Author's Forum: Sustainable Urban Design Handbook

Welcome everyone. Welcome to on the park bench a public square. Conversation brought to you by Congress for the new urbanism on the Park bench presents interactive conversations with thought leaders in new urbanism and allied industries. Providing an opportunity for the audience to engage in real time. The Webinar series is a platform for seeing you members to engage, debate and collaborate on pressing issues of the day. Today's Webinar is authors forum sustainable urban design handbook with author. You can share your thoughts on hashtag on the park bench at Tiny URL, Com. OTPB. Feedback. And be sure to join us for upcoming on the park bench. Next Tuesday, August 27.th Join us for authors. Forum Building. An affordable house. Author, Fernando Pais Ruisse, will discuss the second edition of his book, building an affordable house. The book adds his impressive new urbanist development and planning knowledge to the most comprehensive and honest discussion of affordable housing. Construction issues. You can [email protected] resources. Slash on the park bench. And be sure to join or renew your senior membership, get connected to a powerful movement to advance walkable urbanism, and get the resources and tools to effect change. As well as sharpen your skills in the architecture of community org and select our member portal. And now for today's webinar. Nicolarco is an urban designer, architect, and Professor. Elites element, design, a design and commute, and this consulting firm, and has been a professor of architecture and urban design at the University of Oregon since 2,004, where he is also the director of the Urbanism, next center and co-director of the Sustainable Cities Institute. Since 2018. He has also been a strategic advisor and researcher at Tno, a Dutch national. Think Tank. Professor Larko researches and teaches sustainable urban design. Has developed the sustainable Design Framework. And is the lead author on Sustainable Urban Design Handbook, published in 2,000. Yes, cities and projects on how best to apply these principles and approaches. His workaround urbanism. Next is how technological advances, such as shared mobility, self-driving cars, e-commerce, and the sharing economy are changing. City form and development. Professor Larco assists cities and projects, and future proofing. To thrive amidst these advances, has run workshops in Charrette's nationally and internationally on this topic. And has coordinated work in this area with various municipal and state agencies across America and in Europe. Professor Larko has published. In various academic and professional journals, and his work has been covered by wired the New York Times Fast Company, Bloomberg News, Forbes, The Financial Times of London and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He's a Fulbright scholar in 2,012, 2,013 in Spain, at the Polytechnic University of Catalun. And at the University of Navarra. A visiting professor at Tu Delft in 2,018, and was a Fulbright scholar in 2,019, at the Pontiff University, Catalico, in Chile. He has testified on his research to the Us. Congress has worked on research for the European Commission. And was a speaker at Tedx College Park. And I'm Lauren, Associate Director of Resources at Cnu. As a reminder. Please use the QA. Function to ask questions as they occur to you. Let's go ahead and start. Today's webinar, Nico over to you. Great. Thank you. So much, so excited to be here. I'm going to give me a second here to share my screen. There! And. And can you confirm that you can see that. Yes, all good. Okay, perfect. Thank you so much. Lauren really appreciate the the invitation to be here and the introduction. Very excited to be talking to all of you. As Lauren mentioned, my name's Nico Larco. I'm a professor at University of Oregon, and I direct the next center and code direct sustainable cities. I'm very excited to be talking today about some work that I've been working on for more than decade. Now. On how it is we think about sustainable urban design to you a framework, and then, also introduce you to a resource that we've recently published about this. So as a as a way of starting out. I, realizing now that I can actually see a chat as I'm doing this. But maybe just as a thought experiment, Ju, for each of you to think a little bit of how you currently approach sustainable urban design and projects. And this is a question I've asked many people, many different design firms, community groups. What is it you think about? How do you organize what you're gonna be? What you're gonna be taking on and how you're gonna be thinking about it. So maybe we'll just. Let you think about that. And the. The the impetus for a lot of this work is to kind of try to answer that question of how do we. Do sustainable urban design, came a lot out of looking at many different types of places and asking the question of like, Is this place sustainable, or or how do I make it sustainable? Which you realize is a tremendously complicated question. There's lots of different types of places all over the globe, this on the top here at Shanghai, then Arizona, and the bottom is a Lieville and Gabon, and. You can ask the question of, Is this sustainable for all these? And you have really different answers in terms of what might be possible. There's obviously different environmental contacts like climate contacts. But there's also really different context in terms of the culture of the place the the lifestyles of the place, the the economies of the place, the political will. And so, if we really want to move the dial on sustainability, we have to, on the one hand, understand what it means to be sustainable. You know. The the complicated parts of this question of Is it sustainable, and then figure out how we move the dial. Wherever possible, where, however possible, wherever possible, right, which has different answers in these different in these different contexts. Sustainability has a lot of in Urban. As we all know, urban is a very complicated field, and there's all these different pieces of it. It's really important to define what sustainability is, so that we know what is, we need to focus on what it is that needs to be done in any given project. How we might compare and evaluate different different schemes or different areas, and also to shed light on false claims. So here you can see images of a lot of what's traditionally considered part of sustainability. Everything from obviously the transportation network to ecology and habitat issues stormwater issues. Then we also have things. You know, one of the things that that Stuck out to me a lot as we are starting. A lot of this research is just how much oftentimes, when we talk about sustainability scale. You would see things like, you know, photovoltaics, which is. A a fantastic thing that we should be doing absolutely. But that is more of an architectural question, right? There is some work in urban thinking about solar kind of How you're how you're organized in terms of a solar access. But it's mostly an architectural question. So trying to figure out like, what are the questions we should be asking urban design. Well, it turns out there's a ton of different work that's been doing. That's fantastic work that has that touches on these topics right? And it ranges from a bunch of different disciplines. So everything from. Kind of street design to urban forestry, ecology. Storm water management! There's just a ton of different We'll see places that have started this. The problem is that most of these are tremendously. and so the the problem is that. Most of us don't know about these other parts. And then what's lacking is some kind of idea of how these things overlap with each other how decisions in one area might affect decisions in another area. There might be opportunities, synergies co-benefits within some of these, or