It can happen in your town: Streetscapes blooming with wildflowers, industrial waterfronts transformed into parks, and creeks once again dancing with salmon. A green urban renaissance is growing On a brilliant blue sky day in May, a shining silver fish jumps the
rapids of Whatcom Creek past the old marble city hall building in
Bellingham, Washington, darting amid the rivulets under the Holly
Street Bridge and making its way to the sea. Standing with sketchbooks
in hand, schoolchildren and teachers cheer wildly as it passes beneath
them.
Cheering, also, farther upstream, is a group of stream restoration
volunteers, who have spent many cold, grey days ripping out Himalayan
blackberry vines and knotweed to restore the riverbanks with native
grasses—so they can see salmon return.
“Got a big white thing on his nose!” yells Wendy Scherrer, director of the Nooksack Salmon Enhancement Association.
Mike McRory, one of the founders of the 15-year old organization,
confirms its identity: “It's a steelhead!” While not leaping 10 feet in
the air like the legendary salmon of a century ago, this wild steelhead
has returned to spawn in a creek that once suffered from a legacy of
logging, milling, and dumping.
“In the past, we straightened the creek, channelized it, buried it, and
used it as a sewer and garbage dump,” says Scherrer. “Now we're
bringing salmon back into the heart of downtown.”
Better habitat and the return of a cultural icon are just some of the
city's successes, she says, which have extended to the whole landscape.
The city also closed down an old sewage treatment plant, turning it
into a fish hatchery, and transformed the site of an old town dump into
an environmental learning center, where the students today are learning
the salmon cycle.
This spot is also specially sanctified. Just a few miles upstream,
tragedy struck the city in June 1999 when a pipeline bringing gas from
Canada ruptured, spurting nearly a quarter million gallons of fuel into
the creek. Minutes later, the fuel ignited and exploded, engulfing
parts of Bellingham in a fireball and killing three boys fishing in the
creek.
One of the boys was 18-year old Liam Wood. Soon after, his
mother established a memorial fund in his honor that went toward
further creek restoration. Now, as people walk along Whatcom Creek,
they can pass through “Wayside Park,” built in Liam's honor.
Time spent restoring the creek helped the community channel their grief
and anger over the pipeline catastrophe into something productive and
beautiful, says Scherrer. The creek also served to bring the community
together around a vision of building a sustainable city.
A corner of the city hall parking lot has been retrofitted with a small
“rain garden” to collect and filter storm water. There's a “buy local”
campaign here called “Sustainable Connections” that promotes local
farms and industries. Most importantly, the city is embracing “smart
growth,” channeling new growth into city neighborhoods instead of rural
areas, as an answer to its growing problem of urban sprawl. When
Bellingham showed up in USA Today ranked eighth in the nation among
smaller cities for sprawl, it came as a shock to this city of 70,000
residents.
But look at most towns across America and you see the hand of sprawl
across the landscape, in traffic congestion, air and water pollution,
loss of farmland, and a crying need for parks and open spaces.
We're finding also that the suburban development model is linked to our
physical diseases and mental stress—everything from heart disease to
depression to obesity—says Lawrence Frank, a researcher at the
University of British Columbia.
But there's hope. Just as the “City Beautiful” movement at
the turn of
the 20th century transformed America's ideas of urban design, today's
planners and designers are turning to new models for reclaiming cities
and retrofitting suburbs. A century ago, planners tried to lift
America's newly industrialized cities out of their congestion and
squalor by infusing them with Beaux Arts architecture and civic
planning borrowed from Europe and building parks to provide places of
fresh air and sunlight. That movement died with the birth of the
automobile age after World War I, when planners reshaped cities to
accommodate cars and promoted development of residential areas in the
suburbs—thought at the time to be the “healthy” antidote to urban life.
Today, an urban sustainability movement is inspiring architects and
city planners to shape new visions of city life, whether it's remaking
old downtowns and industrial wastelands, incorporating green space, or
channeling new growth smartly. Community activists, too, are
coming up with new ways of making neighborhoods and cities
healthier—ecologically as well as socially. Here are some tools they're
using.
The life of downtown
Vancouver, Canada, always rates high in surveys gauging cities for
livability and quality of life. Blessed with a mild climate, it is
surrounded by majestic mountains and sea. But it was good planning that
enabled the city to capitalize on its virtues—and views—with massive
downtown redevelopment projects that created a lively mix of high- rise
towers, shopping districts, and urban parks.
