My Critique of the Living and Hybrid Homes

Although the Living and Hybrid homes were designed with the idea of sustainability in mind for almost every detail, there are a few qualities of both homes which were not so carefully considered. I believe that both homes are currently very marketable for people with a generous amount of income and ability to build or buy one of these new residences. However, there are two problems that arise from this.

One is that because both the Living Home and Hybrid Homes are available for a only select group of people, the sustainable practices they promote can be easily bought by families of considerable wealth but not by the general populous. Even if a family would be able to afford one of these homes, it is unlikely that these sustainable dwellings will spur a sustainable housing movement because of the mere fact that common families would not be able to sell their home and move somewhere where these homes can be easily produced. Because these homes are not wide spread, each individual home's impact on the larger scale of community sustainability is small and restricted to the immediate site. In order for these homes to be entirely valued as sustainably constructed and maintained is if their impact spreads beyond the reaches of the wealthy.

The second issue is that although these homes may be marketable (for a select group of people) now, their future value may not be promising. As this goes with most non-traditional, modernly designed homes, technology may progress too soon for these homes to be attractive to buyers in the long run. This will affect their market value in the future, as projected property values are important for home buyers and owners to reflect on.

There is another drawback to these homes regarding the implications of development trends. Considering the Living Home in particular, the scale of the home is fairly large and spacious and unlike the Hybrid Home, its construction does not account for square footage as sustainability criteria. Relevant to the larger context of urban sprawl, our development patterns affect the ability of our urban settlements to take advantage of open space, cropland, and ecological services in general. After touring the Living Home and Hybrid Home website and videos, I did not find that the homes were constructed using an infill development strategy or if square footage was considered for the Living Home. If the construction process of both homes were mindful of outward expansion and site-scale was considered for the Living home as being detrimental to sustainability, I would be able to award their construction as more truly sustainable.

My Chicago Home's Building Envelope

My Chicago home in the Oriole Park neighborhood was built in the 1950's and still maintains most of it's original construction both inside and out.

This building does not take full advantage of natural light, of course this does depend on the room and time of day. The living room on the ground floor has windows facing north, east, and south. This room in particular is darkest during the mornings and lights up most in early afternoon. The living room could be improved upon in that the only window facing east is very small, as is the one facing south. The biggest window in the front of the house faces north and lets in a fair amount of light, mostly because of it's size. The kitchen located on the same floor is south-west oriented and only receives decent lighting during the afternoons, staying fairly dark in the morning. My kitchen is very small and only has two regular sized windows. Even during the day when it is not clear day, it is difficult to work in the kitchen because most of the counter space is not located directly under a window.

Because of my home's age, it does not manage its temperature as well as it could if improvements were made to the existing heating and air systems. In the winter, this building is heated by furnaces, which I find to be very inefficient at heating larger rooms and maintaining temperature overall. In the summer, we use window air conditioning units my father installs when the first wave of heat hits. Because the units are installed seasonally/temporarily, my father has to install small pieces of insulation to fit the windows width. There is a lot of cold air lost through this poor method.

My house does not have large eaves to help shading in the summer time, however we have two large pine trees located in our backyard. There is also one large maple tree in our front lawn that helps shade the building in the summer. By both the front and side door entrances there is a small porch and awning that also aids in shading the area, mitigating intense heat energy from entering the building through the doors.

Also due to the age of this building, our windows and doors are very old and make for a poorly insulated home. However, my father has just begun replacing these windows one by one. Especially in the winter time, you can feel the cold air seeping through the sealant of the windows. During intense rainfall, our basement is prone to flooding through the basement door and cracks in the foundation.

To conclude, my home could use major improvements to maximize it's use of natural energy. It is necessary to renovate old windows and doors to create a more energy efficient and sustainable home. Although building orientation is only able to be altered at the first stages of building construction, the kinds of windows installed can be beneficial in taking advantage of the existing layout and orientation of the building. Each of the aspects described above can be used as a reference for creating more sustainable building units which ultimately contribute to the larger community's sustainability efforts.

