Subject: sustainable urban landscapes

From: [email-masked] (Patrick Condon)
Date: Fri, 3 Nov 1995 16:25:30 UNDEFINED

The 1995 Sustainable Urban Landscapes Design Charrette was successfully concluded.
A publication of the results will be available in March of '96. Anyone 
interested in receiving this publication should e-mail [email-masked]. Your 
name will be added to the list. Cost for the publication has yet to be 
determined but will be as low as possible.

Meanwile I provide a copy of an article about the Charrette that ran in the Vanvouver Sun,
 Vanvouver's daily newspaper.

_____________________________________________

Glenn Bohn
Vancouver Sun
September 19, 1995

Surveyors carved Surrey into one-mile squares during the la
st century.  Some of North America's leading urban designers don't want smile
r squares and single family houses to be the only thing on the map in the
 next century.  They've designed a new suburbia.  In a four-day brainstor
ming session to create that new suburbia, those designers came up with ma
ps and sketches showing ideas for a sustainable community of 10,000 peopl
e, a pedestrian-oriented neighbourhood that is densely populated in some 
places but has large, interconnected parks in others.  The planning proje
ct began Monday when architects and landscape architects joined Universit
y of B.C. students on a school bus for a tour of the south Newton area of
 Surrey, a currently semi-rural area expected to be developed soon, that 
everyone was to come up with their dream plans for.  The project ended wi
th a presentation late Friday at the Surrey Art Centre. Patrick Condon, t
he director of UBC's landscape architecture program, told the audience that 
the goal was to illustrate what neighbourhoods would be like b they we built 
to conform with emerging federal, provincial, regional and municipal licies.  

On paper, all those governments have embraced the goal of sustainable 
development In 1987,  a United Nations commission defined sustainabili
ty as development that meets the needs of today's generation without d
amaging theability of future generations to meet theirs. Condon told a
n audience sprinkled with urban designers, developers and politicians 
that there are contradictions in the resulting urban development polic
ies. Governments want the environment protected, but they also want mo
re densely populated, transit friendly communities. Four teams of urba
n designers tried to turn the new policies into new designs. Now the. 
are four sets of maps and drawings, but there was also a lot of common
 ground.  All the teams wanted to protect the remnants of never-logged
 forests beside the streams and landscapes- as much as 30 percent of t
he land base - became the parks that protected fish, wildlife and water 
quality. These green spaces are also where the planners would put a connecting 
system of trails and bicycle paths. 

The next trick was to use lot designs and housing types that got more people  
on the remaining land. The idea wasn't just to make big parks. Then thousand 
people had to live somewhere. 

Before looking to the future the designers looked at the historical reasons 
for Surrey's development patterns  today.  For example,  Toronto architect Ken 
Geenberg began describing his team's vision by showing slides of the maps 
generated by the 19th century surveyors. This century, as land owners 
subdivided their 10 -, five- and one acre parcels, an increasingly complex 
quilt of properties, single-family houses and wide, dead-end roads spread over 
the landscape, incrementally wiping out the natural features that many urban 
dwellers sought when they fled to the suburbs.

The result, Greenberg said, is something that's neither fish nor fowl. 
It's a conventional suburb with neither the advantages of the city nor the 
countryside.All four urban designs created in last week's project made no 
attempt to eliminate the square-mile road grid. That's here to stay.  what was 
proposed for the areas within these squares is far different from the 
conventional subdivisions of single-family houses now being built. 

This grid can carry far more popple without ever producing streets of the size 
or single-minded quality that you get in conventional suburbia," Greenberg 
said. The elimination of lot patterns that consumes too much land also freed 
up more land for parks and public areas. 

The new suburbia doesn't look like a sea of same-sized houses.  There are
 all sorts of housing types on the same block: small houses on small lots, 
larger houses on larger lots, and plenty of "granny suites" or potential 
rental units above the garage in the back. Huge front yards with double 
garages facing the street are gone. That's wasted space too. Instead, there 
are tiny front yards with old fashioned front porches facing the street. Shade 
tress and sidewalks encourage people to walk to a bus station or store. 

Townhouses and apartment blocks are there too, but many face a forested 
hillside or a creek. There's land to be found on commercial sites as well. 
Instead of huge setbacks from the road that become parking lots, the office 
towers and large stores are placed close to arterial streets like King George 
Highway, just as they would be in a built up city. Eventually, over time, 
parking lots would all be underground. 

The movement of cars wouldn't be the first priority.People come first, so
 quite walkways connect neighbourhoods with light-rail transit and bus st
ops. There are 500 metre-wide circles on the maps. The idea is to have at
 least a small commercial area within that walking distance. "If you want to 
get a litre of milk or buy a newspaper , there's always some place you can go 
to within your immediate neighbourhood, Greenberg said.

In this vision of a 21st-century suburb, even our human waste stays close
 to home. All the sewage doesn't end up in  billion-dollar sewage plant be
fore getting dumped into the sea. Instead, each community could have its 
own sun-powered sewage-treatment plant. The sun pours into a glass lined 
building, providing heat for vats that use certain bacteria and plants to 
clean the polluted water. This indoor sewage -treatment plant also happens to 
be the community's botanical garden, because a nutrient-rich fertiliser is one 
of the byproducts.

"All of these techniques already exist," he noted.  "They can start to be 
employed."