there might be trade offs that we need to be considered. So a lot of the work that that I've been doing is really trying to pull from all this and figure out a way that we can put it all together and and understand it. Now some of the systems that exist is I asked a question of how you might approach sustainability. I'm guessing some of you were thinking of some of the rating systems that exist which have been really good systems. Well, really, good steps forward in thinking about sustainability and urban sign. There's lead cities and communities being the the kind of most recent part of it. I'll say Sites which is more landscape. Oriented and bream are mostly used in Europe. Some issues with this are with these systems, though, as you think about them as design tools or community engagement tools is, they get really technical, really fast. So they are. They're often, I think, of ways of fine tuning, a design or ways of evaluating. But they're not fantastic tools. And it. I'd be hard pressed oftentimes to use some of these tools in stakeholder engagement. As they. They get really complicated, much quicker, I think, than is helpful. They also range in terms of what types of things they're looking at. For instance, you know, talks about. Good governance. Not only how it is, you know, the the physical aspect so really honing on the physical design aspects is is difficult, and I would say, is, there is lacking a clear system. So from all this, you know, all these motivations and background research was trying to understand, how do we get our arms around this topic of sustainable urban design. What are, what are the things we should be looking at? And from the research that I was that I was talking about, and a large number of interviews and a range, different fields. Distilled it down to these 5 main parts. The 1st one is energy use and greenhouse gas, based on transportation, land use. And numerous is this is this is no surprise to to many people who are new urbans. Right? This idea of how we get people out of cars and into bike pet transit a whole lot of work done in that. The next one is water, which is mostly storm water issues, and urban is what we deal with. We somewhat deal with potable water, but mostly storm water issues when water falls from the sky. What happens to it? How do we deal with that? Ecology and habit fairly straightforward. Thinking about the the natural environment that exists around us and the opportunities for supporting species in that and natural cycles. Energy and production. Is, is purposefully separated far away from greenhouse gas and transparency and land use, because these are often put together. But they're really different issues, right? The energy with transposition land is really is about the organization of the city overall. To get people, as I mentioned, out of cars and into bike pet transit energy. Some production is really about for non transportation issues is things like. Embodied energy of a city. How it is that the the. The way that we're developing how much body energy is is in those things like creating micro climates. And things like you know, mitigating the urban heat effect. Last one is equity and health, which really deals with things such as affordability, accessibility, physical activity. How much you're moving around. Safety and then social mobility. How it is, you know, we can get out of whatever economic situation we're in into a better economic situation and how much the built environment kind of impacts that. So these 5 major, I call these outcome goals are kind of guide the most of what we wanna do in sustainable urban design. So with that the. But it is actually separated out into these 4 scales, and these should feel somewhat or reminiscent for those of you who are in work a lot with new urbanism region and city. Large kind of scales. District neighborhood, where we have a lot of urban design projects tend to sit and then difference here, compared to some of the work that's done with the charter, is this separation to block and street and project parcel. And these are basically. The same scale. But they're differentiating. That block and street is typically the public realm. And project parcel is typically the private sector route. This is not always the case. Obviously, if you think about Large campuses or something like that. Right? These things kind of blur. But what this does is it gives you this. Overview of the outcome goals that we're that we're looking towards. And then the different scales at which we might work. From that then I developed, the the. Or organize all these specific. Physical. Urban design elements, physical things that you could do with city in the city into each one of these kind of within this matrix, and I will put a link in the chat as soon as we're done with a presentation which. Sent you to this this framework. But what this does is it helps, you understand? Kind of that gets you arms around the entire topic of sustainability and urban design. And you can do a bunch of different things with this. On the one hand, if you have a project, for instance, at you know this scale, this gives you a a list, a checklist of things that you should be paying attention to, right? What? What kinds of questions you should be asking and design. If you have a certain outcome goal that you're really focused on. Well, these are all the things that need to happen at the different scales to get to that outcome goal. So you can use this, for instance, as a design tool. I'll talk a little bit more about this later, but you can use this as a design tool. You can use this as a as a tool, right? How are we doing with each one of these topics in in an area. You can use this as a stakeholder engagement tool. Right? Stakeholders typically know very well the things that the the outcomes that they want, those pieces on the left hand side. Well, this is. I say this all the time. Magic decoder ring right? That lets you understand. Well, here's the physical things you need to do to be able to get to that outcome goal. Right. So this kind of organized the whole piece. So what I'm gonna do now is go briefly and fairly quickly through each one of these different How come goal categories give you a sense of how this is organized and how you might use it. So if we look at energy use based on greenhouse gas. Or sorry introducing and greenhouse gas based on transposition land use. As I mentioned before, the main idea is, how do we get people out of cars and into bike transit right? And there's a whole range of things that we can be doing. At the largest scale, the region city scale. We're talking about things like compact development super important, you know. No surprise to to an urbanist more compact development. Creates Reduces the distance between a different destinations and allows much more mixture of uses. Fantastic. Right? With that, though at this scale we're also talking about robust transit networks, robust bicycle networks, right? Really important at the larger scale. Balance vehicular networks. We do still need cars, but that doesn't mean that they need to dominate everything and then at the for the land. Use this regional land use mix, making sure that we. We don't have all of our residential in one part of the city, all of our industrial and other part of city right that we're mixing these things. At the next scale, at the district scale. We can think of a couple of different things one of the big ones is thinking about our. Our pedestrian networks, and how that's created through small and defined blocks and street kind of street network connectivity. So the image on the left here. This is downtown Portland, which we are famous for our 200 by 200. Foot grid, very, very small grid, which makes it the city feel tremendously walkable. Really easy to get from any one place you know, to another place in a fairly direct path. This is more or less anywhere. We've