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.”

The actual plan offers some 32 goals, 31 targets, and more than 140 proposed actions. Some goals are quite bold, like creating “a fishable, swimmable Anacostia River in a generation.” The Anacostia is currently one of the filthiest rivers in the U.S. Other goals include diverting 80 percent of the city’s waste from the landfill and expanding urban agriculture across 20 more acres, so that 75 percent of residents are within a quarter-mile of healthy, local produce. The city also wants 1,000 new local renewable energy projects, with a dedicated wind farm for D.C. government operations.

“This is about nothing short than winning the future,” Gray said. For a mayor still under federal investigation for shenanigans during the 2010 mayoral campaign, the Sustainable DC plan offers a positive way forward and certainly paints the city in a progressive light.

But, as they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. At the launch event, media representatives asked pointed questions about whether the mayor and city council will actually put the funds and government personnel behind this bold plan to “change our society.” In a telling comment, Gray said the District would need to wait to hear the results of the debate in Congress on “sequestration” — the drastic, across-the-board budget cuts that would go into effect just over a week later if Congress and the president couldn’t come to a compromise.

Now that sequestration is here, the future of the sustainability effort, and many other things in Washington, are up in the air. Much of the district economy depends on federal government spending. The city’s resurgence in the past few years can largely be attributed to the new federal money pumped into the district. (The New York Times ran a great article on this.)

In his recent state-of-the-district speech, Gray said the city must “diversify” into new sectors. If it is carried out, Sustainable DC will help the district’s economy and people become more resilient to economic, environmental, and social shocks, and diversify into greener industries. This seems like smart local leadership that goes beyond the vagaries of federal spending.

Still, it will be up to the D.C. government, private sector, and nonprofit organizations to implement the plan at a very high standard. The race is on, considering many other top-tier cities have similar goals. Here’s hoping the antics at the national level don’t torpedo Washington’s green dreams just as they’re gaining speed.

For more information, you can read the Sustainable DC plan and check out “Becoming Greenest: Recommendations for a Sustainable D.C.,” a 30-page report produced last year by the American Society of Landscape Architects that seems to have inspired a few of the district’s targets and actions.

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.

Solar Decathlon organizers added a new category so that teams could earn points for affordability after some criticism that homes were getting out-of-control-pricey and therefore weren’t realistic real-world models. A home from Germany, for example, cost upwards of $2 million. Each unit of the actual Empowerhouse in Deanwood (there are two apartments in the mini-complex), cost just $250,000, making it affordable in that neighborhood, according to a spokesperson at New School. The model, which was built by Habitat for Humanity volunteers, has been such a hit that six more are being planned for Ivy City, another inner-city neighborhood in the District.

The “net-zero” home is a marvel. The bright, bold exterior lights up the whole block. The healthy, light-filled interior is built out of sustainable, recycled materials. And the landscape architecture was integrated into the project from the beginning, said Professor Laura Briggs, faculty lead of the project at the New School. The result is stormwater management solutions that address the truly local environmental problems: the heavy runoff that impacts the already polluted rivers.

Each unit has terraces with green roofs and small plots for urban agriculture that are designed to capture some water. In the rear of each building is a rain garden that captures any rainwater that escapes from the roof gardens. Each unit also has its own underground cistern, where rainwater is collected and then used to water the property.

At the sides of the house, the parking space is made of permeable pavers that allow stormwater to sink into the underlying soils. And out front, there’s the District’s first residential green street, a deep trough filled with dirt and plants designed to soak up street runoff and deal with the oily pollutants that collect on streets. The landscape work was done with a the local organizations Groundwork Anacostia and D.C. Greenworks.

Both the homes and landscape were co-designed with the community. Students met with community members, local organizations, and Culley, the owner, in a series of design charrettes. The result of all that outreach and collaboration will be more projects in the neighborhood, including a new community “learning garden.” The designers say this was all part of creating social sustainability, a piece often left out of the puzzle.

Empowerhouse is a powerful model for how to bring sustainable, affordable, community-based housing to inner city neighborhoods, and there’s this: Habitat for Humanity now knows how to build these uber green homes in a low-cost way. No doubt we’ll be seeing more of them in unlikely locations in the future.

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.

