Beyond The Sustainable Urban Design Roadmaps

Tigran Haas

Department of Urban Planning and Environment, School of Architecture and the Built Environment (ABE), Sweden

The complexities of contemporary global urban, political, economic and environmental issues are evident. We are facing the consequences of accelerating and rapid urbanization, the scarcity of natural resources and their mismanagement, the impact of major errors in our responses to natural and man-made disasters, and the increasing demand for, and complexity of, greatly expanding transportation flows. Our societies have also undergone rapid and radical shifts in terms of age and class, increasing inequities between the rich and the poor, and intense demand for affordable and high-quality housing. All of these major challenges require immediate solutions from architects, urban planners, urban designers, landscape architects and urbanists; actually, we need the combined efforts of all good people who are concerned with the physical condition and future of our cities.

Nico Larco’s (2015) explorative effort and rather reflective piece attempts to provide a composite, novel and interesting idea in the field, while adding new dimensions to the issues at hand. It is definitely a worthy project and part of the ongoing constructive debate occurring between today’s competing, complimentary and, at times, completely divergent approaches to sustainable (green) urban design. His sustainable urban design framework, although thoroughly described, and largely based on evidence and utilizing logic coherence and theoretical underpinnings from all existing ‘sustainable’ paradigms, leaves ample room for discussion and overall musings on the subject, as well as on the overall idea of frameworks, indicators and guides. Here, a problematic issue exists; one is left unsure if this constitutes a roadmap, guide, framework, matrix, fine-scale mechanism or something else (all terms used by Larco in the paper). While the spirit of his paper is more than correct, one cannot avoid the feeling that yet another ‘new’ way of seeing and doing things is presented. Aside from the need to sort out what this really is, as it cannot be all of the above terms simultaneously, we must not forget that similar or complimentary frameworks and guides do already exist. For example, the creation of action plans with sustainable urban solutions was achieved through a tool to measure sustainable urban development, known as The City Prosperity Index, which was accompanied by a conceptual framework-matrix, the Wheel of Urban Prosperity (Moreno,

2012). A new methodology or framework for measuring sustainable development called the Urban Sustainability Index is also in existence, a joint initiative of Columbia University, Tsinghua University and McKinsey & Company (The Urban China Initiative, 2010). Tools for Measuring Progress towards Sustainable Neighbourhood Environments has also been developed (Brunner and Karol 2009), while Sustainable Development Indicators (SDI) has existed for quite a while (Hák, Moldan, and Lyon 2007), to name just a few.

The other aspect is that the endless search for the latest trend or paradigm, and even theory, in urban planning and design ranges from absurdity to over quasi-scientific accuracy, and at times reflects the overall zeitgeist of the deconstructivist caprices of our age encapsulated in postmodernist disorientation, disjuncture and fragmentation. Throughout the last 20 years, a number of serious theories, approaches, models and ideologies ‒ paradigms ‒ have influenced the practice of urban planning and design, such as Sustainable Urbanism (Farr 2008), Green Urbanism (Beatley 2000; Lehmann 2010), Ecological Urbanism (Mostafavi 2010), Landscape Urbanism (Waldheim 2006), Biophilic Cities (Beatley 2010) and Resilient Cities (Newman, Beatley, and Boyer 2009). A major contribution in this respect (vis-à-vis Nico Larco’s ideas) has been the sustainable urbanism framework developed by Doug Farr, sustainable urbanism (Farr grows out of three late twentieth-century reform movements: the ‘Smart Growth’, ‘New Urbanism’and ‘Green Buildings Movements’, with its standards for green building ‒ Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design [LEED]). Another important approach that could have been utilized in Larco’s analysis, although it is not included, is Emily Talen and Andrés Duany’s contribution in the form of ‘New Theory of Urbanism’ ‒ The Transect (Duany and Talen 2002; Talen 2002), i.e. a planning and urban design strategy that seeks to organize the elements of urbanism ‒ building, lot, land use, street and all of the other physical elements of the human habitat, in ways that preserve the integrity of different types of urban and rural environments. This certainly constitutes an approach that attempts to define and relate the various aspects of urban design that contribute to sustainability which, finally, becomes even much more than a roadmap or a framework, but a dynamic implementation tool. In fact, it becomes a way of applying good urban principles to a range of human habitats, something which the New Urbanism Movement, one of the most influential and prolific development trends of the last century, utilizes in its projects. Last, but not least, let us not forget the Smart Growth Manual which is in many waysa sustainable urban design framework and guideline (Duany, Speck, and Lydon 2009)

In other words, there has not been a lack of draft frameworks, models or ‘new’ systems that describe what sustainable urban design should address; on the contrary, there has been an abundance of them. Perhaps, however, as Larco points out, “because of the current state of research and the complexity of the topic, the framework has speculative aspects, but the attempt has been to ground all aspects ‒ as much as possible ‒ in currently available research”. Nico Larco (2015) certainly deserves a great deal of credit for providing (through his ‘roadmap’) a renewed and systematized perspective on green urban design approaches, as well as a number of sustainability-focused urban scale rating systems, in which we see the main themes, their concepts, issues and elements,and where we see many commonalities, but also quite a few differences. This becomes particularly important, as he notes, when there is “variability in a few specific topics on the one hand and the relative agreement on a number of topics on the other” in all of these approaches. Related to all of this, one has to keep in mind the bare issue of sustainability, a complex and elusive term, both broad and vague with multiple meanings and interpretations and a lack of robustness that, for example, the concept of resilience comprises. As Neuman correctly points out, due to sustainability’s complex structures, which draws on at least five intellectual traditions ‒ capacity, fitness, resilience, diversity

and balance (Neuman 2005) ‒ one must be careful when designing any type of taxonomy, framework or roadmap. In all honesty, one needs to have already in place a classification according to a pre-determined system, with the resulting catalogue used to provide a conceptual framework for discussion, analysis or information retrieval, whichin this case is the Sustainable Urban Design ‒ A Framework. That notwithstanding, the current framework does incorporate some of the existing green paradigms and taxonomies. What is unfortunate, however, among all these ‘green’ movements, is that there has been an unwillingness to engage in a comprehensive and interdisciplinary agenda

and transfer the best practices of each paradigm.

In the end, perhaps, there will be an emergence of a more synthesized urban design theory,

Not just a framework or a roadmap, adjusted to deal with a range of hard realities facing us, operating a more complete technical and planning repertoire, but also a socio-economic-cultural as well as a natural one. Until then, we need to console ourselves that even though there is a consensus on the main burning issues of climate change and built environment manifested through sustainable urban design approaches, no real consensus exists in the current paradigms and toolkits; they live lives of their own operations in different contextual settings, but work towards a common goal ‒ urban ecology and urbanism as a way of life. Therefore, every new approach that can be scrutinized, problematized and criticized, such as Nico Larco’s sustainable design framework, should be welcomed.

（文章来源：Journal of Urban Design excerpted）