“GREEN” CITIES AND THE SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY BLUEPRINT

Because a large measure of “greenness” now pervading our awareness, we can and should be creating new methodologies to recycle our existing cities. How do we encourage such recycling? The answer as always, is through good urban design.

Urban design has its own Darwinian dimension: the higher a cities’ architectural quality, the more likely we are to conserve, save, and recycle it. Unfortunately we don’t have standards for sustainable cities. Our cities cannot save themselves through technology applications – only.

The green cities of the future will step into an entirely different pattern of mutual support to become sustainable. This word “sustainable” means to many contrary things to describe the city as a crucible for urban mankind’s collective fascination to collectively live together in such close proximity.

The new fad of “sustainability conferences” tends to be wellsprings for the purveyors of nuts and bolts. The underlying message at many of these gatherings is: if you get all those green gizmos lined up and working just the right way, sustainable buildings will result. There’s no question that we need to know the science of how our buildings perform, why they behave badly, and how to make them better. It is these buildings clustered together that make fine cities.

But this is no substitute for great urban design for cities. As urban designers, our “duty to beauty” must always be addressed. How do we accomplish this to provide clean air, water, food and fiber, auspicious use of local resources, the provision of energy and communication, mobility, structures, waste handling, security safety and justice, a fit into a natural setting, an economy of exchange and a consensus of the living in a good place. This is no mean task.

By now, most Architects can recite the essential technical elements of green architecture: build with local materials, use recycled or recyclable materials, use diverse energy sources to lessen our dependence on fossil fuels, cut out anything emitting chemicals that deplete the ozone layer, take advantage of the latest environmental technology.

But what in our vision of future cities do we conjure up for the “bridging” required to develop from our existing into new urban designed cities? There is far more to cities than just becoming “green”. It is how to live in them while we change them. Is it only by paying greater attention to geography, soil and geology, topography, indigenous flora and fauna, temperature, climate, and water availability that great cities will manifest themselves? Yes, it is all these above things that must be integrated to reflect the culture of the inhabitants.

The mission for a truly sustainable city must include social, cultural, historic and psychological sources of content, respond to the spirit of the age of information and ecology, absorb cultural diversity wherever one builds structures to transform “green technology” into an aesthetic language, integrate ideas drawn from the surrounding natural indigenous context, in order to create a design language for the 21st century. These goals move us beyond merely specifying the right green widget for a singular building.

The question then is how are urban designers doing with the recycling of our cities? Is the true test of doing a good urban design that which would allow us to dissemble our cities? What land areas in our downtowns have we turned “green”? How many of our old buildings have we refurbished for alternative uses? How many of our buildings have been trashed by the forces of nature? Why do we decide to reconstruct them in the same places and with little improvement in building technologies? Why are we so slow in adapting to changing the way we introduce better mobility?

The world’s inhabitants are indeed in need of creating and using a far better “green” urban design formula for city building futures.

Graham Kaye-Eddie

Master Urban Designer