The report’s authors argue for a comprehensive policy approach to urban agriculture because so many of New York’s urban farms are on city land. A “decentralized system of diverse, small-scale, community-based public spaces” exists in schoolyards, the grounds of public housing developments, community gardens, and public parks, the report reads. As we know, the benefits of these spaces go beyond fresh produce. The American Society of Landscape Architects’ recent Google Sketch-up animation — The Edible City — explains how gardens improve the health and well-being of communities and help people better engage with their urban environments. But, unfortunately, in New York and so many other cities, there’s still a disconnect between official policy and the bottom-up grassroots movement being led by gardeners, farmers, and landscape architects.

Photo by Design Trust for Public Land and Added Value.

To remedy this, the Design Trust brought together nearly 100 experts in food policy, sustainable design, and public health. It looks like just about every major urban farm, community gardening group, and nonprofit working on food issues participated, which gives their recommendations some real weight.

First, the group identified some of the obstacles to future growth. For example, farmers and gardeners face a whole host of “challenges obtaining critical resources” such as soil, compost, and growing space, as well as construction materials, financing, and skilled labor. More involvement by city farmers in policy making could help alleviate some of those problems. Additionally, the group identified some “race- and class-based disparities that hinder access to information, services, and funding” among urban farmers. In other words, depending on where they are, neighborhood farmers in New York may get very different treatment. Furthermore, the city is doing very little to actually track urban agriculture, so there’s no good data on the scope of the field or its growing contribution to the city’s economy. Without a better understanding of how urban agriculture creates social, ecological, and economic benefits, it’s hard to build more support for these farms. Lastly, the report says that the city government has little authority over coordinating urban agriculture, nor does it appear to be incorporating these programs into other complementary initiatives.

The Design Trust for Public Space and Added Value smartly focus on the need for better metrics. They write that while there are now tons of studies showing the benefits of urban farming, there is no way to track real progress on improving healthy eating, spurring physical activity, growing jobs, and building “community cohesiveness.” As a result, they propose a whole set of indicators that the city should be methodically collecting data against annually. And to track this data well, the city will need to ramp up its own resources, with an enhanced position for the “food policy coordinator,” whose success should then be tied to the growth of the burgeoning field. [Read a related Grist post about urban farm data collection.]

The report’s recommendations, which are detailed over many pages, fall into a few categories. The first involves boosting the resources for urban agriculture in New York City’s government. The group proposes strengthening the city’s GreenThumb program, while making the food policy coordinator a true urban farming czar for the city. The second looks at how urban agriculture can be better integrated into city policies and plans. For example, shouldn’t urban agriculture be better connected with New York’s innovative green infrastructure program, which just received almost $200 million in financing? Maybe all those green streets could also be used to grow tomatoes. The third explores how the city’s vast roofscape could be better used for farming. Stalled development sites, new developments, and existing buildings that can handle the structural load should all be real opportunities for rooftop farms, like the innovative Brooklyn Grange. The last set of recommendations examines how disparities based on class or race could be better addressed, with more capacity building and information resources for poorer areas of the city.

Even if you don’t live in New York, this well-designed, well-written 170-page report is certainly worth exploring, perhaps as a model for a similar urban agriculture plan in your own city. You can see some of it online or buy it online. You can also read an interesting interview with Susan Chin, executive director of the Trust, by Metropolis Magazine editor Susan Szenasy, or one with Nevin Cohen, lead writer of the report, by Urban Omnibus.

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 Dino Perucci.

Byrne stumbled into creating his first racks via a bicycle rack competition in which he was serving as a judge. When he decided to submit his own design, the transportation department “enthusiastically agreed to install” it. His first nine racks were designed for particular spots across Brooklyn and Manhattan: A spot near Bergdorf Goodman got the high heel rack, while Wall Street got the dollar sign rack.

Byrne’s new racks at BAM come in the form of letters. The Brokelyn blog reports that Byrne realized he could spell out most words using a “semi circle, line, and ‘v’ shape,” so he came up with interesting phrases like “PINK CROWN” and “MICRO LIP” for his first text installation. According to that site, the words will periodically change:

What’s more, you might get to help design the next round of bike racks. BAM says it will reach out via social media to solicit suggestions for additional letters and words to be used for the “ever-evolving installation.”

To learn more about Byrne’s love of bikes, check out The Bicycle Diaries.

“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.

Miller was speaking at a recent conference in New York City called Greater & Greener: Reimagining Parks for 21st Century Cities. In a separate panel on health care and parks, Deborah Cohen, senior natural scientist at RAND, and Sarah Messiah, a research professor at the University of Miami, presented some exciting results.