seen this pattern all over the country, and these kind of loops and lollipops and and Serpentine roads, where, if I live, for instance, here and I want to get to a friend who lives there instead of having this, you know, fairly straightforward short distance. I need to do this large round about going out here, probably hitting an arterial coming back. And then going to that which you know can more than double the distance that you need to travel, which means that we will all do what we typically, you know, a rational decision which is well, okay, you know. Why don't you get? Ask your kids get in the car to take him to see that friends be able to walk to those locations. So really important pedestrian, how we have our block structure makes it makes really big difference, this same kind of at the scale. We also think about things like our. High density, zoning. And so what's the size of our lots? What kinds of buildings can we make? How much density can we put in there, what kind of zoning is allowing that and those types of things. And then we can also think at the same scale. About what, how we're doing the mixed land use at the at the smaller the district scale. So this is more thinking about the 15 min city. Do we have a range of. Uses where I can get to most anything I need to get to in in 80% of my needs are fulfilled where, within a walking distance or short biking distance. At the block and street scale. We're thinking about things like streets again. This is Miss will be no surprise. People working. So multimodal street design, thinking about pedestrian streets, bicycle-friendly streets, transit friendly streets and streets that allow the car, but are not dominated by the car. This is an image from Nakos. Urban street sign guide. If you are not familiar with that. Publication is fantastic, has great great resources, a great resource for how to design streets. And we worked with on on the this work in the book that I'll be talking about in just a little bit. But the idea is that all these different modes have a place a designated space right? Have? One does not dominate or create problems for the other. So, figuring out how you integrate all those different pieces. Also at the same scale, we can think about things such as parking, which, on the one hand, is, do we? Or how do we organize parking in terms of? Is it district parking some such as the image that you see on the left, where there's a parking garage that. Feeds a whole district, or we have on site parking, which is the image that you see on the right, which you know causes a lot of takes up a lot of space, and then also, it needs to be you. Isn't used. Throughout the day in in quite as rigorous way. So how it is that we organize our parking. So how does the parking touch the street. Is there a is there an edge condition that defines the edge of the street, or does it, you know, bleed into the parking? what kinds of uses might we put on a ground floor and put parking behind? Do we put parking on corner lots or within the block? What's the extent of the parking along the block, or connect. Be more internalized. Right? So those kind of design decisions make a big difference on. If you decide to walk or bike or use transit. And then finally, in this category, looking at the project parcel a whole lot of questions on how it is that you how it is, the buildings are supporting. The sustainability at the urban scale. So one of the questions which again is to be of no surprise is this idea of like entrances and transparency. The image on the left is a project Wh, which has, you can see behind there. There's tall towers that this project is is attached. But instead of having all the circulation be internal, each one of these units, it's actually a town home which looks directly out on the street connects directly onto the street. So there's entrances, and there's transparency. You can see it on the right hand side in a commercial setting, where once again instead of creating a blank wall there. The way that the building is fronting the street, the way that you're creating active street edges makes a tremendous difference in terms of the. How vibrant the street feels! And and how much activity happens there, and how safe it feels right. So these are all ways that the built environment at all, these different scales is helping get to that goal of getting people out of cars and invite transit. Right? As as I mentioned before, my sense is, none of this is surprising to to any of you with the work that typically happens in in modernism. If we look at storm water. There's 2 main things that we want to be doing. On the one hand, we're trying to minimize the amount of runoff that exists, and the other hand so reduce the amount of when the water. When water hits the ground, try to get it back into the ground as quickly as possible, and then the other part is we want to mitigate that runoff. So. If we look at the this, a slide from the EPA, where you can see that in a natural state, right? There's a a. 40% is about transportation. 25% of the water that falls goes into deep infiltration. 25% shallow. Filtration. You only have 10% of runoff right? That. Worlds along the surface. In more urbanized settings. Right? Some of the things that we're really hoping for with that dense kind of development. You end up getting a a much. Different mix, only 5% goes into deep infiltration. This is a huge reduction of aquifers being filled up, a 10% file shall, and more than 5 times 55% of the water becomes run off right? So this is an enormous question or problem. And you know, most of this water is in urban areas in that are not taking sustainable approaches are taking that water in as quickly as possible, putting back into natural systems. So that means that you've got a lot of fast moving hot and polluted water going to the natural systems and with sustainable systems. What you really wanna do is exactly the opposite. You wanna try to cool the water down. Cool, cool it off, slow it down, filter it, and put it back into the natural system as much as possible. So what are some of the things that we might do? So the 1st thing in terms of minimizing. At the larger scale, you know. We're talking about Trying to create compact development. So this is a slide also from the EPA which looks at the this is a watershed, and the option of having all dense development happening in one area versus that same amount of development spread over an entire a watershed. And even though this actually creates a tremendous amount of problems for that area that has densely developed this is actually much worse because it has an a small effect. Everywhere you are creating pollutes. You are creating a runoff. All over the the larger watershed. And, in fact, this creates, helps, maintain more of a natural system, and then you can mitigate the impacts that are happening there. So again, compact development being really important. And trying to minimize and mitigate, run. Otherwise other ways you can mimic sorry. Minimize runoff is simply by reducing the amount of previous or impervious surfaces, so creating streets that are more narrow, fantastic for that great for pedestrian kind of issues as well, but really great for stormwater issues creating impervious surfaces in that. And then, you know, nothing we do is trees. So fantastic studies out of California showing that a tree canopy itself can hold about 24% of the water that falls from the sky, and so that never touches ground. It's an image right after a a storm event. And you can see that this tree canopies and the bark. Actually, the bark has a really big role to play in. This actually holds the water and never has it touch the ground. So huge ways that all these different ways of minimizing the amount of runoff. Then there's ways of mitigating which I'm sure you're all familiar with as well. This idea of, you know, detention ponds, bios, rain gardens all