While the extremely popular game has sparked the interest of many future urban planners, it has also likely left many shaking their heads once they meet the reality of city planning, urban design and infrastructure improvements. If only decisions could be made regarding the re-routing of an interstate or the construction of a community arena with ease and planners could see the immediate impact of that decision and how it affects the city overall. But it’s simply not that easy.
Throughout history, cities have served as hubs of civilization. They have grown, expanded and evolved to fit the needs of their citizens. But the problem has been that different parts of the city have different needs, oftentimes leaving the overall whole overlooked. Siloed thinking and overspecialization can lead to mismatched parts — a Frankenstein-type conglomeration of well-intentioned projects that simply don’t work together. Short-term needs have often come before long-term sustainability and resiliency. And the need for infrastructure has traditionally outpaced the ability to finance it.
In our first FutureStructure publication, we introduced the importance of viewing the city as a system and as a living thing that incorporates and organizes non-living components in service of its ends. In this issue, we take that farther and focus on two of the most important parts of any city system — transportation and the built environment. In the previous two articles in this issue, we focused on the soft, hard and technological components of optimizing our transportation systems. Now it’s time to focus on the built environment.
When we talk about the built environment, we mean the man-made things you see when you walk out of your front door. It’s all of the artifacts we humans have constructed over time and continue to update — our buildings, roads, power plants, parks, reservoirs, airports and more. It’s the places we go and the things we use to get there. It’s the critical infrastructure that our communities need in place to attract industry and citizens and position the city to thrive economically and socially for years to come.
The Big Picture: Thinking Differently About Building
The urbanization of the world is rapidly increasing. One hundred years ago, 2 out of every 10 people lived in a city, but by 2010 this number had increased to 5 in 10. It is projected that by 2030, 6 out of 10 people will live in a city. Sixty million people become urban residents every year.23 This type of growth requires innovative thinking to promote resilient, thriving communities that are economically sound — in short, good places to live for the people who live there.
El Paso, too, is taking a cue from trendy cities like Portland and Austin. Drawing on principles of new urbanism, city officials wanted to create more livable communities. The city had been impacted by sprawl and infrastructure had traditionally been designed in mind for transportation of the four-wheeled variety. Every commercial building was surrounded by parking lots and kept firmly separate from residential areas — the two linked only by roads and highways. Now, design quality has become the focus for not just better designed corner street stores, but also for a number of large-scale projects the city is funding, including a new museum, arena, ballpark, cultural center and parks.24
In Denver, the Auraria West Redevelopment is a project designed to revitalize the downtown area. Through a public-private partnership, the Community College of Denver, Metropolitan State College of Denver and the University of Colorado at Denver will share facilities, including a student center, classrooms, faculty and student housing, and a large underground parking garage. Also included are retail developments and a transfer station for the RTD light rail system that could accommodate a streetcar connecting Auraria to the city’s urban core. With work already well underway, the latest version of the Auraria Higher Education Center’s master plan calls for “strong physical and programmatic connections from the campus to Denver’s core.” The overall idea is to move away from the suburban office-park model of the original campus design to a “highly urban environment inspired by the nearby urban neighborhoods of Lower Downtown.”25
Too often city planning has occurred in a vacuum, without taking advantage of local resource strengths. Building took place one project at a time. But once hard infrastructure is set in place it dictates how residents connect, or, conversely, are disconnected from each other. Building for the future requires a systemic view of the entire built environment and how one project will affect the whole. Thinking differently requires building for what the populace might need 30 years from now — not only what they need today.
For its part, the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments is using a tool called State of Place to guide its efforts to improve the region’s walkability and economic performance.26 Developed by Mariela Alfonzo, Ph.D., research fellow at NYU-Poly, it is a place rating and walkability diagnostic tool that informs economic development, guides investment, aids place branding and enhances communities. Community members and planners in over 95 neighborhoods are making block-by-block assessments of some 250 features within 10 different urban design dimensions. The tool pulls existing data together and gives a profile of what’s working and what makes the most sense to change.
Drilling Deeper: Integrative Design of Buildings
Important too is the people at the table when planning takes place. Gone are the days where a master builder strategized, planned and executed a building, a project or even an entire city. In our first FutureStructure publication, we noted the “problem of specialists.” Not that specialists and specific jobs aren’t needed, but that their creation has led to a silo of information and the lack of a holistic view. The Rocky Mountain Institute, an organization dedicated to sustainability — particularly in the areas of energy and resource efficiency — advocates for integrative design for the built environment. Integrative design starts with getting input earlier in the building process — including input from people that would not normally be involved until later in a project. The ultimate goal is to design the building as a whole system.