In a National Institutes of Health-financed study, Cohen has used “systematic observations” measuring “play in communities” to determine if and how people burn calories in parks (see downloadable app). Her team of researchers visited parks and counted people in target areas every hour, three or four days a week. Cohen was particularly interested in “vigorous” physical activity such as brisk walking, jogging, or running — the healthy kind of activity needed to get hearts pumping.

She said some 50 percent of all vigorous activity occurs in parks. Unfortunately, that doesn’t say much, because “hardly anyone engages in vigorous activity anymore.” For boys, the average is two minutes a day, and for girls, just one minute a day.

To measure the impact of new parks on activity levels, Cohen did a before and after study. She watched residents in low-income, high-crime areas in Los Angeles before and then after three pocket parks were installed. These are tiny parks (less than half an acre), mainly playgrounds, which aren’t staffed. She found that for two of them, “the parks were better used than the larger parks serving larger areas.” People were “more likely to walk to the smaller neighborhood parks, which were perceived to be safer than the larger neighborhood park.” Walking gets the heart pumping.

Then, Cohen evaluated 12 “fitness zones”  — places in L.A. parks where the Trust for Public Land has installed outdoor exercise equipment. Of the 23,500 people who used the parks during her study, some 2,500 were in the fitness zones — two to four people each hour on average. She said these fitness zones led to “increases in moderate, vigorous activity” and were “relatively cost-effective”: At $45,000 a piece, with a 15-year lifespan, these systems offer 11 cents per metabolic equivalent of task (MET), referring to the metric for measuring the energy use of physical activities. “Anything under 50 cents per MET is worth it,” she said.

Benefits did not necessarily increase with the amount invested. When Cohen looked at the MET value of new facilities costing upwards of $1 million, she found that in one park, after the major improvements, the use actually fell from 2,000 to 1,500 people a day. The culprits? Reduced hours, cut programs, less maintenance, and a shorter baseball season. “Less was happening so people went less,” she said. Apparently facilities aren’t everything.

In fact, in another experiment, some parks were given $4,000 to spend on signage, courses, activities, and other programming, while a “control group” didn’t receive any money. The “control” parks saw user levels fall, while the intervention parks saw increased users.

Sarah Messiah with the Miller School of Medicine at the University of Miami and the Miami-Dade County parks and pediatrics department is focusing her research on parks and childhood obesity. Thirty percent of American children are now obese, she said. She’s now seeing lots of kids with scary adult diseases like fatty liver disease and metabolic syndrome. “This generation could be the first that has a shorter lifespan than their parents.”

Miami-Dade County has the third largest park system in the U.S., with more than 260 parks over nearly 13,000 acres, visited by 10 million people annually. With the park system as a platform, Messiah and local parks officials used Fit2Play, a national wellness program, and SPARK after-school programs. For a year, kids from “dangerous” low-income neighborhoods were bused in after school. They spent an hour doing homework and then an hour of SPARK programs in the park.

The researchers found that the after-school programs were extremely beneficial. “The kids were growing normally” instead of ballooning up abnormally, Messiah said. “There were statistically significant decreases in blood pressure,” which is “just important as weight.” Test performance “significantly improved over the year.” The kids’ knowledge of nutrition improved, too.

Messiah said the key to the program’s success was the partnership between the parks system and the university. “This was a team approach with lots of fluid communication both ways.” She said it was also important to get parents to buy in and “sign those participation forms.”

Messiah and Cohen’s programs show that parks not only provide a safe place for people (and especially kids) in dangerous neighborhoods, but are possibly key to their health and well-being. However, park space alone isn’t enough. The park programs are equally as critical.

Without these opportunities, Messiah said, kids in these dangerous neighborhoods just sit inside, playing video games, eating junk food, growing into sedentary unhealthy adults disconnected from nature.

Cohen put it this way: “There’s lots of competition for leisure time. Parks need to compete.”

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.

Diane Sullivan, sustainability planner for NCPC, says the goal is to create a new tree-lined 10th street (or L’Enfant Place) that can connect the Mall to the new southwest waterfront development while also making that connection itself an exciting cultural destination, with space for up to five new museums, along with farmers markets and other draws.

To improve pedestrian access, Miller says new, park-like avenues will carve through the buildings, cutting up the impenetrable “mega-blocks.” A revamped, solar roofed-L’Enfant station will offer access via both commuter rail and Metro. A nearby freeway will be capped with a solar-panel skinned shell, connecting Benjamin Banneker Park, which serves as a monument to an African American surveyor, to the waterfront.