ways that we can, instead of putting water into pipes, moving it quickly and hot and and polluted into natural waterways. These are all systems that help cool it down. Slow it down, filter it, and then put it back in natural systems, be it through in in larger detention, or, you know, slowly infiltrating step of the way in rain gardens and such. Trees as well hold a really have a great Impact on this as well as they can provide transpiration. This is where the tree is pulling water up out of the soil, through its roots up into the canopy and coming out through the leaves. There's mud in the leaves, and so and this is tremendous amount of water that can you know, thousands of gallons of water. A mature can put it back thousands gallons of water into the air. In a day. And so this is a fantastic way of. Pulling water out of the out of the soil, and giving the soil more capacity to take on more water right. So, as mentioned with storm, 2 big things. Reducing the amount of runoff and then mitigating the runoff at these different scales. In terms of ecology and habitat. There's 3 things that we really wanna do. On the one hand. Don't touch things that you shouldn't be touching. Leave critical areas undisturbed as much as possible. Where we do need to touch it. We need to figure out how we mitigate those effects kind of interaction, and then we also work at a scale that's large enough at urban side work. We can actually create micro habitats. So what does this mean in terms of How this might work at these different scales. Well, at the largest scale, we're really talking. About. Compact development being really good. So that we're not disturbing. We're not spreading out over the landscape, and we're leaving more land untouched. But then we're also talking about robust ecological networks. So here you can see with an urban area. This fantastic ecological network. That moves through throughout that area. This is an excellent place. On the one hand. Could be for recreation. But it's a great place for species to move. From one place to another to have large amounts of habitat, to be able to have places to forage or places for protection or for mating whatever might be needed. Oftentimes we think of urban areas as an anathetical to ecology in habitat. But there's enormous opportunities to bring these things together, and great examples throughout the country where this has happened. As we think about these ecological corridors of corridors, there's, you know, different sizes of corridors, different ways that species might move between these. And there's really big difference between what is considered core habitat. You know, the larger kind of expanses. There's some species that really only can exist within core habitat and be undisturbed, or or feel more protected from things outside of it. And then there's this kind of edge habitat which happens around the core habitats. Which could be between 2 different types of habitats or between, for instance, habitat and developed areas. And so, understanding how it is that those pieces interact what species work best at one scale or another, scales really, really important. This is an image here from Bulkstat, where you can see the the, the this fantastic kind of Buffer between the built environment that's happening on the background there. This becomes this buffer and then these wetlands up in front. And we can think about different. Buffers that we might need between different types of development. And this we really need to focus on what kind of species we're most interested in. So here we're looking at the block and street scale, thinking about robust ecological area buffers from the framework. But depending on what species we're looking at that might tell you the length or the size of the buffer that you might need, and you know you might need to modify that based on. If there's more of a slope or more a higher intensity of development in one place for an. In interviewing a lot of people working in the area of ecology, one of things became clear. I often ask, you know, what's the most important thing, urban in terms of ecological resilience and and robustness. And one of the topics came back over and over again. Was this question of verticality. And the basic idea behind that is that in natural in many natural habitats there is a real mix of. Canopy. A a tall canopy bushes shrubs. Sedges. Ground cover this whole range of different vertical structure, and that creates these very types of habitat that's being created which is really good, not only for different species, but maybe different parts. Life cycles, different parts of life cycle for any one species, so. On the left here is, if any of you haven't been out to Oregon, this is what our natural areas look like. The the Our rainfall that we have out here really beautiful area. And you can see a tremendous amount of vertical complexity in this. And what we typically build is the thing on the right in urban areas, right? Which is this kind of mono culture of grass. And then mono culture of one kind of tree repeated. These I call these lollipop trees throughout. And it's really possible that that makes sense in places, maybe where you wanna have a, you know, be able to kick a ball around or throw a Frisbee, but. We do so much of our open space this way, and it doesn't necessarily create opportunities for habitat. Here's an example where you can actually put these things, you know, do something in between. And this is actually a an area off of a parking lot. Then, on the one hand, it's acting as as a stormwater. Rain guard! So this is water coming off of the the asphalt you see, on the right going instead of going into a pipe instead of going into this The strange area. Where. Not only is that where the water can accumulate, but instead of just planting it with grass, for instance, we're putting gravel in. There's this fantastic vertical complexity. So you see, there's trees, there's bushes, there's sedges and there's ground cover. And so this creates a much more robust ecological area. And I'll also mention that as we think about ecology and habitat, some of the most important species that we really need to think about or classes species is insects. You know, if insects are doing well. Talk to a Callist. They always say the insects are doing well. Then everything upstream is gonna be doing well from that. So. Really important to create a habitat like this for these types of species. We also have that opportunity, as I mentioned, to create micro habitats. This is an example of a of a park. That has both wetlands. Actual water areas wetlands Grasslands. And then kind of this oak savannah up at the top and the left there. It's a little bit of like a zoo is kind of look here, because they're trying to put everything into one place. But it does actually work to create all these habitat. And you know there are many species of birds actually, that that inhabit this and many species of insects, so we do have the opportunity, as urban signers to create these these micro habitats. At the at the Block Street Project parcel. We go to the next category looking at energy use and production. And here, as I mentioned, we're really talking about Not about the transportation related energy use, but more non transportation. Sources, or or. Not transportation. The reasons to be using energy. This is. A fairly complicated topic in that. You know, climates are very different. So in in a lot of the work we've done, we've separated kind of into these 4 main classes of climates, hot, dry climates, hot, humid, and hot climates temperate climates typically called or cold climates. And we would act differently in each one of these areas. So on the one hand, we can think about what housing typologies might be. Best for these different. Climatic zones. So you can look here, we we looked at these 6 main housing. And. Kind of looked at which ones make the most