[Greenbuilding] Good design, good message

Wed Nov 17 11:46:16 CST 2010

Those are neat. And just think how much they could have saved if they
skipped all that infrastructure for stacking and parking the cars! That
pretty much seems to be the main difference between this approach and what
is found in some European cities: carfree apartment complexes along good
mass transit corridors and with excellent proximity and bike infrastructure.
We'll get it here in the US eventually.

May 12, 2009
 In German Suburb, Life Goes On Without Cars
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/elisabeth_rosenthal/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

VAUBAN, Germany<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/germany/index.html?inline=nyt-geo>—
Residents of this upscale community are suburban pioneers, going where
few
soccer moms or commuting executives have ever gone before: they havegiven up
their cars.

Street parking, driveways and home garages are generally forbidden in this
experimental new district on the outskirts of Freiburg, near the French and
Swiss borders. Vauban’s streets are completely “car-free” — except the main
thoroughfare, where the tram to downtown Freiburg runs, and a few streets on
one edge of the community. Car ownership is allowed, but there are only two
places to park — large garages at the edge of the development, where a
car-owner buys a space, for $40,000, along with a home.

As a result, 70 percent of Vauban’s families do not own cars, and 57 percent
sold a car to move here. “When I had a car I was always tense. I’m much
happier this way,” said Heidrun Walter, a media trainer and mother of two,
as she walked verdant streets where the swish of bicycles and the chatter of
wandering children drown out the occasional distant motor.

Vauban, completed in 2006, is an example of a growing trend in Europe, the
United States and elsewhere to separate suburban life from auto use, as a
component of a movement called “smart planning.”

Automobiles are the linchpin of suburbs, where middle-class families from
Chicago to Shanghai tend to make their homes. And that, experts say, is a
huge impediment to current efforts to drastically reduce greenhouse gas
emissions from tailpipes, and thus to reduce global
warming<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>.
Passenger cars are responsible for 12 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in
Europe<http://dataservice.eea.europa.eu/dataservice/metadetails.asp?id=1080>—
a proportion that is growing, according to the European Environment
Agency
— and up to 50 percent in some car-intensive areas in the United States.

While there have been efforts in the past two decades to make cities denser,
and better for walking, planners are now taking the concept to the suburbs
and focusing specifically on environmental benefits like reducing emissions.
Vauban, home to 5,500 residents within a rectangular square mile, may be the
most advanced experiment in low-car suburban life. But its basic precepts
are being adopted around the world in attempts to make suburbs more compact
and more accessible to public transportation, with less space for parking.
In this new approach, stores are placed a walk away, on a main street,
rather than in malls along some distant highway.

“All of our development since World War II has been centered on the car, and
that will have to change,” said David Goldberg, an official of Transportation
for America <http://t4america.org/>, a fast-growing coalition of hundreds of
groups in the United States — including environmental groups, mayors’
offices and the American Association of Retired People — who are promoting
new communities that are less dependent on cars. Mr. Goldberg added: “How
much you drive is as important as whether you have a hybrid.”

Levittown and Scarsdale, New York suburbs with spread-out homes and private
garages, were the dream towns of the 1950s and still exert a strong appeal.
But some new suburbs may well look more Vauban-like, not only in developed
countries but also in the developing world, where emissions from an
increasing number of private cars owned by the burgeoning middle class are
choking cities.

In the United States, the Environmental Protection
Agency<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/e/environmental_protection_agency/index.html?inline=nyt-org>is
promoting “car reduced” communities, and legislators are starting to
act,
if cautiously. Many experts expect public transport serving suburbs to play
a much larger role in a new six-year federal transportation bill to be
approved this year, Mr. Goldberg said. In previous bills, 80 percent of
appropriations have by law gone to highways and only 20 percent to other
transport.

In California, the Hayward Area Planning
Association<http://www.haywardcal.us/links/links.html>is developing a
Vauban-like community called Quarry Village on the outskirts
of Oakland, accessible without a car to the Bay Area Rapid Transit system
and to the California State
University<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/california_state_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org>’s
campus in Hayward.

