It's Smart To Be Dense  

The WSJ has an article from the "cities are the future" genre, looking at the impact of high oil prices on urban planning - With Gas Over $4, Cities Explore Whether It's Smart to Be Dense.

Gasoline was less than $2 a gallon when Mike McKeever brought his gospel of bikes, light rail and tightly packed neighborhoods to this state synonymous with cars, freeways and suburban sprawl.

"The development industry was very concerned," says Mr. McKeever, head of Sacramento's regional planning agency. "The environmental community was openly negative," concerned that it was "just more talk, talk."

Seven years later, with gasoline hurtling past $4 a gallon, Sacramento has become one of the nation's most-watched experiments in whether urban planning can help solve everything from high fuel prices to the housing bust to global warming.

"They're really the model," says Steve Winkelman, a transportation expert at the Center for Clean Air Policy.

For decades, backers of "smart-growth" planning principles have preached the benefit of clustering the places where people live more closely with the businesses where they work and shop. Less travel would mean less fuel consumption and less air pollution. Several communities built from scratch upon those principles, such as Celebration in Florida, sprouted across the country. But they were often isolated experiments, connected to their surroundings mainly by car. So, as gasoline remained cheap, the rest of the country continued its inexorable march toward bigger houses and longer commutes.

Now, smart-growth fans see a chance to reverse that.

"Expensive oil is going to transform the American culture as radically as cheap oil did," predicts David Mogavero, a Sacramento-based architect and smart-growth proponent.

As cool as ultra high-performance green buildings are individually, the real action is all with districts. Individual buildings may blaze paths, and as we engage in acupunctural infill (changing sprawling or underused areas into walkable, compact mixed-use communities by adding new buildings and redeveloping older properties -- something we'll be writing more about soon) we're going to need a lot of small-scale, even individual architectural solutions.

But if we want to really push the environmental performance of urban areas down to zero-impact levels, we need to think in terms of districts; we need to look at settings where a number of buildings can be built afresh or creatively re-used, and where the infrastructure and public space they share can be recreated in ways no piecemeal agglomeration of individual projects can usually match.

The ideal sites for new districts are abandoned urban and inner-ring brownfields. The EPA estimates that there are over 450,000 brownfield sites in the U.S. alone. Some are extremely heavily polluted. Most are just polluted or problematic enough that in a regional economy where greenfield development on the suburban fringe is allowed, even subsidized, it makes no economic sense to invest in their redevelopment.

But the economic equations of urban development are shifting quickly. As energy prices rise, the suburban real estate market collapses and cities see the advantage of turning liabilities (abandoned industrial areas) into assets (newly developed housing, offices and stores), brownfields start to look like better and better deals.

What's possible, when you have a clean slate on which to work? Big leaps.

Take Dockside Green. In terms of North American development, Dockside Green is the gold standard.

On 15 acres of former industrial land in Victoria, British Columbia, Dockside Green's developers are building 1.3 million square feet of residential, office, retail and light industrial space, aimed at being a global showcase of new techniques for bright green development.

The innovations are truly impressive. Not only do the builders say they hope to certify the entire project LEED-ND (neighborhood development) and all 24 buildings in it LEED Platinum (there are currently just 65 in the world), they're planning to exceed almost all the current environmental performance standards for green buildings in Canada. ...