sense right? How is urban the opportunity for sustainability at the architectural scale. So, looking at how these things might need a solar exposure or access to wind access to ventilation these types of things. And I'll mention here as well that some of the things that you this doesn't necessarily say that you shouldn't use towers anywhere, because, you know, Towers might make sense in in some context, especially if you're looking for really high density. But just understand that. You know, there's a trade off between the benefits you might get from density and the actual thematic response. The the energy use that the building scale is gonna have. Also within this energy production, we can think about the the color material. So the the albedo effect. So having cool and green surfaces really makes a big difference in reducing the urban heel and effect. This is a really great example from Barcelona, a street where, you know the the public realm has really been substantially greened, and it helps create a much, much cooler area. For this. The other thing we could think about in this category is this question of embodied energy. So here we have 4 examples in Going Florida. Oh, I don't remember which one the middle one is Barcelona, and then New York. And. If you think about, we often think about embodied energy at the scale, right? How much energy is needed to, you know. Use a certain enclosure system, we'll say, or or sorry to. To mine all the materials for it, to process it to manufacture it, to transport it, to, then operate it in a building, and then have dispose of it. Well, that same idea of embodied energy we can think of in the urban realm. So if you think about, you know some of the big pieces of embodied energy we have are, for instance, all of our infrastructure, our streets, our sewers, our electrical systems, these types of things. And in the you know the in New York. You know a hundred feet of street. Use has a certain amount of embodied energy within it, but it serves, you know. We're talking 50, a hundred, 200 units, whereas the development, low density, development, suburban development, we have the similar or sometimes even more embodied energy because of the size of streets. And yet we're only serving. You know. 3, 4, 5 units. So we can think about the overall organization. Of our cities having a really important effect on the embodied energy of the city. The last category is equity and health. And in that there's really these 5 main pieces of it, that urban sign effects. So on the one hand, affordability. So how is it that the transportation network, as I talked about before the the. Getting people out of cars and a bike pet transit isn't only good for the energy use part of this, but it's also a really important for equity considerations it. It affects the affordability. If I have to use a lot of my money for transportation, it actually affects how much my quality of life and my affordability overall. So thinking about the our transportation network, our density, this lot sizes lot Shapes. Rights can have big effect on the affordability of a place accessibility. All the transportation piece that I talked about before. Obviously. Physical activity really talks about things like, on the one hand, the active transportation. So do I have a transportation system that has me walking a biking and using transit which usually starts and ends with walking and biking but also what kind of parks are available, you know, thinking about the district, neighborhood and block street scale. What kind of open spaces are available a huge indicator of if people will be physically active is how easier hard it is for people to get to these. Open spaces. If it's really easy for you to get to a place that you do exercise, there's a huge huge larger chance that you'll actually be doing exercise. And then what type of of open space you have, and may really coordinate that with the different demographics. Young kids obviously need playgrounds and some open space to run around A. Teens and middle-aged adults. Want courts and fields to be able to run out. And then older adults want places that they can walk, and very importantly, places they can sit and stroll and and watch people go by. In terms of safety. We're talking about safety from crashes. Again. A lot of the transportation work that I talked about for is really our categories is important for this. But also safety. From pollutes. So where do we have our school's, for instance, in relationship to freeways and those types of things. And then social mobility. There's been a number of studies in the last decade that have shown how much the design physical design of the built environment. Affects people's ability to get out of poverty. And you know. Not surprisingly affordability and accessibility. Have a huge piece to do with this right. If I'm spending most of my money to get around the city, or I'm spending most of my time to get around the city. And therefore I you know, I have difficult to access jobs, education training. You know, services, healthcare, these types of things that's gonna really diminish my ability to to improve my social economics situation. So okay. So that was very quickly. Going over these these different pieces just as an introduction. I wanna talk a little bit about how it is that that you might use this. So, on the one hand, as I mentioned. You can think about this in terms of focusing on your outcome goals that you're most interested in. And this understanding of like these are all the pieces that need to be in place to make that thing happen. And, on the other hand, you can think about this. I've got a project that a specific scale we're doing. We're working with a community and a specific project. I wanna do evaluation at specific scale. Well, these are all the questions that I should be asking. And you can think about. On the one hand. These are. These are the things you should be asking about the project itself. But you can also think about. Well, what situation is this other scale in right? What? What is the what's the context, what things are already working well and what things might be a bigger lift, right? So it can be a really helpful design tool. With this. You could also the using the frame can also help you understand synergies and code benefits. So, for instance, you know, one of the questions that all urban designers run into at some point is figuring out how you deal with your trees. And most projects in most cities, typically, you know, decide on trees based on whatever happened in the block next door. And you know, 2030 feet on center, and that's what we do. But you can use this framework to think about. And this approach. Broader ideas of sustainable urban sign to make more informed decisions. On the one hand, you can think about. In terms of energy use and greenhouse gas. How is it? How is it that the trees are helping create a pedestrian or bike friendly environment, right? So everything from trees really acting as buffers between the street and the pedestrian realm. To how it is that the street, how the trees are, you know, in here, creating this fantastic dappled light here, which makes a beautiful kind of pedestrian environment in terms of water we can think about in stormwater. We can think about what species of trees we're using. What's the canopy like, what's the bark structure like? How much water is it gonna be able to hold? And different types of events? How much water will it be able to evaporate in those events. We can also think about ecology and habitat. We often create model cultures with street trees, which I think is a valid approach as well. But you can also think about. Well, maybe instead of. 2030 feet on center. I create clusters of these trees, and maybe I mix the species up within a block which can expand the robustness, and also help with a bunch of different species right? Vary the species that are