Curitiba's Web of Solutions

Each of Curitiba's many solutions to it's urban issues have been very successful in eliminating a multitude of issues. Solutions were not only geared toward fixing one problem, but rather they work in a multi-faceted fashion. This methodology has produced extremely productive urban improvement efforts that have benefited the lives of all Curitiban's. Lerner has been successful in utilizing the power of urban planners to create solutions that have altered the ways people live out their daily lives rather than relying on mere technological fixes. This Curitiban innovation has produced myriad forms of action, making this city one of the world's leading sustainable urban communities.

Sussman's Strategy in Boston: Requiring LEED Certification for Commercial Buildings

As mentioned by Edna Sussman, requiring all commercial/large-scale buildings to be LEED certified has been a strategy many municipalities have taken to promote urban sustainability. LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) is a green building certification program that recognizes sustainable building strategies and construction practices. In order to receive LEED certification, building projects need to satisfy prerequisites and earn points to achieve different levels of certification (certified, silver, gold, platinum). Prerequisites and credits differ for each rating system (location and transportation, materials and resources, water efficiency, etc) and project managers themselves are allowed to choose the best fit for their particular project. Requiring LEED certified commercial buildings has been a way for cities and towns across the nation to combat local and global climate change. First, let us take a look at the successes of one major American city that has implemented this strategy. 

Boston has taken the reins in constructing state-of-the-art LEED certified buildings. The old American city has seen much success after requiring all commercial building to be LEED certified, however, the city still struggles with upgrading its existing buildings and the need for historic preservation of the city's many old buildings. This has been the major challenge to the overall success of this strategy because innovation as proven difficult in such a dense urban environment. Besides this, this requirement along with Boston's requirement of all city buildings to be at least Silver LEED certified has spurred an explosive interest in sustainability around the city. In Boston, with the requirement that certain projects need to be LEED-certified, the bar has been raised greatly. It has been noted that despite the wave of successes the LEED requirement has seen in Boston, the next step in the sustainability efforts needs to focus on smart-growth aspects including transportation because climate change is not so much a green-building issue but more so a question of location and density.  

Bogota and Curitiba's Sustainable Cities

Both Bogota and Curitiba took similar routes in planning their cities because these cities were faced with the same issues; population growth which resulted in traffic clogged streets. In addition, both cities were moving towards unsustainable transportation planning methods. Before Penalosa and Lerner took office as mayor of Bogota and Curitiba respectively, there were confronted with efforts being made to demolish buildings and widen streets to allow more cars to travel. Both Penalosa and Lerner saw this as unsustainable and counterintuitive. They believe that more consideration should be given to pedestrians and with a rising population it would become more important to provide safe and accessible walkways because otherwise, automobile dependency would continue to skyrocket, leaving both cities with insufficient street space to hold cars.
One thing both Bogota and Curitiba have in common is that they have implemented similar Bus Rapid Transit systems to improve commuter experience and to cut traffic with mass-transportation. Bogota's "Alameda de Porvenir", a multi-use transit path that connects many important nodes in the city is analogous to Curitiba's system of interconnected green open spaces. Both of these undertakings have created safe places for walkers and bikers alike, allowing them to escape from the perils of high traffic avenues. Finally, both cities have also been dealing with the expanding slums right outside each cities peripheries. In Bogota, urban poverty prompted many of the new, successful planning changes which occurred during Penalosa's mayoral term. In Curitiba, where city life has remained of high quality for almost all residents, still experiences the disadvantages of urban poverty. While Lerner was mayor, he created a program for slum dwellers to clean their compounds and in return, they would receive nutritious food from the government. In both cases, however, urban poverty and slum prevalence have been a key element to the improvement of quality of life in these areas.
These two cities also have a few differing characteristics. In Curitiba, more emphasis has been given to pedestrians in that the system of interlinked parks and open green space have served to complement and supplement other inner city initiatives like the Bus Rapid Transit system. In the video we watched on Bogota, however, there were no green infrastructure implementations. In addition, Curitiba seems to have dealt with urban poverty issues in more depth than Bogota by creating the waste for food program and they have even transferred all of those living in one slum to an area with roads and proper sanitation. Lastly, Bogota has had to deal with other hurdles regarding public transportation which Curitiba has not and that is the corrupt ownership of the private bus system.