Miller says the new district will “capture, manage, and reuse water, energy, and waste,” integrating clusters of buildings to create a new system. Many of the old federal buildings will be replaced by new ones that meet the goals of Obama’s Executive Order 13514, which calls for federal agencies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, water and energy use. The ones that stay, like the famed Brutalist HUD building, will be updated to be more efficient.

Sullivan says the goal is to create a “zero-net energy district as measured in carbon.” Solar electric and hot water systems will be added to the roofs of the new buildings wherever possible, while ground-source heat will also be tapped. A central facility that runs on natural gas will still be used.

The plan also sets out to reduce potable water use throughout the eco-district by 70 percent and manage all stormwater where it falls. All building greywater will be reused while blackwater will go to a new anaerobic treatment plant. Rainwater will be caught by acres of green roofs (including rooftop farms), green streets, trees, and planters. Permeable surfaces will grow to cover 35 percent of the area, while the tree canopy will reach 40 percent.

There are more ambitious goals for waste reduction: Some 75 percent of construction materials for the new buildings will be reused, and 80 percent of everyday waste will be diverted from the landfill. A composting program will be put in place, too.

So, how will this all actually work? Sullivan sees some government buildings first getting a light rehabilitation and then others will undergo a full rehabilitation. Three federal buildings will be “re-purposed” as major infill development begins. Then, big redevelopment will start over the freeway. Critical projects like a new Banneker Park and a new 10th street landscape will begin next year.

What’s this all going to cost? An economic feasibility study only provided some high-level numbers, but Miller and Sullivan say the federal government will make back its multibillion dollar investment over 20 years through reduced energy, water, and waste fees; increased revenues from private sector developers; and improved local tax gains.

Learn more about the plans here, and read more about eco-districts here.

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.

Therein lies the material for an incredibly boring book, you might be thinking. But Ben-Joseph’s book is so clearly written and designed and includes such great photos you’ll find yourself drawn in.

Take the history, for example. Back in 705 B.C., Assyrian King Sennacherib posted signs on his highway to ensure it was cleared of parked chariots. The signs read: “Royal Road — let no man decrease it.” Whereas nowadays, you’d just get a ticket, then an improperly parked chariot could result in death by beheading. Later, the Romans actually implemented parking laws. Julius Caesar instituted rules preventing chariots from entering busy commercial zones during peak hours to limit congestion.

Two millennia later, as cars, the “horseless chariots,” overtook horse-drawn carriages, they started to consume too much road space, so needed to be stored somewhere. To “ease this ever-growing need,” municipalities and entrepreneurs started to offer off-street parking.

Beginning in the 1930s, off-street parking began to appear in planning and urban zoning strategies. Guidelines were produced over the years, culminating in the Institute of Transportation Engineers’ handbooks Trip Generation and Parking Generation in the 1980s, which Ben-Joseph says are still the go-to guidelines for many transportation and community planners. The guides helps communities estimate the number of parking spaces needed for a particular development. The only problem: A simplistic use of these guides alone has resulted in masses of underutilized parking lots.

The aesthetics of a parking lot were considered important back in the 1920s to 1940s, but over the years, the design of these spaces was increasingly left up to developers. Even very progressive cities like Cambridge, Mass., offer over 30 pages of regulations on parking lots’ size and organization, but no rules about how they should look. The result was that many developers simply cut corners, creating oceans of these “generic, ordinary spaces.”

All of those parking lots are not only expensive but represent an opportunity lost. The average parking lot cost is $4,000 per space, with a space in an above-grade structure costing $20,000, and a space in an underground garage $30,000-$40,000. To give us some sense of the opportunity lost, Ben-Joseph says 1,713 square miles (the estimated size of all surface parking lots in the U.S. put together) could instead be used for spaces that generate 1 billion kilowatt-hours of solar power. With just 50 percent of that space covered with trees, this space could handle 2 billion cubic meters of stormwater runoff, generate 822,264 tons of oxygen, and remove 1.2 million tons of carbon dioxide annually.