really served by the habitat. In terms of energy and production. You could think about the location of these trees should they be on the east side, west, side, north, south side. How close to the building could they, should they be? Should they be deciduous or evergreen? How much shading are they going to be creating? How do they help create the the microclimate in this area? Those types of things, and in terms of equity and health. You can also think about things which is an issue in many cities. Which is how how much, how allergenic are these trees? Are there? Certain trees create? You know, a lot of problems, health problems for people at different times of the year. What tree, what species might have choose for that? So. Again this one question of like, what tree should I use? And where should I put it as you go, as you use this framework and understand all the different parts of sustainability helps you make more sophisticated decisions around that. You can also use this to help think about trade offs. So I showed this slide before, you know, with this seems like an ideal situation for runoff, and this seems like a horrible situation for runoff. But, conversely, this is a great situation for density and energy and greenhouse gas, getting people out of cars and bike pet transit as opposed to that. So. This. This, the frame will let you kind of. Take a look at, and makes evident where some of the trade offs might be, and how best to mitigate around these things. You can think through the the different aspects of that. So ways of using this framework, and I've mentioned a couple of these. I'll just talk a little bit more right now. So on the one hand. You can use as a design tool. It's really what questions need to be asked of a project. So you can look through and figure out. This is a scale that we're working on. These are all the things that we need to be asking. It doesn't mean that you're gonna be able to answer all those things. It doesn't mean that there's going to be the political will or economic will to work on all those things, but you could at least ask the question, to figure out what kinds of things make sense to to be touching upon. You can also use this to do existing conditions or assessment. And I'll show you an example of this in just a little bit, but you could look at a site that you're about to be working on, and. Go through each one of these topics and just ask the question, Is this. Working well, do we do we have good? Is it? Does this have good bones? So we can actually build on this? Is this a low hangar fruit, something that we could be improving. Is it really hard? And we really need to figure out how to mitigate the fact that we don't have that that element there. So it really helps you do this kind of evaluation. You can also use it to evaluate different schemes. Right? So we've got 4 different proposals, but for what might happen here. Is which proposal is most sustainable? Well, again, complicated question, well, let's look through the matrix which parts of it make the most sense are, are, gonna be the most beneficial, and which are are most painful. In terms of the client and stakeholder engagement tool. It's. Stakeholders are usually really good, as I mentioned before, in understanding what it is. The outcomes that they want, the things that they find are important. And this helps translate. Which oftentimes, you know, people who are not in the design. Fields don't understand how it is that you know my protecting some specific species. What are all the pieces across all the different scales that need to need to come in line, come to play to help make that thing happen. So it's a great way of. As I mentioned this magic decoder ring to help people understand how to translate. Their interest into the physical sign across all these different scales it also lets people see like, Oh, my interest is in there. Oh, but there's these other interests as well. So you can think about where there's a potential benefits co- benefits over there, and also just the understanding that there's other other other issues that are important. If we think about sustainably. And finally, you can talk about Kind of design team composition with this. So we've done this with a couple different firms where. You go through your your office and just ask people to rate themselves on. This is a topic I know each one of these elements in the framework. This is a topic I know really. Well, this is a topic that I kinda know, and this is a topic I know nothing about one of the difficulties with sustainable urban design is that it covers a range of different topics. And it's hard it's. Most people don't know everything, and so figuring out how you balance a team to make sure that you're covering those things so it can make help. You figure out how you create a a design or planning team or project team on these things it could also help you understand where you might need training and how where you need to. You know, beef up the expertise in your office. Or it can also help you understand. Who the next person you should hire, and what kinds of skills you might be looking for for that. So To give you just a quick example of how you might use this framework. This is a project that we did. This is the the. My goodness, I'm forgetting the name of this. The Lloyd district. Important. So for those of you who are familiar with Portland, what you see there on the lower left hand side is downtown up here. There's the there's a now really defunct mall that's with a new owner. This is a the convention center, and this is where the blazers play. And the the owners of this of this, the new owners of the small. We're at thinking about how to redo this area and. We took them on as clients along with the city at the same time, to say, Well, what could happen here? What might we do here, and the question of like, How do we make this more sustainable. So we did an evaluation where we looked at all the different elements, and just quickly went through and said, Well, these things work well already. You're in good shape or there's these things are likely or you could be doing something, and these things are all might might be Might be hard to list. So you gotta figure out how it is. You can what you might be able to do to mitigate that, or bring in partners to make that work. And you can do this at all the different scales. So we kind of went scale by scale talking about this Which lets. The. Let's. The the planning design development team, understand. What's possible, what's easy, what's hard, and what some approaches might be to this. So. Over the last 10 years I've been working on developing that framework into a book that just recently got published a few months ago called the Sustainable Urban sign Handbook, and I developed this with a Karnen urban architect, who is now. Interestingly, about to be the mayor elect of the city of Eugene. And what the book does it takes. All the elements that are in the framework. And there's a chapter for each element. I'm going to show you. Basically how the chapters are organized give you a sense of how it works. So each one of the elements that you saw in the framework. Have a Have its own chapter. Where talks about what the thing is, has a brief description, what the element are, topics that you might not be familiar with. Talks briefly about what metrics are most important here. Has a section. We call this the dashboard here, this page. A section that talks about how this element is related to other urban sign elements, and this is one of the parts that I'm most proud of within the book. It talks about how this element is influenced by other elements and how it influences other elements. So you start to understand what the synergies are and where they interact with each other. With implementation. It talks about both in Greenfield and retrofits. Basically, what's the relative cost of this, and how