Community Scale Sustainability: Oriole Park, Chicago, IL

Regional Accessibility

In the Oriole Park neighborhood located in Northwest Chicago, most people work in the near Northwest suburbs or closer to inner-city neighborhoods while some work in the downtown district. For those who travel to work in the inner-city and downtown areas, there is a CTA blue line stop located on the Northeast edge of Oriole Park. There is a limited degree of walkability to places of work and shopping centers. Unless you are employed by the various businesses and restaurants down the main street, Harlem Avenue, it is likely you have to travel by car to reach other areas of employment, either in or outside of the city limits. Oriole Park is not connected to any green infrastructure systems like regional parks or nature systems. Instead, the neighborhood is bounded on all sides by wide, busy streets.

Within Oriole Park

Under my discretion, I believe the identifiable center of the neighborhood is its park, which is next to the library and public school. The boundaries of the neighborhood are Harlem, Foster, Canfield Avenues, and the 1-90 Expressway. Within the neighborhood itself, there are not many reasons to walk around other than to utilize the large park for the various recreational activities offered, to visit the neighborhood school, or library located nearby. Because Oriole Park is a residential neighborhood, one other reason why one may walk within its borders is to travel from one home to another. Oriole Park can improve its walkability by building a CTA blue line stop entrance closer to the residential blocks where a greater number of local commuters reside. As a frequent rider of the CTA, I can speak from experience that the current path leading to the CTA entrance is not walker-friendly and takes significantly longer to reach than if it were built with residential commuters in mind. Considering "bike-ability," this neighborhood serves bikers well within the neighborhood limits. Wide streets allow considerable space for both two lane traffic and bikers and the paths within the park are wide enough that at times of low park visitation, biking is possible with ease.With regard to access to areas outside of Oriole Park, bikers are hindered by lack of corridors and nature paths to ride.

I would not consider any of the streets in my neighborhood to be "complete" because all of the inner streets are residential, containing no places of work or stores to shop in while the streets bounding the neighborhood are high traffic, wide-laned streets with nothing but shops or vacant storefronts. There is not a high degree of mixed land-use in Oriole Park, therefore, I would not consider any of the street blocks to be "complete". I believe due to the neighborhood's location in an isolated pocket in the farthest corner of the Northwest side of Chicago, there are very low instances of crime reported in the neighborhood. As a result of this separation from other surrounding neighborhoods, I feel very safe when roaming the streets, even far after dark.

In the next 50 years?

I predict that over the next 50 years, I believe this area will generally stay the same and maybe (hopefully) see an economic improvement in the local businesses. Maybe more chain restaurants will spring up along the edges of Oriole Park on the busy avenues. More home renovations will take place and many newer more modern houses will be built in place of the traditional styles still standing. Possibly more improvements will be made to the neighborhood's walkability and changes to the nearby Harlem CTA stop will give more consideration to walkers. With a more walkable neighborhood may come more smaller shops and employment opportunities located inside its borders. This would give way for a more sustainable neighborhood, one that is less reliant on automobiles to travel for daily necessities and more conscientious of on harnessing the benefits of its natural amenities. Improving elements of the neighborhood "center" (the park) and designing it to work in tandem with the natural environment is how Oriole Park can implement green infrastructure systems, having positive impacts for residents quality of life.