Still, so few communities impose even basic landscape requirements to make these places just a bit more green and permeable. Ben-Joseph points to many well-designed examples created by landscape architects and architects, but unfortunately, they remain very rare birds. In Turin, Italy, Renzo Piano created a beautiful parking lot without parking islands and curbs, just rows of trees in dense grids intermingled among the spaces. Other high-performing parking lots incorporate solar panels or wind turbines, add new trees or even preserve old ones, and incorporate bioswales and permeable pavement. One parking lot in Duck, N.C., is even designed to serve as a detention pond during minor flooding.

Beyond the environmental benefits, more flexible parking spaces help communities build social connections. Already, as Ben-Johnson notes, in parking lots, children learn how to ride bicycles, teenagers learn how to drive cars, and high school students hang out after school “where the drama of youth plays out.” In many communities, farmers markets and flea markets take over lots on weekends. In Manhattan’s Lower East Side, there’s Shakespeare in a Parking Lot. Outside of stadiums, there are tailgating parties. In Walmart lots, you can find RVs “boon-docking.” In a number of cities, festivals of food trucks turn a sad parking lot into a space for food, beer, and bands.

What’s important is that community leaders and planners actually enable these activities and remake regulations so that parking areas can provide multiple social functions.

Parking lots can also become sites for activism. San Francisco landscape architect John Bela created the nonprofit Rebar and launched the annual Park(ing) Day, which has become a global movement. In 2009, some 700 parking spaces were designed as mini-parks in 21 countries and 140 cities. Some have even been made permanent in San Francisco, Vancouver, and other cities. These spaces can also become sites for art. Martha Schwartz created a funky parking lot for an amusement park, while artist Toshihiro Katayama and landscape architecture firm Halvorson Design created a stunning shared space for cars and pedestrians in Boston.

Unfortunately, once you exclude the small share of well-designed lots, the average parking space hasn’t really changed much since the 1950s. Still, these bland expanses of asphalt aren’t “no-places,” and they could still be so much more. Don’t believe it? Read this book. I promise you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

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?”

Q. Which aspects of your strategy, in retrospect, proved to be most critical to moving the High Line forward in those early days?

A. Josh and I get a lot of credit for this great strategy. I think the most important thing we did was start the project, and it allowed other people to come along and help us get it done.

The High Line, before. (Photo by Joel Sternfeld.)

One of the things that really connected the landscape and the ultimate design of the High Line were the photographs by Joel Sternfeld. When Josh and I went up there, we realized what was right there in the middle of Manhattan. I first fell in love with the High Line from the street. I loved the structure, the rivets. But then when I walked up there, there was a mile and a half of wildflowers running right through the city. That’s what I really fell in love with: the combination of this wild landscape on top of this industrial structure in the middle of the city.

We knew most people were never going to see it like this, so we took our snapshots which just didn’t look that great. They didn’t really capture the impact of it. So I got a photographer named Joel Sternfeld to go up there, and over the next year, between 2000 to 2001, he took a few pictures in all four seasons. He ultimately published a book called Walking the High Line in 2002.

Josh and I think of him as the third co-founder because those photographs of the wild landscape are what really helped galvanize people. I realized the most effective way to bring people on board was to show them the photographs. Joel’s images really made the case for the project.

Q. As the High Line developed, it has helped spur literally billions of dollars of new property development. Was that part of the original plan?

A. It was. We knew that the High Line had to make economic sense in the long run, so we realized that for some people, pretty pictures weren’t enough. We also needed an economic impact study, which is a really powerful tool for people working on parks projects because landscape, park, and public space projects can have a tremendous economic impact. Too often, people just rely on what it looks like to make the case.

Q. Do you think the High Line’s success can be replicated in other cities?

The High Line, after. (Photo by Iwan Baan.)

A. There are certain projects I really like, which have their own integrity. A lot of them are generated by communities. There’s the Bloomingdale Trail in Chicago, which was originally based in the community and came from a few people who lived in the area. The Atlanta Beltline, which is a much bigger, ambitious project, started as one student’s thesis. The Jersey Embankment, right across the river, is definitely a community-based project.

A project has to have that spirit from below. I think the best ones are not trying to copy the High Line; they’re trying to be something new altogether. This is the test to determine success: whether they try to create something original, just like the High Line did, or not.

Q. What advice would you have for other community groups trying to save and transform local infrastructure and cultural assets?

A. The most important advice is just start it and experiment. Just try things. There are multiple ways to get started.

Now, a great way to do these things and galvanize a project is Facebook. Start a Kickstarter account — I’ve seen that working a lot now. One of the really important things is to raise money. It also helps start building the community. Whether someone gives $5, $5,000, or $5 million, when they give money they become more invested in the project. It’s literally skin in the game. It’s an important part of building an organization or a whole movement.