hard, what political will necessary to make this thing happen. Each section. Each element, then, has a section on recommended approach. This is what we're what we're shooting for a typical approach. This is what we often see in in urban areas throughout the country. Why, it's important. And this is where we have mostly peer viewed literature, and then professional best practices. And then a section on background which talks about For for people who are not as familiar with this, some of the basic things you know, for instance, in your basic things you need to know. So, for instance, in this topic being core and edge habitat where you might want to buffer, and how different characteristics might impact the amount that you wanna buffer. And then each element also has a section called Considerations and Caveats, which is meant to. Introduce some of the nuances of these things. So we talk about element, political issues, maintenance or operational issues and other issues so trying to give you, as I mentioned, a little bit more nuance, and then, finally, the last part is these design guides. So their guidelines that help you make good decisions in schematic design phases so that you won't create problems for yourself later on. So you can see example of these pieces here. So each, as I mentioned, each element in the framework has this chapter like this, so gives you a way to kind of understand how they're related to each other, and more information about those, each one of them, and then the kinds of things that you should be doing. So I should give, an I'd like to give an enormous thank you to a lot of different people who help make this happen within this list are a number of professionals who helped us understand, especially areas that I was not as familiar with. Professors, People who are working in the field, and students who did a lot of the early research on this work so enormous. Thank you, and obviously enormous. Thank you, Karen, who's my co-author and and this piece. So I invite you to take a look at the book and hopefully it's helpful. And but also tell us if there's things that don't work so that we can figure out how to improve them for a future additions. I'll mention only briefly here that I also do work on as was mentioned earlier by Lauren, I also direct the urban next center, where we look at the impacts of emerging technology on city. So things like. Shared shared mobility and self driving cars and e-commerce. How that affects. We're less interested in the. Those technology. What we're interested in is how those things affect land use urban design, transportation and real estate. And really, the important thing is how those things affect equity, health, the environment and the economy. So if you're interested, this is, you can look, go to Urban next org where we have a lot of this research. In this framework, I do only do frameworks. But this other framework on those topics and in case you're interested in being in. Amsterdam and October we're holding a conference with We usually do the conference in the States, but this year we're doing it in Europe, and we're doing that with you, Delft, Tno and Ams, which is. The city of Amsterdam's kind of innovation arm to invite you to. Kind of that. Also, there's a website. If you're interested, lots of information on this. So to sum up, hopefully, this is a helpful tool for you. It is. Really meant not to be prescriptive, but instead, to give you a sense of the types of things you need to be thinking about and give you enough information to. Understand the relationships of each one of these things, and what kinds of things you might be doing. after working for. More than 10 years on developing this work. I'm super excited now to be getting into the hands of people who can use it, so I hope it's helpful to you, and I'm also, as Lauren mentioned. I also have a small urban design consulting firm. So if there's interest, I'm also really excited to be helping on specific projects. So with that, maybe I'll stop my share and Ask if there's questions. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Nico. That was really great. As somebody who got the opportunity to read the book. It was really awesome, just seeing it broken down with all the visuals and the examples at each scale for each topic. So yeah, we have some. QA. Questions coming in. I'll just note for our audience that all of these webinars are recorded. And will be available within 24 h of the end of this. Webinar you should either receive an email or you can check them out right on our Youtube channel or on our website. Cnuorg. So I'm actually gonna go right in. We already got some really excellent questions. So I'm gonna go through and. See what we have. There was this really interesting one that came in pretty early from Vaidilda. Which is most cities are already developed and difficult to change. Street networks, infrastructures. What are your thoughts about transitioning towards sustainability and any key considerations. That is a great question. Thank you for that. 1st of all, I'll just say that I put in the chat the link to A site that has the framework itself. So you can look at that. I know it's like small text on the screen, and also some sample chapters, so places that are developed are. On the one hand, we'll say harder, but also have a lot of opportunities as well. There's tremendous opportunity, especially in this country for infill and denser development. So there's enormous opportunities for that. I think most of the development that we're gonna be that we'll be seeing. And hopefully, that we're seeing is actually infillment and redevelopment of areas. So there's all sorts of things we can do in that you might have less opportunity to redo larger scale. Street networks. But there's huge opportunities to Redo street design density connectivity definitely a ton of opportunity to redo stormwater. I think you know, a really good example of that is the city of Portland, city. Portland is leading nationally on stormwater infrastructure, and it's not doing it in the. There's not really new areas of Portland's kind of bound by cities all around. So within the city itself, there's a norms opportunities to to redevelop areas and to shift away from kind of a traditional ways of doing this same kind of thing for creating. Habitat ecology, a huge opportunity for ecological networks that either exist or need to be need to be strengthened. Daylighting of creeks so. Yes, I I think you know. Enormous amount of of need for for Redevelopment of our urban areas. Awesome. Yeah, we had a couple folks kind of chime in for some specific examples on this topic. Does this framework apply to both suburban infill projects and brown field redevelopments. Yes, yes, absolutely. And, as I mentioned before. This is not. This is specifically meant to not be prescriptive, and one of the one of the. One of the motivations for doing this work is as I was just starting this and looking for you know what are some good guides for sustained blurb and design. A lot of guides really. Put out these fantastic projects like Hammerby, Solstad, or Bob. Which are just like fantastic, beautiful everything, I mean they they're addressing almost every topic. And the truth is that most projects either don't have the political will or the economic ability to do these things, or you know the the we'll say the culture of the place doesn't really lend itself to that. And I think we're in a situation where we can't just say, well, we can only do the most like fantastic pristine. Everything works and everyone's. Everything is dealt with. As as I mentioned, as I show those images earlier with Shanghai and Arizona and And gabone. We need to figure out how we move the dial on every single project. So if we have a, you know single, if we have a mixed use, you know. Dense multimodal. Project fantastic hopefully. This is a helpful guide for that, and can