On June 17th we are holding our first full-day workshop on the LEED for Neighborhood Development standard.
Although our organization largely focuses on buildings, we’ve mentioned many times the great importance we feel should be placed on community planning. Where your building is located, and the contextual fabric of that location, is often more important than the design of the building itself. It has always been clear that choosing a greenfield site over an already urbanized location has major environmental repercussions: from simple disruption of ecology to less efficient utility distribution. Since climate change has become the most pressing issue of our time, we have come to understand that even just within the limited focus of energy-use there is a clear imperative to curtail sprawl. The transportation and energy impacts of a building’s location were codified into the metric of “Transportation Intensity” by Alex Wilson in a quietly transformative article at BuildingGreen.com in September of 2007. Here were the statistics that backed up many of our suspicions that, say, replacing a poorly performing inner-city high-school building with a LEED platinum school 20 miles outside the town was not an unequivocally good thing.
It seems a simple edict: To be considered a truly sustainable building, a project needs to be located in a sustainable community. But what are the components of a green community or neighborhood? The LEED for Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND) standard is a strong attempt to codify the basic pieces to the puzzle of a sustainable community. It sets out some basic thresholds:
- No projects that imperil endangered species
- No projects in floodplains, wetlands or on heritage agricultural land.
- Projects have to be compact, and feature walkable streets and diverse services.
- It encourages buildings within the proposed neighborhood to be LEED certified.
No surprises on that list. However the standard addresses a myriad of other issues such as diverse transportation options, tree-shaded streets, community outreach programs, habitat restoration and local food production. There are nods within the standard to historic preservation, solar access, waste management infrastructure and district heating & cooling. It’s a complicated stew of options and each of them have their own metrics, synergies and trade-offs.
Our June 17th workshop is an opportunity to understand the intent behind addressing all of these individual issues. It’s a great primer, not just for the application of this standard to actual planning projects but also for a basic understanding of the principles of sustainable planning. Kaid Benfield has even pointed out that LEED-ND is a great tool for communities looking to institute more sustainable land use policies. It’s an enormously important subject, and since the standard is relatively new there have been few workshops in this area to date.
Seats are strictly limited. Register here.
Photo credit: Joshua Bousel