I have my personal goals for the High Line: one is that it’s a well-loved park by New Yorkers; two is that it gets better after Josh and I leave; and three (and most importantly) is that it inspires other people to start these kind of things — not just elevated rail lines, but any kind of project. You don’t have to have experience, you don’t have to have all the money, you don’t have to have the plans all set. Those things can come.

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.

Q. You’ve argued that cities are the solution to climate change, not the problem. What is the case for this?

A. Well, my point of view is that there are many, many answers to what would be the best way to avoid climate change. A lot of people are talking about new materials. Or new sources of energy. Or wind turbines. Or recycling. They’re really important but not enough. When we realized that 75 percent of car emissions are related to the cities, we realized we can be more effective when we work with the concept of the city. It’s through cities that we can have better results.

Q. What do you see as the relationship between livability and sustainability?

A. Every time we try to create a solution, we have to have a good equation of co-responsibility with the public. That means it’s not a question of money and it’s not a question of skill; it’s how do we organize the equation of co-responsibility?

For example, when I was governor we had to work hard to reduce pollution in our bays. Of course, it’s very expensive to do environmental cleanup work and we didn’t have the money. Another region had taken out a huge loan from the World Bank, about $800 million. For us though, the question wasn’t about money; the question was about mentality. We started to clean our bays through an agreement with fishermen: If the fisherman catches a fish, it belongs to him; if he catches garbage, we buy the garbage. If the day was not good for fishing, the fishermen went to fish garbage. The more garbage they caught, the cleaner the bays became. The cleaner the bay was, the more fish they would have.

It’s that kind of win-win solution we need. We need to work with low-cost solutions.

Q. You also decentralized garbage collection. One program to clean up dirty, narrow streets that were inaccessible to trash collectors gave residents bags of groceries or transit passes in return for their garbage. How well did this program work?

A. It’s been working for more than 20 years in Curitiba. In many cities, there are places where it’s difficult to provide trucks access to collect garbage. In many cities, if the slums are on the hills or deep in valleys, they’re difficult to access. In these places, people are throwing away their garbage and polluting the streams. Their children are playing in polluted areas. In 1989, we started a program where we said, “Okay, we’re going to buy your garbage as long as you put your garbage in a bag, and bring it to the trucks, where it’s more accessible.” In two or three months, all these areas were clean, and these very low-income people had an additional source of income.

We also started public education programs on the separation of garbage [into separate streams for recycling, composting, etc.] because we realized that we could transform one problem if we separated garbage in every household. We started teaching every child in every school. Children taught their parents. Since then, Curitiba has had the highest rate of separation of garbage in the world for more than 20 years. Around 60 or 70 percent of families are separating their garbage at home.

Q. As mayor of Curitiba, you created the world’s first bus rapid transit system (BRT), “Speedy Bus,” which works like a surface subway system but at far less cost. How did you form the public-private partnership that made it cost-effective?

A. We didn’t have the money for a completely new fleet, which would have cost $300 million. What was the equation? What was the solution? We said to the private sector, private companies, “We’ll invest in the itinerary as long as you invest in the fleet. We’ll get loans for the work on our side, for public works, for the itinerary, if the private sector gets loans for the fleet.” We paid them by kilometers and there are no subsidies. The system pays for itself. Now, there are more than 83 BRT systems around the world.

The problem is in many countries, government wants to invest in everything. That doesn’t work. I’ll give you an example. Why don’t we have a good system of transport in New York on the waterfront? This could be a very good approach for reducing congestion in the city’s bridges and tunnels. The city could have a very pleasant system of water public transport. But instead, the policymakers are holding it up, saying there are no passengers and we don’t want to invest in the fleet. First, they need to create a good partnership and create an attractive system, then they will have the passengers, and then they will have a low-cost solution.

Q. You’ve also mentioned that many poor copies of your BRT are out there, and are actually setting back BRT as a transportation movement. What are other cities doing wrong?

A. BRT can’t be designed as a transportation solution. It has to be planned as a whole city. Why? Because the city is a structure of living, working, and leisure. Everything together. Transportation has to provide a structure for living and working together. It can’t just be a system of transport. You will just have a kind of commuting system, which is more difficult to make feasible. With that kind of approach, you will only use public transport twice daily, concentrated in just a few hours. If you have a system that works always and connects working and living activities, it’s more a city [approach] than just a corridor of public transport.

