Green Cities Conference Focuses on Local Sustainability
November 21, 2011
by Laura Turner
“All of a sudden, architecture wasn’t adequate for us,” Bob Berkebile, a principal of Kansas City-based BNIM Architects, told attendees during the Congress of Cities in Phoenix.
Berkebile shared stories of community transformation at the Opening General Session of the Green Cities Conference, one of four concurrent conferences at the Congress of Cities.
Until the late 1980s, he said, his firm had been designing buildings that would be healthy for their occupants and good neighbors. But they found they couldn’t solve their clients’ or a community’s problems at the building scale.
They had to move beyond to neighborhoods, cities, regions and watersheds and began partnering with sociologists and physicists to reach a systems-based understanding of what they were doing in communities.
Berkebile went to Antarctica for the National Science Foundation in the early 1990s because installations there were destroying the environment. His firm retrofitted the structures to reduce energy consumption by more than 65 percent and pollutants emitted by 90 percent.
While in Antarctica, Berkebile discovered that climate change is real and “will have everything to do with the vitality of our communities going forward,” he said.
“It’s not just about whether or not the ocean’s going to rise, it is about whether or not we will have water to drink and whether we will have food to eat. And the cost of energy, and every forecast they made when they were there has been exceeded dramatically,” he said. “All these environmental crises all over the planet are directly linked to how we design, operate and build our communities.”
Berkebile has spent the past 20 years responding to disasters and is currently working in Joplin, Mo. and Tuscaloosa, Ala.
“When something disastrous happens to a community, it creates an opportunity for complete transformation, and it’s not guaranteed, because they are facing a lot of challenges,” he said.
After a tornado destroyed 95 percent of Greensburg, Kan., the Federal Emergency Management Agency provided circus tents for community meetings to craft a vision for the future.
Wind tore their town away, and residents chose to use that resource for power. BNIM designed, built and privately funded a municipal utility adjacent to the town that generates five times the energy Greensburg consumes. The excess is sold back to the grid, bringing revenue to the community.
Every drop of rain would be treated as a precious resource to be captured on buildings, streets and sidewalks and taken to a natural area and managed, purified, used, stored, re-purified, re-used and finally returned to the aquifer.
Berkebile hopes Greensburg’s approach becomes a model for revitalizing rural America. He said communities should not wait for a natural disaster, but recognize that they are suffering a very slow, but very real man-made disaster.
Berkebile said he talks a lot about community engagement, and it was a tweet that first requested BNIM come to Tuscaloosa following April’s tornado. When he and his staff arrived, the mayor and planning officer said they didn’t have time for community dialogs, so they assembled a steering committee and BNIM could pretend its members were the entire community.
BNIM launched a website the day the firm was hired and scheduled the first community meeting for two weeks later. More residents than expected showed up, and the mayor told Berkebile it was the most diverse meeting in the city’s history.
BNIM has found that when it talks to local officials, the chamber of commerce, business community and developers, they only offer their priorities.
“Now they actually knew at the fine grain level what the community was really concerned about, and it informed their decisions going forward, and it empowered them to make the right decisions,” Berkebile said.
Ensuring that sustainable communities are inclusive to all who live there was the focus of Sustainable, Inclusive Communities: Engaging Communities for Equitable Development, one of the workshops that was part of the Green Cities Conference.
Nora Liu of Seattle’s Neighborhood Planning and Community Land Use office described the different types of outreach her city employs to include underrepresented people.
Liu said cities should support the people already living in redeveloping neighborhoods and help them grow their businesses.
And sustainability can mean business. Andrea Luecke, executive director of the Solar Foundation, noted that the solar energy industry is creating jobs at a rate far greater than the overall economy during the Getting Started with Solar in your Community workshop sponsored by the International City/County Management Association.
Moreover, many green jobs cannot be outsourced.
Chad Laurent of the Boston-based renewal energy training firm, Meister Consultants Group, noted that homes can’t be shipped to China to have solar installed.
Every dollar invested in energy yields six in savings, said Institute for Market Transformation Executive Director Cliff Majersik during the Building Codes: The Foundation for an Energy Efficient Future workshop.
Majersik called energy codes one of the most powerful policies, as they allow consumers to spend the money they save on utilities on other things, thereby creating jobs.
“We could save over $10 billion per year by 2040,” he said.
Details: Look for more information about events at the Green Cities conference in the December 5th issue of Nation’s Cities Weekly.