Last month, standing at the Old Capitol Pump House, a restored building along the Anacostia River, Washington, D.C., Mayor Vincent Gray announced the launch of the long-awaited Sustainable D.C. plan. The result of an amazing public outreach process that involved more than 400 local green experts, over 180 public meetings involving 5,000 people, and 15 D.C. government departments and agencies, the plan is an attempt to make D.C. "the greenest, healthiest, and most livable city in the U.S.” by 2032. Less than two weeks after the announcement, drastic, across-the-board federal funding cuts kicked in, throwing the whole plan into question.

At the unveiling Feb. 20, Gray said D.C. already leads the nation in the number of green, healthy buildings per capita. New schools must now reach the LEED Gold standard. The district has signed on to the National Better Buildings challenge, aiming for 20 percent energy efficiency improvements across all buildings by 2020. And with the Sustainable DC Act of 2012 now signed into law, a new Property Assessment Clean Energy (PACE) program is underway, aimed at improving financing opportunities for greening commercial buildings and multi-family housing.

The district wants to be greener looking, too. There’s an accelerated tree-planting campaign, with 6,400 slated to be planted this season alone. The goal is a tree canopy that covers 40 percent of the city’s surface, which would put D.C. in the top tier of major cities worldwide. Beyond trees, the city is creating new stormwater infrastructure. According to the mayor, 1.5 million square feet of green roofs are already in place. Green streets, like the first green alley built in Ward 7, are also being rolled out, with more potentially coming soon in Chinatown. Green infrastructure technologies may get a local boost, too, with the $4.5 million that has been dedicated to “innovative pilot projects.”

The district already has the biggest bike share network in the U.S. The D.C. government now purchases 100 percent renewable energy, earning it designation as a No. 1 "green power community” from the Environmental Protection Agency. All of this action has led to a 12 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions over the past year.

Gray seemed to stress, however, that going green can’t just be the agenda of educated, liberal, white environmentalists. The diverse, multi-ethnic crowd seemed to underpin this point. “We need to focus on jobs, health, equity, and diversity, and the climate,” he said. So part of making D.C. more sustainable will involve “expanding access to affordable housing and economic development opportunities” for all, so that “we have one city,” Gray said. “We can’t push people out.”

Lakiya Culley, an administrative assistant at the U.S. State Department and mother of three, just moved into one of the most innovative, energy-efficient houses in the U.S. – in a rather unlikely location.

Culley lives in Deanwood, a working class, primarily African American neighborhood of Washington, D.C., that has recently struggled with foreclosures. She is now the proud owner of an Empowerhouse, a home that produces all of its own energy, a feat made simpler by the fact that it consumes 90 percent less energy for heating and cooling than a conventional home.

Empowerhouse, which uses “passive house” technologies, was designed by students at the New School and Stevens Institute of Technology as part of the Solar Decathlon design competition, which was held on the National Mall in 2011. Developed in partnership with Habitat for Humanity and the D.C. Department of Housing and Community Development, the house marks the first time in the Solar Decathlon’s history that a team partnered with civic and government organizations to make a house a reality in the District.

Although there are 700 urban farms and gardens spread throughout New York City's five boroughs, urban farming there still feels ad-hoc, somewhat tacked-on in many places. The gains have been slow and future progress isn’t guaranteed.

To boost the long-term prospects of urban farming in the U.S.’s biggest city, the Design Trust for Public Space and its partner, the Red Hook-based nonprofit Added Value, just launched a new report some three years in the making called "Five Borough Farm: Seeding the Future of Urban Agriculture," along with a companion website. The project seeks to create a comprehensive “road map” with the goal of helping stakeholders -- policymakers, community groups, farmers, and designers -- “understand and weigh the benefits” of urban agriculture, while making a compelling case for significantly ramping up local government support for this growing field. Basically, if you’ve been looking for a thorough examination of all the policy aspects of urban farming, this is it.

The Design Trust for Public Space has had a long history of strategically intervening in the public realm in New York City. It was a very early supporter of the vision of the High Line founders, and the group has recently been involved in redesigning New York's taxis and creating sustainable guidelines for the city's parks, buildings, and infrastructure.

Photo courtesy of BAM.

You’ve probably heard by now that David Byrne, famous for “burning down the house” as lead singer of iconic New York City band Talking Heads, has been reborn as an avid bicyclist and transportation policy wonk, giving power point presentations in D.C. and the Big Apple. A few years ago, Byrne wrote The Bicycle Diaries -- a book, actually worth a read, about his tours of global cities by bike. In 2008, he partnered with the NYC Department of Transportation on a series of wild bicycle racks.

Now, Byrne has created a new set of funky, typographical racks for the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). And bonus: These things will change over time.