Q. Now you have your own architecture and urban design firm and you are working with major city governments and private clients throughout the Americas. What kind of projects are you working on?

A. Sustainability is an equation between what we save and what we waste. There are so many problems of mobility or integration of systems, but we have to work fast. If we understand the city as a structure of living, working, moving together, we can work more effectively …

For instance, in Sao Paolo, they have three subway lines. They are working on fourth line of the subway, with 84 percent of the trains running on the surface. It’s the surface that has to operate better. At the same time, the suburb railroad is being improved. The idea is to take advantage of the existing path of the suburb railroads and build above the rail a kind of linear park like the High Line. However, this linear park would link the whole city, where you can connect people of all income levels. In every place, you could have good public transport and you have a huge park linking it all. Within this park, you could walk, bike, or take small electric cars.

Sometimes there’s an idea and it has to be improved. In other cases, we use “urban acupuncture.”

Q. At the street level, you’ve been experimenting with “portable streets,” creating informal and spontaneous market street life.

A. Some places in some cities have become decayed. There’s no life. When that happens, it’s very difficult to bring back life because people don’t want to live in a place like that. However, the moment we bring street life, people will want to live there again. That’s why we designed the portable streets. On a Friday night, we can deliver a portable street and remove it Monday morning. We can put a whole street life in front of a university or any place, bringing street life back …

These are small interventions that can provide new energy to the city, and provide assistance during the process of long-term planning, which has to take time. But we have to work fast.

Bjarke Ingels.

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 good a time we can have. We have to downgrade our current lifestyle to achieve something that is sustainable. That makes it essentially undesirable. People can be to the left [politically] and maybe shop a little bit green, but they’re not going to drop their car if they have to pick up their kids from football and go to the movies. It becomes an impossible mission.

However, there’s nothing in our lifestyle that necessarily requires CO2 emissions. It’s just an unforeseen side effect of all of the increases in quality of life that we have been able to deliver through modernization and industrialization. As we get smarter and more aware of these side effects, we can factor them in and start delivering urban mobility without emissions by switching to fuel cells or batteries.

My two favorite examples from Copenhagen: 37 percent of the Copenhageners today commute by bicycle so they are never stuck in a traffic jam. You know how unenjoyable it is to sit stuck in traffic, especially if you do it every day. So 37 percent of the Copenhageners never experience that because they have the convenience of going from A to B on a bicycle. Also, our port has become so clean you can swim in it. You don’t have to commute to the Hamptons to have clean water. You can actually jump in the port downtown. So these are basic examples where sustainability actually starts becoming an upgrade rather than a downgrade.

Q. In your large-scale master plan and park projects, you often feature landscape loops. For example, in your Stockholmsporten project, “a continuous bike and pedestrian path reconnects different areas in an un-hierarchical and democratic way.” In Clover Block, there’s a perimeter loop surrounding a massive lawn.  In another project still in the idea phase, you propose a loop city in the Copenhagen suburbs. What’s the attraction to these loop forms? How well do they work?

Ingels’ proposed loop city for Copenhagen.A. They have to do with connectivity. You can see it in the loop city idea. The old paradigm for Copenhagen was the five finger plan, where from the central orientation of downtown Copenhagen you have these corridors of urban tissue that extend, leaving gaps between the fingers [for] green and agriculture. But, of course, this is a hierarchical and central model where the further you get out in the finger, the further you are away from the concentration of connectivity and activity.

Given a lot of the Copenhageners live out in the fingers, and a lot of people actually work in this finger and live in this finger and play football in this finger, another kind of connectivity starts becoming interesting … So what we are proposing with the loop city is to create a … continuous urban tissue where people are no longer condemned to live in the outskirts and commuting into downtown Copenhagen and back out again. There will be a continuous ability to interact between these kind of urban areas that now house the majority of the population of the area. You have 500,000 people living in the Copenhagen inner city and you have 3.5 million people in the region. 

Q. You are well-known for integrating building and landscape in your large-scale residential projects.  In The Mountain, terraced apartments are arranged so each gets sunlight and has its own individual garden. Other projects, including your upcoming West 57th Street residential complex in New York City, Vilhelmsro School, and the 8HOUSE project in Copenhagen, combine building and landscape in the form of green roofs. What comes first: the building or landscape? How do they mesh?