Starting in the 1950s, says Gordon Price, a former city
councillor and planner, Vancouver focused on keeping its downtown
neighborhoods alive and housing affordable. To this day, it draws a
widely diverse population to its West Coast brand of high-rise living,
with an outdoorsy lifestyle of walking, biking, and using public
transit.
Its “Livable Region Strategic Plan” stresses not just “smart growth”
development of compact, mixed-use neighborhoods, but also what it terms
“complete neighborhoods” designed to promote “jobs closer to where
people live and accessible by transit, shops, and services near home,
and a wider choice of housing types.” This strategy also protects
from development “green zones,” including parks, watersheds,
ecologically vital lands, and farmlands.
Vancouver's history provides many lessons, says Tom Hauger, a planner
for the city of Seattle. “First, they decided, ‘there will be no
freeways in our city,' and second, they sold vast tracts of land to
developers with strict conditions,” he says. That allowed the city to
design a mix of densities and heights of buildings, street connections,
walkways, and public space in one attractive package.
Vancouver continues to inspire planners with the longest of long-term
planning. A few years ago, Greater Vancouver drafted a 100-year
plan called “Cities Plus” (Cities Planning for Long-term
Sustainability) that anticipates handling global warming, air
pollution, sprawl, overflowing landfills, water shortages, disease, and
terrorism through strategies to conserve energy and water.
Green infrastructure
Forests, waterways and watersheds, parks, and other green spaces have
often ended up as casualties of planning. As cities lose more trees and
open space, community leaders are uniting around the idea of viewing
green space as not only essential to replenishing the human spirit, but
also as a form of essential infrastructure like roads, water lines, or
sewers. In fact, they have begun calling trees and other vegetation
“green infrastructure” because they are so valuable to the economy and
functioning of cities.
Trees provide vital services in a globally warming world. They absorb
carbon dioxide and give off oxygen. They prevent the “urban heat island
effect,” the phenomenon by which cities run higher temperatures because
they are paved over with concrete and other surfaces that absorb rather
than reflect the sun's heat. And trees absorb and clean storm-water
that runs off streets.
And green infrastructure often does the job better than anything
human-built, for much less money, as groups like the Tree People in Los
Angeles and Cascade Land Conservancy in Seattle argue. Take storm-water
management. With conventional approaches, runoff from roofs and roads
is channeled into underground pipes and into lakes and streams, an
expensive process that also causes too much water to flow too quickly,
disrupting habitat for fish and picking up pollutants from city streets
and yards, spoiling water quality for all. Trees and vegetation slow,
collect, and filter flowing water, and replenish aquifers.
Enter the “green street” concept. In this, Seattle, the city of
rainstorms, is leading the way. The city constructed the Street Edge
Alternative (S.E.A.-Street) pilot project with a group of citizens. In
this innovative streetscape, designers wove winding landscaped areas
along the road edge to filter and slow the runoff into nearby Piper's
Creek.
Some of these projects rise to the level of a new artform. The “Growing
Vine Street Project,” designed by Carlson Architects and Peggy Gaynor,
which carries storm-water over eight blocks of Seattle's downtown,
features a streamlet coursing downhill over a series of water and plant
terraces that act as biofilters for stormwater, as well as walkways and
gardens to be enjoyed by passersby. On one building hangs artist Buster
Simpson's playful gutter system, the “Beckoning Cistern,” with a
downspout shaped like an outstretched hand.
A green street can vary with locale. While a street may sculpt
waterfalls of rain in Seattle, another might celebrate a sun shower
over adobe in Santa Fe.
Taming the car, unleashing feet
Cars take 40,000 lives each year in the United States and are the
leading cause of death of young people. In 2003, 4,827 Americans died
while crossing the street, walking to school or work, going to a bus
stop, or strolling to the grocery store, among other daily activities.
Yet simple measures like crosswalks and speed-limit enforcement helped
reduce that death toll.
At the same time, not walking is also dangerous to one's health,
because it contributes to obesity. Research shows that Americans walk
so little not out of laziness, but because of the popularity of
suburban living, which dictates car travel and sedentary behavior. Not
surprisingly, research shows people are more likely to walk if it's
convenient for them and if it is an aesthetically pleasing experience.