Photo by Jeremy Blanchard.

“Parks are a part of our healthcare system,” said Daphne Miller, a professor of family and community medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. These green spaces are crucial to solving hypertension, anxiety, depression, diabetes -- “the diseases of indoor living.”

But parks officials and the medical profession still need more data to take aim at the many “naysayers on the other side” who don’t believe in what landscape architects (and many urban residents) value, Miller said. Luckily for all of us, a few scientists are doing innovative research, trying to capture that data.

After two years of internal debate among 17 different federal agencies and the Washington, D.C., government, the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) released its long-awaited plans for a new Southwest Eco-District this week. The plan is designed to undo the worst damage of the massive “urban renewal” projects inflicted on L’Enfant neighborhood over the past decades. When it is completed, still decades out, it will transform the spooky, almost pedestrian-free area just south of the National Mall into a highly sustainable, people-friendly cultural and business destination.

The project will go a long way toward “breathing new life into the city,” NCPC Chair L. Preston Bryant, Jr. said at a hearing Thursday. “We have a once in a generation opportunity to make this happen.”

The 110-acre, 15 square-block project is meant to showcase “high performance buildings and landscapes,” while creating space for 19,000 new federal workers, says Elizabeth Miller, the landscape architect who is guiding the project. At the same time, the plan will take aim at the incredible lack of public access -- the barriers, the highways, and grade changes -- that keep people away.

A version of this story first appeared on The Dirt.

Photo by Matt Johnson.

It doesn’t matter whether you have a Prius or a Hummer, you have the same environmental impact. So argues MIT landscape architecture and planning professor Eran Ben-Joseph in his fascinating new book, ReThinking a Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking.

Whatever could he mean? Cars, on average, are immobile 95 percent of the time, taking up the same 9-by-18-foot paved rectangle. All of those paved spaces increase runoff into streams and wetlands, create heat islands, increase glare and light pollution, and shape the character of our cities.

To grasp the magnitude of the problem, consider that there are 500 million surface parking lots in the U.S. alone. In some cities, parking lots take up one-third of all land area, “becoming the single most salient landscape feature of our built environment,” Ben-Joseph writes.

But to this day, he says, “parking lots are considered a necessary evil; unsightly, but essential to the market success of most developments.” So the time is definitely ripe to redesign the lot.

Robert Hammond. (Photo by Annie Schlechter.)

Excerpted from a longer interview in The Dirt.

Robert Hammond is co-founder and co-executive director of Friends of the High Line, the nonprofit conservancy that manages the High Line, a public park built atop an abandoned, elevated rail line on the west side of Manhattan. He and his co-founder and director, Joshua David, have just published a book about their experience called The High Line: The Inside Story of New York City’s Park in the Sky.

Q. In the beginning of your book, you say that early on, living in Chelsea, you’d seen parts of the High Line, “but never realized all the bits and pieces connected.”

A. I lived in the neighborhood so I had always seen it when walking around, but I didn’t think it was all connected. I really didn’t think that much about it until I read an article in the New York Times in the summer of ’99 that said it was threatened with demolition. The article showed that it was a mile and a half long running through the Meatpacking District and Chelsea, all the way up to Hell’s Kitchen near the Javits Convention Center. That’s when I first realized the whole extent of it.

I assumed someone would be working to preserve it. So many things in New York have preservation groups attached to them. But pretty quickly I found no one was doing anything for the High Line. I heard the proposed demolition was on the agenda for a community board meeting in my neighborhood so I went to my first community board meeting ever and sat next to Joshua, who I didn’t know at the time. By the end of the meeting, we realized everyone in the room was in favor of demolition except for us. So we exchanged business cards and we said, “Well, why don’t we start something together?”

This interview originally appeared in The Dirt. Jaime Lerner was elected mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, in 1971, and reelected two more times before serving as governor of the Brazilian state of Paraná. As mayor, Lerner devised a number of low-cost solutions and innovative partnerships with the public and private companies that turned Curitiba into a model green community. He has won a number of major awards for his transportation, design, and environmental work, including the United Nations Environment Award. In 2002, Lerner was elected president of the International Union of Architects. Today, he is principal of Jamie Lerner Associated Architects. …

Bjarke Ingels.This interview originally appeared in The Dirt. Bjarke Ingels is founding partner of Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG). Ingels, rated as one of the 100 most creative people in business by Fast Company, is also a visiting professor at Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Q. You've been calling for a new approach, "hedonistic sustainability," which is "sustainability that improves the quality of life and human enjoyment." Why is it important for sustainability to enhance pleasure? A. The whole discussion about sustainability isn't popular because it's always presented as a downgrade. The position has been, there's a limit to how …