The 8HOUSE project.A. As you mentioned, it is often hard to distinguish where one discipline begins and another one ends. We’ve had lots of collaborations with landscape architects. It’s an interplay.

In the case of the 8HOUSE, we wanted to include the typology of the townhouse with the small garden and all of the social interaction that happens when people have a little piece of their private life happening in the semi-open, like the porch in an American suburban setting. Sitting out on the porch, you can holler at the neighbors and see who’s home and who’s not. You’re at home and sort of semi-private but people can actually access you and there’s the possibility of spontaneous interaction. We simply tried to introduce that social typology found in a dense urban block by simply allowing it to invade the three-dimensional space of the open block. To really make it townhouses with gardens, we wanted to make sure that there were trees and plants. To recreate the social possibilities, we had to include the element of landscape.

In the West 57th project, the entire architecture is created as the framework for the courtyard. Somebody called it a Bonsai Central Park. It’s probably one-five-hundredth the size of Central Park, but by insisting on creating an urban oasis for the residents, the whole volume of the block, the whole architecture, was dramatically reconfigured, and we can no longer rely on the traditional boxy typology. We created this highly asymmetrical roofscape that allows in daylight and creates views into a sort of oasis. It was really the Central Park of the Copenhagen courtyard. We arrived at a completely different architecture because of Central Park.

Q. In Copenhagen, you are designing a 100-meter-tall waste-to-energy plant that will double as a ski slope and civic center. What did Copenhagen figure out that other cities haven’t? Why aren’t more cities designing and building imaginative public works projects that solve multiple problems at once?

The waste-to-energy plant that doubles as a ski slope and civic center.A. We are quite interested in this new genre of projects that we call social infrastructure. A major part of any city’s annual construction budget goes into improving highly utilitarian structures that are purely in the domain of civil engineering. The holistic, integral thinking that architecture and landscape architecture can contribute, where it’s not technology-driven but actually human-centered, can be transformative. Instead of getting your nasty highway overpasses that create shaded areas for dodgy activities, you start incorporating social attributes and making sure that when a necessary piece of infrastructure like a train connection, a bus line, a roadway, a power cable, is carried through, that it’s done in such a way that it actually increases connectivity and creates new activities, so that the sheltered spaces become sort of sports facilities or market halls.

There are tons of examples where decommissioned infrastructure turns into new programs. In Paris, Berlin, or London, you have galleries and marketplaces occupying the archways under the train lines. You have the High Line in New York. You have tons of examples where, after the fact, we can re-imagine the infrastructure. But what if we, from day one, can actually turn the power plant into a public park?

The power plant has a budget of $700 million USD, so the configuration of the roofscape is nothing compared to the overall budget. As a result, people don’t feel that we’re dumping a big boxy factory that blocks their views and casts shadows into their neighborhood. They feel that we’re actually creating a public amenity. Normally we would get not-in-my-back-yard letters and complaints about the project. Now, we’re actually getting letters from people asking when it’s going to open. So it’s also a way of integrating the necessary infrastructure into our urban fabric rather than sort of putting it in some kind of industrial wasteland in the periphery of our city.

Q. I saw you discussing your buildings in the context of parkour in the film My Playground. Do you think through how your buildings and spaces could be reappropriated? 

A. The driving force of our design is to saturate it with possibility. We like the whole notion of parkour. What architects do is put potential out there, and what parkour people do is to expand the preconceived or pre-planned possible use and take it one step further, essentially to expand the human realm of the city. That said, take a project like the 8HOUSE, where we made this mountain path that allows people to walk and bicycle all the way to the 10th floor. Sociological studies from the ’70s indicate that children living higher than the third floor rarely come down and play because of the disconnect, whereas here, if you were living on the 10th floor, you could actually just walk four houses down and play with your neighbor to create this spontaneous social interaction. That’s also why the 8HOUSE is actually a loop. Everybody’s connected to everybody.

Because Copenhagen is completely flat, there is no landscape, there is no vista where you can go and enjoy the view and hold your girlfriend’s hand, blah, blah, and enjoy the beautiful scene except now, at 8HOUSE, there actually is. So what we didn’t imagine is people from around Copenhagen actually go to 8HOUSE on weekends for a walk because this is the only place you can actually enjoy the view of the city and get this sort of three-dimensional experience that you get in a lot of other cities naturally.