Tragedy of the Commons in Our Oceans

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21596942-new-management-needed-planets-most-important-common-resource-tragedy-high

In the above news article, the issue of declining biodiversity among the world's oceans has been a direct result from Garrrett Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons" phenomena. Hardin argued that when a resource is collectively owned , over-exploitation leads to the resources long-term viability. In the case of our fragile ocean ecosystem, overfishing has caused the demise of our ocean life in the same way Hardin's example of overgrazing causes the degeneration of the pasture in which cows feed. Because of human tendency to underestimate the long-term vitality of our natural resources, there have many instances of the tragedy that have captured the attention of sustainability efforts. In this instance, the high seas are the commons, where the worlds thousands of miles of coastlines offer fish for all. However, overfishing has resulted in a catastrophic collapse of the oceans biodiversity and has had an impact on the larger biota. The oceans fish stock is not the only part of oceans system which has been affected by the overexploitation of this resource. Declining fish populations have larger implications for the oceans oxygen content, causing the spread of dead zones throughout the globe.
The tragedy of the commons occurs when there are not sufficient rules and institutions governing the use and allocation of a limited resource. Massive individual fisheries have acted in the favor of short-term interests and have failed to recognize the balance needed between short-term benefits and long-term conservation. This article offers several reform solutions to the tragedy. First, fish subsidies are suggested to be ended, as fisheries have been depending on government funds to do major environmental damage. Because there is not a required global fishing registry, individual fishermen have easily gotten away with taking more than their fair share of fish. In addition, less than 1% of the high seas are protected by marine reserves. If there were more reserves, more species of sea life would be conserved from the rapture of private corporations.
I believe all of the solutions presented here could work to revive fish populations and curb their overexploitation. Whatever the solution taken, I believe it is necessary that there be large-scale institutional reform to cut overfishing and, more crucially, to change attitudes toward the way we as a collective society share the bounties of the ocean. If we are looking to create sustainable ways to ensure the longevity of our planet's ocean life, we need to recognize that although the ocean may seem vast and limitless, the fragile species that call it home are in danger because of our overzealous demand for them.

Reid Ewing et. al -- "Growing Cooler" as Ecological Sustainability

In the Ewing et. al reading for this week, he focuses on two major concepts: the current vehicle and fuel technology available in the United States and the continuing national trend of urban sprawl. Ewing explains the connection between the two as one of the nation's most pressing issues: global CO2 emissions. Ewing explains that although the United States has made much needed advances in vehicle and fuel technology, these improvements will not render any results in mitigating CO2 emissions as a whole. He attributes the faultiness of these seemingly beneficial improvements to the ongoing suburban sprawl occurring throughout the states. He claims that if we do not make a collective effort to stop and even reverse outward development, we will see that these technological advances alone will not make enough of a difference. In this sense, transportation carbon dioxide reductions can be viewed as a three legged stool: one leg as fuel economy, one as the carbon content of the fuel itself, and the third being vehicle miles traveled (VMT). If all three are not taken into consideration when attempting to reduce carbon dioxide, results will stagnate.
Relating this issue back to the first week of class when we read David Orr's piece about technological and ecological sustainability, we can understand Ewing's offerings as ecological sustainability in response to existing technological sustainability efforts. Improved vehicle fuel economy and hybrid vehicles have been a progressive response to climate change, however, Ewing proposes more needs to be done to ensure that the limitations of technology will not affect sustainability as a whole. In David Orr's piece, we find that ecological sustainability in contrast to technological sustainability acknowledges human limitation and how our limitations are compounded into the technologies we build. Because of this, it is necessary to go beyond even the most advanced technology and to restructure the system of land use planning in its entirety. We can improve our vehicle and fuel technologies as much as we want and can, however, if we do not switch our development patterns to be more compact, we will be unable to work in tandem with technology. Therefore, it is vital to the success of sustainability that we also strive towards educating developers, planners, and jurisdictions on more sustainable ways to approach regional planning. Furthermore, I believe that Ewing's perspective is an example of ecological sustainability because David Orr explains this type of sustainability as one which works within predefined ecological processes. Although redevelopment inward toward city centers may not exactly replicated ecological processes, compared to the outward expansion the nation has been experiencing for decades, compact development patterns will help to mitigate our human disruptions on nature.

