March 2009 » book review

Life, But Not As We Know It

Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design with Nature
by Douglas Farr
John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ; 2007
304 pages; hardcover; more than 130 color & b&w illustrations; $75
ISBN 978-0-471-77751-9

Reviewed by Michael Carey

In his foreword, Andres Duany compares Douglas Farr's Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design with Nature with Christopher Alexander's seminal A Pattern Language. In common with the earlier work, Farr's book "propounds the full range of elements necessary for a sustainable future," writes Duany, and "designates the human settlement pattern – and not just the dwelling – as the crucial variable in the environmental equation." Farr uses more straightforward and more general language than "human settlement pattern" when defining what is crucial. He uses the word "lifestyle." It is our lifestyle that is unsustainable, he states, not simply our buildings or even our urban and suburban patterns.

While this idea may seem self-evident to many, Farr argues, it has been largely ignored by architects, planners, developers, legislators and even the United States Green Building Council (USGBC) in its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification program. LEED has become the standard tool of measurement of a building's sustainability, yet the program inadequately addresses the contexts of the individual building – Farr describes LEED as "building-centric." A LEED Platinum building, the argument goes, in a greenfield, auto-dependent office park is hardly sustainable. Farr notes the development of LEED for Neighborhood Development (which he oversaw for a number of years) and the addition of the word "community" to the USGBC mission as hopeful signs of change.

The simple fact, Farr argues, is that sustainability as it relates to building patterns in their broadest and most holistic terms has not been sufficiently well defined and the instruments for the implementation of sustainable building have not yet been developed. These are the objectives of the book. In Farr's somewhat curious words, it is intended to "create a brand, agenda, and standards for an emerging and growing design reform movement."

The book is divided into four parts. The first is "The Case for Sustainable Urbanism," in which Farr sketches the current situation and gives a very brief introduction to the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), USGBC and its LEED program. He then sketches the three steps he sees as necessary in establishing sustainable urbanism: the creation of a "branded standard" of sustainability, the dismantling of "petroleum-era" barriers and the mounting of a national campaign to adopt sustainable urbanism.

The second part is "Implementing Sustainable Urbanism," in which Farr and a number of planning and policy specialists provide what is called an "operating system." There are two parts to this: the first identifies the roles of particular decision makers, from local to national levels, and the second describes various steps towards implementation. The third part, "Emerging Thresholds," offers rules of thumb or benchmarks for designing and developing sustainable urbanism in five categories: density, transport, neighborhoods, natural/built world interaction and building performance. The fourth part documents a wide variety of national and international, built and unbuilt case studies.

It is this last section that will be most attractive to a non-professional audience. The breadth of project types is fairly wide, although space concerns limits the depth of coverage, and the variety of site types makes for compelling studies. For design professionals, however, it is the section on benchmarks that will be of greatest use. Farr has collected an impressive set of proposed thresholds from an interdisciplinary group of specialists. This includes Victor Dover and Jason King on "Neighborhood Definition" and Hilary Brown on "High-Performance Infrastructure."

The book's weaknesses can be found in its first part. Here, the irony of making a call for a change in lifestyle – a lifestyle that must be based less on patterns of unsustainable consumption – and putting it in terms of "brands" and "branding" seems lost in the rather hyperbolic language. Issues of rhetoric aside, the most obvious problems of the book are the absence of discussions of racial and economic diversity and affordability. Farr identifies "we" as "the American middle class" on the first page of the first chapter and thereafter seems to ignore "them."

This is a familiar criticism of New Urbanists and rightly so. While the principles of diversity and affordability are written into the CNU's charter, the majority of projects built by that organization's members have fallen far short of meeting them. These aspects of inclusiveness are simply essential to the success of any reform in the way sustainability is conceived and implemented, yet there seems to be a reluctance to engage in a discussion on how they are to become a reality.

There is a balance to be achieved between vision and scale, between how we conceptualize the boundaries of a set of interrelated conditions and how we act to effect change within those boundaries. In the realm of sustainable urbanism, the political, the social, the economic and the racial must all be part of the conceptualization – must all be recognized as interrelated to "lifestyle" or "human settlement patterns."

As for scale, I'm reminded of Wendell Berry's 1990 book, What Are People For?, in which he writes: "The question that must be addressed, therefore, is not how to care for the planet, but how to care for each of the planet's millions of human and natural neighborhoods, each of its millions of small pieces and parcels of land, each one of which is in some precious way different from all the others. Our understandable wish to preserve the planet must somehow be reduced to the scale of our competence."

The great value of Sustainable Urbanism is that it is a sincere attempt to reach a balance between vision and scale and for that Farr is to be applauded. The book's most useful parts, however, are those that are aimed directly at the scale of our competence.  

«BACK TO March 2009 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Have something to say about this article? Feel free to comment!

Comments feed