CAMIROS

What goes around comes around! Sustainable concepts such as green roofs aren’t necessarily new. Many have been forgotten during our embrace of technology, only to be rediscovered as our needs and values change.

It seems that “sustainability” is in the air. Every planning and design article argues for sustainability. Every plan that we draft or read includes sustainable actions. Sustainability is important. But how do we go about making city development sustainable? We suggest that sustainable development is the way we manage our policies and our regulations to improve the quality of human life so as to live within the carrying capacity of our environmental systems.

Ethically, urban planning and development policy has always been concerned with sustainability. What planner thinks of their work as purposefully depleting or permanently damaging natural and human resources? What planning professional or civic leader purposefully supports a pattern of sprawling urban development? But if these concerns remain only a policy, it is difficult to assure that sustainable objectives can be achieved. To do so we need to look to regulation, and no one set of regulations offers more potential to positively address sustainability than the zoning ordinance.

Old green roof in Romania (© istockphoto.com/Romulus Hossn)

The assessment of a zoning ordinance for sustainability policies is a complex endeavor. We are all familiar with the notion of unanticipated consequences, and nowhere does it play out as completely as in zoning. A change in one regulation may inadvertently affect another. For example, in order to accommodate parking we tend to excessively pave areas resulting in increased runoff. We limit the types of accessory uses permitted on a lot, which often restricts the use of renewable energy devices and technologies. We do not include flexibility in ordinance regulations that would allow for adaptive reuse of existing structures. These requirements were not established to purposefully conflict with sustainability goals, but they resulted from trying to meet specific community goals. However, creating sustainable, energy efficient places requires us to test the impact of commonly held assumptions to be sure that our plans and ordinances do not produce such unanticipated consequences.

To that end, sustainable development policy, and the resulting regulation, needs to comprehensively address all quality of life issues within an ordinance. And, sustainable development regulations need to reach beyond direct environmental impacts to consider how land use regulation:

• Accommodates alternative energy sources
• Increases walkability, encourages biking and fosters choice in transportation
• Provides public transit linkages
• Allows for and incentivizes green building techniques
• Incorporates sustainable landscaping and stormwater management
• Protects natural resources

One way to make this assessment is to undertake a “sustainability audit” of the development regulations. The audit reviews all of the community’s ordinances and assesses the roadblocks and omissions to renewable energy and broader issues of sustainability by uncovering those regulations that can be labeled “unsustainable.” The ordinance is reviewed through the lens of sustainability, and a series of potential revisions and additions is compiled. Once the audit is complete, one can suggest how to best tackle the issues identified through changes in regulation or in broader community policy.

The core of the audit process is a broad review of the ordinance to assess how regulations should allow for and encourage a variety of sustainable and green development techniques, improve opportunities for renewable energy, and take advantage of existing resources. This can range from large-scale development concepts like traditional neighborhood development and conservation design to regulations and permissions for site-specific elements like solar panels, wind turbines and the use of pervious pavers. Sustainable ordinances should:

1. Reduce barriers to sustainable development
2. Create incentives for new development, as well as flexibilities for the retrofitting of existing development, to incorporate sustainable design and technologies
3. Set standards for these techniques that make permissions clear and address potential impacts
4. Measure and quantify the results of implementation over time

More specifically, a sustainability audit focuses on the following areas:

1. Permitted accessory structures, including alternative energy technologies
2. Emerging “green” principal uses
3. Permitted densities
4. Sustainable development techniques, both small-scale and large-scale
5. Adaptive reuse and retrofitting of existing structures
6. Incorporating green building techniques, including incentives for their use and monitor their efficiency
7. Landscaping and stormwater management