Across the country, cities are establishing new traffic-calming
measures, from round-abouts to chicanes, which curve the street
to slow traffic. Some are adopting European-style traffic-calming road
forms, like the Dutch woonerf (“Living Yard') in which cars defer to
pedestrians, bicycles, and other human powered forms of transport.
A
woonerf typically features winding paths and street furniture, along
with play areas, unusual paving stones, and signage to indicate that
non-motorized transport rules the space. Berkeley's “slow street,” a
six-block area combining speed bumps and weaving, shifting travel
lanes, may be the closest official version in the United States.
Seattle's city planner Tom Hauger says that the streets feeding the
city's Pike Place Market, where shoppers, strollers, and itinerant
street musicians freely walk amidst parked vehicles, might be
considered an ad hoc woonerf.
Bicycles, as author John Ryan writes, are the most energy-efficient
form of travel ever invented: “Pound for pound, a person on a bicycle
expends less energy than any creature or machine covering the same
distance.” And, of course, bicycles, without burning any fossil fuels,
are great burners of human calories. While European cities are miles
ahead of us in terms of bike lanes, signage, bike rentals, and bike
parking, there have been some improvements here. Witness the rise of
the “Bike Station,” which has popped up in a number of cities on the
West coast. These offer secure bike parking for people riding
bikes to public transit or to offices and shops. Many are staffed and
offer commuting tips; others offer bike repair. The Cadillac of
bikestations in the U.S., however, is Chicago's, which offers shower
facilities. In Holland, Germany, and France, where there are many more
services for bicyclists, 30 percent of the population regularly cycles
to get from place to place, say researchers.
From brownfield to green
Despite its peerless view overlooking the Olympic Mountains, Seattle's
industrial waterfront is fouled by a century of logging, shipping,
refining, and toxic dumping. But, like many cities that find their
cores riddled with contaminated sites, its community leaders are coming
together to remake the waterfront. They hope to tear down a post-war,
earthquake-vulnerable viaduct that carries truck traffic through the
city and redevelop the land as a big civic park.
Re-using former industrial sites, called “brownfields,” can be an
important strategy for economic development. Although hundreds of
brownfield sites still litter the landscape, federal policies now
encourage their redevelopment. Some are redeveloped along ecological
lines. One of the most exciting examples is Chicago's Center for Green
Technology, designed by Doug Farr. Built on the former site of an
illegal garbage dump, the Center now houses a solar panel factory, as
well as community landscaping and job training programs. A further
bonus: the Center boasts that it is the only brownfield redevelopment
in an urban district accessible by transit.
One way to build sustainability into cities is to design
green buildings. That's important because buildings, in their
construction and operation, use half the energy we expend as a
nation—more even than the fuel burned by cars and trucks.
At the same time, construction demolition and disposal generate a quarter of the waste in landfills.
Under a self-certifying rating system called LEED (Leadership in Energy
and Environmental Design), building developers accumulate credits for
saving energy and water and using recycled materials. Already, the
green building movement has created a shift in the way architects and
planners go about their work, says Lynne Barker, a member of the U.S.
Green Building Council, the non-profit council that manages the
certification process. In the five years since the council created its
standard, more than 3 percent of all new construction uses it.
When it comes to “green urbanism,” extending sustainable practices
beyond buildings to neighborhoods and cities, there are few examples in
the United States, but a growing number in Europe. London, for example,
has its “Bed Zed” (Zero Energy Development), 100 densely packed but
attractively designed apartments with roof gardens. The complex
generates energy from on-site solar and renewable sources, adding zero
carbon emissions to the atmosphere.
Across North America, however, despite its daunting challenges, the
quest for urban sustainability is extending to cities big, mid-sized
and small. Chicago bested Seattle by building a “green roof” on its city hall a few years before Seattle did, proving
that a roof planted over with hardy, drought-resistant, native plants
could effectively cool the building and lessen the city's heat island
effect. Cities like Vancouver are pragmatically preparing for
“unthinkable” global warming scenarios while trying to imagine their
best options. What would it take for your city to become a green city
beautiful?
Francesca Lyman is a Seattle journalist writing a book on cities. She
thanks the CASE Media Foundation for a fellowship to Western Washington
University last year that helped support the research for this article.
Send further suggestions on urban innovations to her at
.
Reprints/Reposts :: Contact Us :: 206-842-0216 :: Toll-Free Subscriptions 1-800-937-4451
YES! is published by the Positive Futures Network, 284 Madrona Way NE, Ste 116, Bainbridge Island, WA 98110-2870