Why have we created cities we do not care about?

The prevalence of suburban ghost towns dotting the nation is skyrocketing. This is due to various reasons, however, much of this trend is due to our tendency to continue to build and develop outward -- in sites which are situated on virgin land. This movement toward decentralization has had various impacts for the sustainability of a city's life span and has resulted in city abandonment all throughout the nation and beyond. I believe our haste to leave these deteriorating cities behind is rooted in our inability to maintain the basic vitality of these communities. Similar to how the threat of the atomic bomb contributed to the dispersal of urban centers in post World War America, failing infrastructure and lack of investment in major cities and towns has further fueled this dispersal to areas which are deemed more promising today.

Growing up in Chicago, I have very personal ties to the neighborhoods which I have spent the majority of my life. However, the city extends beyond these particular places which are closest to me and it is important to acknowledge that much of the deterioration of the city is actually happening in neighborhoods which are unfamiliar to me. Raised in a fairly affluent middle-class neighborhood on the city's Northwest side, the everyday experiences of those residing on the city's crumbling South and West sides are foreign to me. Regardless of community affiliation, I believe it is extremely crucial to save Chicago from becoming a ghost town, to save us from experiencing a situation similar to what Detroit has found itself in after it's manufacturing economy declined. With the decline of a city comes great social consequences which spill over into surrounding areas and cannot be easily remedied. Massive displacement of those most vulnerable (poor, working class, minority communities) presents a larger social misfortune as they have no where to turn to elsewhere. As these people are forced out of the city and into low-income areas of surrounding towns and suburbs, there begins a downward cycle of middle-class flight to more prosperous areas, causing businesses to invest elsewhere, eventually contributing to the inability of the city to sustain itself. Therefore, urban sustainability not only concerns environmental factors that we may be prone to focus our efforts on, but arguably more importantly, urban sustainability concerns the vitality of the city center itself and its ability to pass it's culture, history, and prosperity onto next generations. 

21st Century Energy: Vaclav Smil

Vaclav Smil's "sobering thoughts" of the 21st century seem to follow the perspective of technological sustainability over ecological sustainability. He proposes five major drawbacks of the transition to new energy sources, all of them concerning the shortcomings of technical sustainability to adopt a certain standard of strategies which are environmentally conscientious. Smil acknowledges that current technologies have not been developed which will make the shift from fossil fuels to renewable resources easy and seamless. Current technologies are incapable of managing the energy density of renewable energy which would be necessary to meet the energy density of the fossil fuels that we are currently relying on. Smil approaches the concept of sustainability by exposing the technical limitations of both the natural world's ability to generate energy and the limitations of technologies which humans have created to harness natural energy. Smil does not mention a transition of public attitude as the necessary element of a sustainable future, but rather focuses on a transition of improved technologies and policy.
If we do not meet our energy needs by 2112, it is due to the fact that the supply of fossil fuels is adequate for generations to come, new energy technologies are not developed enough for us to fully rely on them yet and their production and dissemination will not be economically feasible or distributed evenly enough for successful results. Therefore, meeting our energy needs by 2112 is most likely unattainable given the current status of sustainable technological improvement and appetite for unsustainable energies.
A more optimistic story would be concluded with the attainment of our energy goals by 2112. In this case, society at large is able to collectively acknowledge a more environmentally conscious mentality. Economic growth and development is also able to occur in areas which it was previously lacking, giving way for updated, more expensive technologies. To be sustainably successful is to be able to achieve the enormity of technical and infrastructural requirements that will be necessary to make a difference on a global scale.

Living Planet Report 2012

"Ecological overshoot" is when humanity's annual demand on the natural world has exceeded what the Earth can renew in a year. This term explains how it is physically possible to consume for than one years worth of biocapacity, in that it takes the Earth more than one year to generate the renewable materials that people have used in a given year. This is because these renewable resources can and currently are processed for human consumption faster than they can be produced in the natural world.

