A Positive Development Strategy

San Francisco-based prefab architecture guru Michelle Kaufmann expands her vision of sustainability and order to an urban scale, seizing upon the awful economy and the collapse of the housing market to do so. Her white paper on the subject, Embracing Thoughtful, Walkable Neighborhoods, makes important connections between scale and several forms of sustainability:

The collapse of the housing market has more or less put a moratorium on the advance of our most unsustainable mode of developing new housing: suburban sprawl. With banks no longer offering easy credit and no one buying the new homes already flooding the market, there is little reason for developers to start building new ones....

We should take this opportunity to study the housing collapse and look at the lessons it offers on how and where we went wrong. Now is the perfect time to reexamine the qualities we value in our neighborhoods and hopefully shift our focus onto these qualities that are conducive to financial, environmental, and sociocultural sustainability. Doing so will be an important step toward choosing more viable development strategies for housing our growing population.

On her blog, Kaufmann highlights 10 American community developments, from North Carolina to California, that are attuned to what she calls the "10 Eco-Principles of Communities" (six of which are seen in the above image). These developments, a mix of adaptive reuse and greenfield development, generally hew to a warm, modern aesthetic and are thrifty when it comes to consuming energy and resources; but the wisdom of their design extends to a larger, community scale, with awareness of transportation issues and the strength of the social fabric. They borrow the best of New Urbanism's bent toward timelessness and sense of place, and overlay attention to pressing environmental and energy concerns.

For the communities in question, this attenuation to design at multiple scales, and concern for design issues that are external to the realm of the purely architectural, can help engender a sense of place and create a shared identity over time. Broadening the ethos that drives prefab design moves to an urban scale seems like a natural, intelligent progression. I've long appreciated Kaufmann's holistic, ethical approach to her office's work, as well as her awareness of its didactic strength, and I can't wait to see what kinds of projects could result. Perhaps something like these?

Also, implicit in any of today's prefab designers' approaches to their work is an innate awareness of marketing, which I appreciate. Expanding that inherent marketing focus toward a goal of increased economic diversity at an urban scale would be incredible and significant. More. (Via)

If you find that interesting, you might also check out Green Urbanism Down Under, a book currently on my shelf, detailing efforts to merge sustainability with urban design in Australia, full of valuable lessons for would-be designers elsewhere. Fascinating, wide-ranging reading, made all the more apropos by the country's particular environmental strains and current, disastrous weather woes.

Comments

[Aurora Colorado homes]

Thanks for sharing this information. Neighborhoods
should aware about the qualifications or policies of housing in general and specifically. This info is important especially to the buyers so that they would know if the housing is right for them.This is excellent post.

-Audrey

[Michael Rose]

Maybe i missed it but was this building made of Precast Concrete?