now has a “four-planet” level of consumption and waste, and the goal is to reduce this footprint from seven hectares to 1.8 hectares per person.

To date, many city planner look to Vancouver as an example of the best practices in urban development.  Apparently, they are just getting started.

This sign is displayed on the side of the Dry Goods building in Denver, a city know for its sprawl. While still largely unrealized, smart growth is a pervasive concept in cities throughout the U.S..

The passing of Senate Bill 375 in California last year was a landmark occasion marking a new approach to land use and climate protection. The bill, authored by Senate President-Elect Darrell Steinberg, is the first law in the nation to tie billions of dollars in federal and state transportation funds to plans to shorten commutes, build sustainable communities and reduce global warming.

Through various incentives, SB375 will limit California’s CO2 emissions by curbing suburban sprawl and increasing transit-based development. Communities that plan walkable, mixed-use, transit-oriented growth that reduces automobile use and greenhouse gas emissions will get moved to the front of the line for state and federal transportation funds, and buildings proposed near transit lines will have an easier environmental review process.

This legislation comes on the coat tails of a lawsuit filed by California Attorney General, Jerry Brown in 2007 against the County of San Bernardino for causing global warming through rampant suburban sprawl. In that county, households make an average of 10 car trips a day, because their homes, workplaces, schools, stores, and friends are miles apart from each other, and transit
options are limited.

California officials settled that case and agreed to monitor the effects of rapid growth on the environment. San Bernardino County, one of the fastest-growing regions in the nation, will be forced to measure how much it contributes to global warming and set targets to begin cutting its greenhouse gas emissions in the next two and a half years, according to a legal settlement.

San Bernardino is not the only culprit. Because of sprawl, the number of cars is growing faster than the number of people in the U.S. Between 1980 and 2000, 1.2 vehicles were added to the roads for every 1 person increase in the population. Between 1980 and 2000, the total number of vehicular miles driven grew by 80%, more than three times faster than the U.S. population increase in those years. Today, Americans are driving over 365 billion miles annually and producing 154 million metric tons of carbon dioxide just going to the store.

However, changing demographics are working in favor of higher density communities. U.S. household size has shrunk from 3.27 in 1950 to 2.03 in 2000. A 2006 Virginia Tech study found that 38% of today’s U.S. homebuyers prefer attached housing versus 25% of Americans who want a detached single-family house on a large lot. Furthermore, the stock of empty lots available in urban areas is ample to get started, with many green builders already aware of the issue and looking to the U.S. Green Building Council’s pilot version of its new LEED for Neighborhood Development program for some inspiration. The program provides the first national standard for neighborhood design that includes compact mixed-use development, walkability, and proximity to transit.

While creating high density mixed-use communities will be an important part of SB375, creating jobs near these centers will be equally important to avoid the proliferation of heavy commuter traffic. California will also need to develop greenhouse gas reduction mandates that look at regional emissions so that urban cities that take on larger populations are not penalized for going high density. Whatever the challenges, California is redefining land use and development in less carbon-intensive ways.

Flint, MI hosts vast swaths of abandoned properties that may be bulldozed.

The U.S. government is considering replicating a pioneering de-urbanization effort in Flint, one of the poorest U.S. cities, which involves razing entire districts and returning the land to nature. Local politicians in Flint believe the city must shrink by as much as 40%, concentrating the diminishing population and local services into a more viable area.

Flint is sixty miles north of Detroit and was the original home of General Motors, which once employed 79,000 local people. Today GM employs about 8,000, and unemployment is now approaching 20%. The total population has declined to about 110,000 – almost 50% of what it once was. The exodus – especially of young people – along with the consequent collapse in property prices, has entire sections of the city almost completely abandoned.

After sharing his strategy with Barack Obama during the election campaign, Dan Kildee, – treasurer of Genesee County (which includes Flint) – has now been approached by the U.S. government and a group of charities who want him to apply what he has learned to the rest of the country.

Mr Kildee said he will concentrate on 50 cities, identified in a recent study by the Brookings Institution – an influential Washington think-tank – as potentially needing to shrink substantially to cope with their declining coffers. Most are former industrial cities in the “rust belt” of America’s Mid-West and North East, and they include Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Memphis. In Detroit there are already plans to split the city into small urban centers separated by countryside.

Mr Kildee, who has lived in Flint almost all his life, says he first had to overcome a deeply ingrained American cultural mindset that big is good, that all development is good, that if communities are growing they are successful, while shrinking indicates failure.

The local authority in Flint has restored the city’s formerly deserted center but has pulled down 1,100 abandoned homes in outlying areas. Mr Kildee estimates that another 3,000 need to be demolished, although the city boundaries will remain the same.

Flint’s recovery efforts have been helped by a state law passed a few years ago which allows local governments to buy up empty properties very cheaply in order to knock them down or sell them to owners who will occupy them. Kildee says choosing which areas to knock down will be a sensitive issue but many of them are already obvious and no one will be forced to move. According to Kildee, the city is buying up houses in more affluent areas to offer people currently living in neighborhoods it wants to demolish.

Many organizations have been looking at the issue of shrinking cities. Karina Pallagst, director of the Shrinking Cities in a Global Perspective program at the University of California, Berkeley, says there is “both a cultural and political taboo” about admitting decline in America. Richard Register, founder of EcoCity Builders, makes the case that shrinking our cities will be necessary to halt global climate change and wean ourselves off of fossil fuels.