Sherman Lewis, a professor emeritus at Cal State and a leader of the
association, says he “can’t wait to move in” and hopes that Quarry Village
will allow his family to reduce its car ownership from two to one, and
potentially to zero. But the current system is still stacked against the
project, he said, noting that mortgage lenders worry about resale value of
half-million-dollar homes that have no place for cars, and most zoning laws
in the United States still require two parking spaces per residential unit.
Quarry Village has obtained an exception from Hayward.

Besides, convincing people to give up their cars is often an uphill run.
“People in the U.S. are incredibly suspicious of any idea where people are
not going to own cars, or are going to own fewer,” said David Ceaser,
co-founder
of CarFree City
USA<http://new.carfreecity.us/AboutUs/OrganizationandMission/tabid/104/Default.aspx>,
who said no car-free suburban project the size of Vauban had been successful
in the United States.

In Europe, some governments are thinking on a national scale. In 2000,
Britain began a comprehensive effort to reform planning, to discourage car
use by requiring that new development be accessible by public transit.

“Development comprising jobs, shopping, leisure and services should not be
designed and located on the assumption that the car will represent the only
realistic means of access for the vast majority of people,” said PPG 13, the
British government’s revolutionary 2001 planning
document<http://www.communities.gov.uk/documents/planningandbuilding/pdf/155634.pdf>.
Dozens of shopping malls, fast-food restaurants and housing compounds have
been refused planning permits based on the new British regulations.

In Germany, a country that is home to Mercedes-Benz and the autobahn, life
in a car-reduced place like Vauban has its own unusual gestalt. The town is
long and relatively narrow, so that the tram into Freiburg is an easy walk
from every home. Stores, restaurants, banks and schools are more
interspersed among homes than they are in a typical suburb. Most residents,
like Ms. Walter, have carts that they haul behind bicycles for shopping
trips or children’s play dates.

For trips to stores like
IKEA<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/ikea/index.html?inline=nyt-org>or
the ski slopes, families buy cars together or use communal cars rented
out by Vauban’s car-sharing club. Ms. Walter had previously lived — with a
private car — in Freiburg as well as the United States.

“If you have one, you tend to use it,” she said. “Some people move in here
and move out rather quickly — they miss the car next door.”

Vauban, the site of a former Nazi army base, was occupied by the French Army
from the end of World War II until the reunification of Germany two decades
ago. Because it was planned as a base, the grid was never meant to
accommodate private car use: the “roads” were narrow passageways between
barracks.

The original buildings have long since been torn down. The stylish row
houses that replaced them are buildings of four or five stories, designed to
reduce heat loss and maximize energy efficiency, and trimmed with exotic
woods and elaborate balconies; free-standing homes are forbidden.

By nature, people who buy homes in Vauban are inclined to be green guinea
pigs — indeed, more than half vote for the German Green Party. Still, many
say it is the quality of life that keeps them here.

Henk Schulz, a scientist who on one afternoon last month was watching his
three young children wander around Vauban, remembers his excitement at
buying his first car. Now, he said, he is glad to be raising his children
away from cars <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/world/europe/27bus.html>;
he does not worry much about their safety in the street.

In the past few years, Vauban has become a well-known niche community, even
if it has spawned few imitators in Germany. But whether the concept will
work in California is an open question.

More than 100 would-be owners have signed up to buy in the Bay Area’s
“car-reduced” Quarry Village, and Mr. Lewis is still looking for about $2
million in seed financing to get the project off the ground.
But if it doesn’t work, his backup proposal is to build a development on the
same plot that permits unfettered car use. It would be called Village
d’Italia.
On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 8:11 AM, Sacie Lambertson <
sacie.lambertson at gmail.com> wrote:

> Good design, good message, good idea:
>
>
> http://dirt.asla.org/2010/11/10/can-green-duplexes-build-sustainable-communities/
>
> Sacie
>
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