There are obvious, direct implications for this magnitude of consumption concerning the environment and it's biodiversity. These consumptive practices will no doubt weaken the ecosystems they exploit as biodiversity will cease to thrive. There will be additional stresses on the resources people around the world depend on daily. We are currently finding ourselves in a growing biocapacity deficit as the global population continues to exponentially rise, particularly in dense urban areas. The rising population has generated a larger ecological footprint, as over-consumption and over-industrialization have created a deep dent in the supply of resources we depend on and pushed the limits of natural biogeochemical processes. 

Reversing this trend will become increasingly difficult in the near future because it will rely on a large scale shift in the focus of global economic policy toward the sustenance of the natural world. Mitigating current climate trends and reducing out global ecological footprint is not out of reach, however, it will require large scale conservation and restoration efforts. 

David Orr/John Robinson's Two Sustainabilities

In David Orr's Two Meanings of Sustainability, he draws the distinction between technological and ecological sustainability, which were differentiated as a result of the Brundtland Commission. Orr explains the main point of differentiation between the two is that one reaches sustainability through technological fixes and advances and the other depends on overcoming individualistic and militaristic attitudes. Orr goes on to say that both sustainabilities do not work in isolation, but rather are two necessary parts to sustainable development. 

Technological sustainability works to stabilize current impacts and manage ecological processes in an economically efficient way. This type of sustainability focuses of economic growth, advocating for free trade in order to maintain technology transfer. All the while, creating sustainable technologies will transform the technology industry into adopting a certain standard of strategies conscientious of the environment.  The purpose of ecological sustainability is to create alternative solutions to the impacts. The first step toward ecological sustainability is the general moral improvement of society at large that replaces the current public understanding of subsistence activities. 

Ecological sustainability understands that humans do in fact have limitations and these limitations are also compounded into technology that may appear to enlarge our human possibilities, but essentially do not. Because of human limitation, call for a new citizen order is necessary to build an educated public that has the ability to build the background for action and for a society whose local community is able to work in tandem with the nation. Local, traditional ecological knowledge also plays a vital role in working towards practices that are compatible with society, showing that there are advantages to a society which adapts to the places in which they live. Ecological sustainability depends on replicating and designing technologies which resemble natural systems because human activity will continue to be disruptive if it does not fit within the predefined ecological processes. 

I believe Both David Orr and John Robinson have created their respective typologies in order to dissect the concept of sustainable development and show how these two seemingly independent views do in fact have ties with one another. Their typologies work within the definition of sustainable development itself: "develop which meets the needs of current generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." Robinson further elaborates on Orr's two sustainabilities by illustrating the force each one has on one another. I believe both Orr and Robinson's purpose in creating these typologies is to show that sustainability requires a multi-faceted solution that differs based on context. 

An example of an in-between scenario is recycling. Although there are technological proponents which may increase a societies recycling outcomes, the success of recycling also lies in the hands of people themselves and largely relies on a certain attitude that has to be adopted. 

What I want to learn about sustainability

I wish to broaden my knowledge on sustainability throughout the semester in order to more fully understand how it applies to planning contemporary urban areas. I am particularly interested in the connections between sustainable development and gentrification. This is of interest to be because I believe the public majority has a notion that "sustainable" practices may only be viable options for certain demographics, as related "green" initiatives have a tendency to be available ad realistic for certain social classes over others. I think social equality is another significant aspect of successful urban planning, and it is especially imperative in today's increasingly urbanized human society. Sustainability and it's effects should encompass the potential of society at large (including ALL of it's inhabitants) and should improve existing social conditions, not exacerbate them. In UP136, I want to be able to know more about how current and past sustainable practices have produced inconsistent outcomes for bettering the human condition and how to be a socially responsible AND sustainable planner.