“Traditionally, buildings have been created by an architect with an idea who then gives that three-dimensional idea to a mechanical engineer, a structural engineer, a landscape architect, etc. And they say, here’s the building, now heat it, cool it, put a structure around it,” says Bob Berkebile, principal at BNIM.27
“Integrative design means designing the building as a whole system and optimizing it for multiple benefits rather than optimizing components of the building or subsystems of the building for single benefits,” says Amory B. Lovins, chairman and chief scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute.28
Integrative design has been used in multiple successful institute projects, including the energy efficient retrofit measures for the Empire State Building, which resulted in a 38 percent energy use reduction with an annual cost savings of $4.4 million, and the retrofit of the City and County Building for the city of Indianapolis. There, a diverse group of building industry experts identified opportunities, barriers and solutions to achieving significant energy savings. The research revealed that the since 1959, the city had pumped over 200 gal/min of groundwater from the lower parking deck due to a high water table, which could be used to heat and cool the building. The city and county recently signed an Energy Savings Performance Contract (ESPC) for 57 percent energy savings.29
Resources are also coming available to help community leaders make decisions about their important public assets. One such tool, developed by the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure, is its new rating system called Envision that serves to guide public decisions on what should be built. Envision is designed to cover all civil infrastructure from roads, bridges and railways to solid waste landfills, water supplies, wastewater treatment plants, power transmission lines and the public spaces in our cities, towns and local communities. William Bertera, ISI’s executive director, explains it this way, “We now have a way to help government prioritize needs and allocate resources for the physical infrastructure upon which everything else depends.”30
Energy Efficiency
According to the Rocky Mountain Institute, America’s 120 million buildings consume a huge amount of energy — 42 percent of the nation’s primary energy, 72 percent of its electricity and 34 percent of its directly used natural gas. If America’s buildings were a separate country, they would be the third biggest energy user behind China and the U.S. The annual cost to power buildings in the United States is $400 billion — as much as we spent on Medicare in 2009 — and much of that is wasted.
Traditionally, energy use in our existing buildings has been tremendously wasteful, but new equipment technology and building materials, as well as better designs, improve energy efficiency and offer huge opportunities to save money, reduce impact on the environment and drive job creation in virtually every community across the country.
Phoenix is a leader with exemplary municipal energy management and is recognized for best practices in setting goals for reducing energy use in local government operations. The city closely monitors energy use and broadly communicates energy savings results. Mayor Greg Stanton says, “It is the leadership and commitment to sustainability — coupled with great implementation — that drives great cities forward.
After realizing that energy costs are the largest budget item after payroll, the city evaluated 300 buildings and identified and deployed efficiency projects that saved it $22.8 million. Phoenix also developed an energy savings reinvestment program, completing $4.4 million in efficiency improvements with reinvested energy savings. Additionally, Mayor Stanton’s signature sustainability project, “PHX Renews,” was launched in 2012. The initiative promises to transform 15 acres of vacant land into sustainable public space for community gardens, outdoor classrooms and public art.
Also a leader in energy efficiency, Hartnell Community College in California has been recognized for its high performance buildings and use of renewable energy sources. It serves as a model of infrastructure design and integration. The college’s most recent solar project is expected to reduce electricity use at its Alisal Campus by more than 90 percent. “This project will help Hartnell College advance a number of our goals, including achieving improved sustainability at all three campuses and setting an example we hope will resonate across the state,” says College President Willard Clark Lewallen. “With many of our students looking to pursue careers in the emerging green economy, this project also serves as an extraordinary learning opportunity to perform project-based research.”
Paying for Our Building
A significant hurdle to overcome is the upfront costs to upgrade building efficiency. City leaders are looking for innovative ways to encourage and incentivize owners to make changes to their properties. In this vein, a new private sector financing tool is rapidly coming into use called Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE).
Cisco DeVries, president and CEO of Renewable Funding, initiated the first PACE district in 2008 while chief of staff for the mayor of Berkeley, Calif. “Financing doesn’t motivate people to do something,” DeVries adds, “but it’s a way to get property owners to engage in their own interests and improve the community in the process. California passed the first PACE legislation in 2008. Since then, 30 other states and the District of Columbia have passed similar enabling laws.
PACE allows property owners to defer the upfront costs of their improvements (which can include HVAC, insulation, solar, water conservation, etc.) and pay them back on their property tax bills over a period of up to 20 years. The loan is attached to the property, rather than tied to the homeowner. If the property is sold the debt continues on the tax rolls to be paid by the subsequent owners. To date, 180 PACE projects have been completed (43 of these being government buildings) totaling over $37 million in funded projects.
Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson has been a leading proponent of PACE as a tool to spur economic development and job creation. In January 2013, in partnership with Ygrene Energy, he opened the Sacramento Clean Energy Center. “Launching Clean Energy Sacramento is a major milestone in establishing this city as a national leader in the green economy,” says Johnson. “Not only are we making Sacramento a cleaner and healthier place to live, we’re also putting Sacramento’s hard-hit construction business back to work and revitalizing our economy at zero cost to taxpayers.”
Clean Energy Sacramento launched with $22 million of prequalified projects in the pipeline, with more than 150 trained local contractors ready to begin work across the city. According to independent research conducted by ECONorthwest, every $100 million invested via Clean Energy Sacramento is projected to create 1,500 jobs, $250 million in economic activity and $25 million in tax revenue.
PACE monetizes the upgrade process by mining trapped value in buildings. Savings, generated by increased efficiencies, can be used to upgrade building components without need for public subsidy and provides a ready avenue to improve a community’s commercial and residential building stock. Deeper energy retrofits that involve redesigning major systems from heating and cooling to the building envelope open up opportunities to modernize a building’s appearance while simultaneously reaping significant energy savings.
Of course, PACE is not the only such financing tool available. But its rapid spread across the country shows the strength of interest by state and local governments to access new approaches. Other financing options include: energy savings performance contracting, mortgage-back financing, sustainable energy utilities, state and municipal loan programs, and utility-backed on-bill financing.