help you. Fine tune that. If we have a suburban single family, home, neighborhood. Well, there's a ton of stuff that you can be doing right. That's not a well, we don't have density, and therefore well, no, there's a ton of other things that we can be doing. How do we make that as sustainable as possible, and also maybe point to a future that you know, at some point. this can be redeveloped even more so so absolutely. Yes, yes, all these different contacts. Wonderful. Yeah, no, that totally makes sense, I think, as you've been saying, this is, you know, a framework, and we should use it. For the context that we are in. And kind of on that same topic. We have a question about. Have you used this matrix and handbook to advocate for sustainable solutions and citywide policy? So going back to that, will. I mean? If so, what approaches and arguments have been most effective. So. What they're gonna there's 2 parts to this answer on the one hand. So I've not personally used it for. Like, specifically to go after regulations again. We we've just recently finished this work. So we're really excited to be applying it for such things. But there is Elizabeth Mcdonald from University of California, Berkeley. So this, the framework is. Built on an article that I published. About 10 years ago. On on kind of. Propose this, and she published an article a couple of years later which overlaid kind of the planning regulatory structures that help make these things happen at these different scales. So I would highly recommend taking a look at that in terms of okay, well, this is the physical stuff that needs to happen. What are the regulatory pieces that help. That affect our opportunity to be doing these types of things. I will say I've had really great conversations since the this. The book came out with different groups on how to do exactly what you're talking about. Excellent conversation with the city of New York. A planning department where you presented this, and one of the. People at the meeting said, Well, what we need to do is we need to look at each one of these topics and figure out what regulations we have that are impacting right? That each one of the our opportunity do these things. Figure out where there's things are easy. And we can, you know, kind of Streamline things, and where we really need to do so some Introspective evaluation of like. Well, we need to change these things right, because this is not allowing these different things to work, and oftentimes a lot of the problems is actually in the overlaps of some of these topics. Right? The synergies between some of these topics. So yeah. That's a yes, I'm my. I'm hopeful, and I will be working on helping to use these to help change regulations. Yes. Wonderful. Yeah, we are. The momentum is just starting with this book. I think. We had this really great question from Kimberly Burroughs. I'll just kind of read the whole comment. I'm curious why equity is pulled out as a separate outcome goal in the framework. Rather than embedded in each part of sustainable urban design. I see the importance of considering who has access and structures that challenge that. Could you speak to? Why you made this decision? And what are the trade offs. Excellent question, and this is like part of like, the struggle of putting this book together and goes a little bit to the part where I was talking about how each one of the elements kind of talks about how it relates to other elements. Part of the difficulty of sustainable design is that it's a complicated topic. And and that complexity is sometimes either off putting to people. And I'll say people being planners, designers, developers. Stakeholders right? Or you know, you kind of like. Throw your hands up in the air. I can't do anything here. And so part of what we're trying to do is separate pieces so that it could be clear it it like digestible, understandable chunks of like, oh, this is why this thing's important, and these are the kinds of things I need to do. And then talking about how these things are related to each other. You know, I think the the best example of you know. What you're talking about is. Transportation right. The entire transportation network and moving towards bike transit is really important for energy reasons. But it's also tremendously important for equity reasons. The car is the most expensive way that we can. And move around our cities. The idea was to try to. Separate things out, so that they so that we understand them individually, but then really work on making those connections. And I, and I recognize that there's the risk that then. Equity becomes this other thing right that we don't integrate. And I can only say, the hope is that that's not how it's used right that this is a tool, and then it's up to designers, planners, developers. To to grab this and and make sure that all the pieces are represented within. There. Absolutely. Yeah, that definitely makes sense. I will say, just for audience, we are right at time. It's 1 o'clock Eastern. So if folks have to hop off, just know that this will be recorded and available. They're just a few more questions, and I know I have you for a few more minutes, Nico, so I'm going to use them. I have a question as a moderator that I think would be a good time to ask. Which is just kind of in the process of doing this whole book. Kind of, you know, be involved in this for quite a long time. What advice would you give to designers, planners, and stakeholders when it comes to using this handbook most effectively? Great question. And I hope people do use it. And if there's ways that you're using it that are helpful, please let me know if you're ways that you're using it. And you things you see in it. Also, please let me know, because we're trying. My. My goal is to make this. This is like. 1st draft, and we'll continue. Actually, it's like 12th draft. But we'll continue to make this better and better. I'd say, you know, if you, the easiest way to really use the book is really to start with a framework. This is, we're talking about this earlier, Lauren. It's not a book that you're gonna like read from beginning to end. It is a book that you should really start with a framework and understand how that works. Cause that organized everything. As I mentioned before. Is it signer and planner, this gonna help? You understand what kind of questions you need to be asking? What the opportunities are. Synergies are between these things. You can also use that as a. As an evaluation tool, as I mentioned, again starting with a framework, and then. Going into the book to figure out much more like what the what. The core information that you need. A big challenge of this book was simply synthesis. Taking a whole lot of information, figuring out what's the most important pieces, and and trying to translate that in a clear, graphically friendly, and understandable way. And then also, as I mentioned, with the stakeholders, like starting with goals, using the framework. Establish goals. Talk about that kind of left hand side first.st And then talk about well, what's that mean in the built environment? Well, what conditions do we have here? What should we prioritise in terms of the things we need to change. Those types of things. Awesome. Yeah, thank you so much for. The all the work on this. And yeah, I think this will definitely. Have, you know, maybe 1416th draft. And with that I think we've gone through majority of our questions. So I'm gonna go ahead and wrap this up. I wanna thank everyone for joining us today, and a big thank you for Nico for your wonderful presentation. I. Really hope folks get a chance to check out their design handbook. I highly recommend it. As I said before, a recording will be available. And have a wonderful rest of your day, and thank you again for joining us. Nico. Thank you, really appreciate it. And and I look forward to hearing from people. Alright, everyone.