Read more: US cities may have to be bulldozed in order to survive
(Telegraph, 6.12.09)

portland

The Environmental Protection Agency is joining forces with the Department of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development to create a strategy for sustainable, smart growth in the US.   The new partnership means that there will be a new focus on environmental issues when the nation’s housing and transportation needs are being considered.

According to the NRDC, the new partnership will:

• Provide more transportation choices. Develop safe, reliable and economical transportation choices in order to decrease household transportation costs, reduce our nations’ dependence on foreign oil, improve air quality, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and promote public health.
• Promote equitable, affordable housing. Atlanta’s Livable Centers Initiative was another EPA smart growth award winner (courtesy of USEPA) Expand location and energy efficient housing choices for people of all ages, incomes, races and ethnicities to increase mobility and lower the combined cost of housing and transportation.
• Increase economic competitiveness. Enhance economic competitiveness through reliable and timely access to employment centers, educational opportunities, services and other basic needs by workers as well as expanded business access to markets.
• Support existing communities. Target federal funding toward existing communities to increase community revitalization, the efficiency of public works investments and safeguard rural landscapes.
• Leverage federal investment. Cooperatively align federal policies and funding to remove barriers, leverage funding and increase the accountability and effectiveness of all levels of government to plan for future growth.
• Value communities and neighborhoods. Enhance the unique characteristics of all communities by investing in healthy, safe and walkable neighborhoods – rural, urban or suburban.

Over 30 years ago, Curitiba city planners developed an extensive bus system that operates for less than a tenth of what a subway costs to operate (Photo: Flickr - BuenosAiresPhotographer.com.

Curitiba is the capital city of Paran, one of Brazil’s southernmost states. While Curitiba faces the same problems as other cities around the world – overcrowding, poverty, pollution and funding constraints – Curitba’s city planners have come up with some creative and inexpensive ways to address them:

• Developed an extensive bus system that operates for less than a tenth of what a subway costs to operate
• Implemented recycling programs to address both pollution and poverty
• Created industrial areas to attract new business
• Expanded green spaces
• Preserved historical areas to revitalize neighborhoods and grow tourism

In 1964, with a population of more than 430,000 people, Curitiba’s Mayor, Ivo Arzua issued a call for proposals to prepare Curitiba for new growth. A team of architects and planners from the Federal University of Paraná – led by Jamie Lerner – laid out plans to minimize urban sprawl, reduce downtown traffic, preserve Curitiba’s historic district and provide easily accessible and affordable public transit. Lerner’s team also proposed adding main linear transit arteries to Curitiba to provide direct, high-speed routes in and out of the city. Their proposal was adopted and eventually came to be known as the Curitiba Master Plan.

After his plan for Curitiba was adopted in 1968, Lerner created the city’s first urban planning department to help organize and direct further redevelopment efforts. The city did several things:

• Created Rua Quinze do Novembro at the heart of commercial Curitiba – Brazil’s first pedestrian-only street
• Adopted a trinary road design, called the Sistema Trinário, to minimize traffic in the city, whose population had now surpassed 600,000. The new system sandwiched a central two-lane street restricted to buses and local car traffic between wide, fast-moving one-way streets
• Began developing an industrial zone on the city’s outskirts, which they called Industrial City

In the 1980s in the midst of a widespread economic recession, rising urban poverty and increasing deforestation rates in Brazil, Curitiba rolled out a number of eco-friendly and social programs for their more than 900,000 residents.

• “Green areas” protected from future development were established in Curitiba, and several parks were dedicated to the city’s different ethnic and immigrant groups
• Curitiba’s transit system was expanded and a color-coded system for the various bus lines was created
• Regional administrations were established to decentralize government
• A citywide recycling program was initiated in which Curitibanos separated organic waste and trash, plastic, glass, and metal. The city sold the salvage to cover the costs of operation

Curitiba had grown to more than 1.4 million people when in 1992 it hosted the World Cities Forum, an advance event leading up to the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development, Earth Summit. The event brought international attention to Curitiba for its bold urban planning. Throughout the 1990s, Curitiba continued to add green spaces and cultural sites, including a new botanical garden and an opera house. As well as new red multicabin buses, carrying up to 270 people each, which were integrated into its transit system, and high-speed bus stops, called tubes.

Curitiba is now home to more than 1.8 million people and continues to be an example for city planners around the world.

NanoCity will be a livable, dense, sustainable, eco-friendly urban hub of business, technology and education.

In the northern niche of Haryana in the foothills of the Himalaya, a new hub of business, technology and education is emerging. Students from the Berkeley Group for Architecture and Planning are working on ideas for infrastructure, transportation, road networks and communication networks for “NanoCity.”  The main intent is to create a livable, dense, sustainable, eco-friendly environment that can serve as a model for other developments in the region.

The pioneer behind NanoCity is Sabeer Bhatia, the “lifelong entrepreneur” best known for co-founding Hotmail. He seeks to revolutionize the way people interact on a daily basis, not only with each other, but with their immediate environment and future generations. Bhatia envisions NanoCity as an avant-garde Indian metropolis with potential to become the world’s “intellectual-property capital.”

In the early fall of 2006, the Haryana state government approved the NanoCity project and entered into a private-public partnership with Bhatia’s Nanoworks Developers (P) Ltd. An 11,000-acre site, nestled in the foothills of the Himalayas and within close proximity to the city of Chandigarh, was earmarked for private development. In the future, NanoCity will transition into public governance by means of India’s long-established traditions of democracy.

The Master Plan

Website:  http://nanocity.in/