Carbon Zero: Imagining Cities That Can Save the Planet by Alex Steffen

Author:Alex Steffen [Steffen, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Alex Steffen
Published: 2012-11-27T05:00:00+00:00

People–Focused Places and Green Building

We’ve inherited a warped vision of what a green building looks like, especially in North America. Strong leadership displayed by green–building pioneers in the 1970s and ‘80s—many of whom were hippies and had a strong preference for independent lives and back–to–the–land lifestyles—has led many of us to associate green building with “living off the grid.” The “neighborhood sustainability” movements of the 1990s and 2000s, with their focus on transitional technologies and small–scale local action, left some of us thinking that green building is fundamentally a small–scale, grassroots project. Other prominent design trends (like the idea of “zero energy” homes, which through photoelectric panels or small wind turbines create as much power as they use) have convinced us that green building is, in fact, a matter of greening specific buildings one by one. Conversely, the last decade’s photos of large modernist single–family homes in forests or deserts or by ocean bluffs have given us the sense that green building is something for rich people’s summer homes and magazine–showcase houses; that it is expensive and exclusionary.

Now, I’m not interested in trashing any of these efforts. They got us as far as we’ve come, often in the face of active opposition and steep learning curves. Many of the structures born of these movements offer terrific illustrations of principles we’d all do well to learn more about—but they do not necessarily offer the best models of the practices we need to embrace. Fundamentally, that’s because they’re not genuinely urban.

Density is the foundation of all truly green buildings. Living urban lives within compact communities is what makes possible the shift from greener structures to truly low–carbon homes and workplaces.

How? Homes in compact communities tend to be smaller. Smaller homes take fewer resources to build and use less energy to live in comfortably. The shared walls of multi–unit buildings make them more efficient. Better–designed larger buildings can also take less work to maintain than a comparable number of stand–alone houses, which translates to lower emissions. People living car–free lives don’t need parking, either, meaning the buildings they live in don’t need parking structures. This can save $10,000–$30,000 in costs for each unit, and shave as much as 10% off the building’s carbon footprint. A study for the EPA found that multi–unit homes in compact communities used half the energy, on average, of large–lot suburban homes—without using any different materials, technologies, or designs.

Just as importantly, we live differently in more moderately sized city homes, as well. A home stocked with smaller appliances and less furniture has a smaller carbon footprint. People with less storage space think twice about purchases they’re about to make, and, trend–watchers say, tend to buy fewer things overall. (At least they do on average—some people pack small homes to the rafters!) The shared services in a compact neighborhood are more sustainable than multiple individual versions; for instance, a 500–building neighborhood with one large gym is more sustainable than 500 buildings with individual home gyms. We’ll come back to this

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