by Justus Stewart
I. The Art Center College of Design, in Pasadena, was the site of a conference last week titled “Systems, Cities & Sustainable Mobility.” The building is an adaptive reuse (most of the conference took place in a converted wind tunnel), and is LEED certified. It is also, most important for the topic at hand, walking distance from the Gold Line, which connects downtown Los Angeles to Pasadena.
The conference opened on Wednesday morning with a keynote from WC’s own Alex Steffen, who set the tone for what would be the conference’s central theme: is green technology (in this case cars) enough to bring about a sustainable future? Alex issued the challenge that we had to completely re-design our systems, not just our technologies; that we need a new definition of what it means to be a prosperous American in the 21st century. (Alex’s post on the subject can be read here.) Most of the presenters made clear that the ‘systems redesign’ model is favored over the ‘green tech’ model. Many of their ideas for creating sustainable mobility in an urban context have been covered here before: scenario building, density, walkability, integration of modes, pay as you drive insurance, distribution points & home delivery v retail stores, shifting taxes, and none of them, you will notice, is a shiny new hybrid (though the author will admit to ogling the Aptera floor model just a little).
Alex was followed by the Urban Strategies Leader from ally Arup, Gary Lawrence, who spoke about Dongtan Eco-city, which WC has posted about extensively. His talk has several great ideas and insights: that sustainability is a political concept, with technical challenges, not the other way around – technology can only provide directions (choice), it cannot be the map; that sustainability is inevitable – it is up to us to decide whether we achieve it through design or collapse; and that sustainability is unknown – Alex described it in a recent post as the sustainability singularity – we cannot see around the corner. This led to another key concept from the conference: that good design is not only green design (to crib from Inhabitat), it is also adaptive and integrated design. A few good examples from Dongtan that were news to me: it’s designed for a sea level rise up to 3 meters; rice husks from local farming will fuel a CHP system; and that while cars are not excluded, they are the least attractive transportation option (something we could copy with great efficacy in the US).
Lawrence also spoke to a heavily debated theme in sustainability: do we try to change people’s behavior (educational model), or change the systems in which they live (design model). Dongtan was created with what he described as ‘cultural’ features – the aspirations, fears, nostalgia, and status of the residents – that are intended to drive some of the sustainability features. This is, I can tell, you, not the textbook definition of community planning.
The conference then made the first of several abrupt shifts to the other side of the debate, as Henrik Fisker discussed and promoted his electric car company, Fisker Automotive, and their $80,000 sports car, the Karma. Fisker stated that most “green design is boring” using Prius as an example, and substituted his sports car instead. (It is a boring we could use more of, in any case, given how many Toyota has sold.) Fisker, by his own admission, was not motivated by environmental concerns; he just saw an unmet demand – a market opportunity. It isn’t greenwashing – they’ve created an all-electric automobile, and if we all drove one, we’d make a big dent in emissions. Yet it seems to me that this particular tactic (‘sexy green’ – sustainable beef v tofu) is behind the times. In fact, people do care about relative greenness, whether the product or service is sexy or not, and businesses, even Wal*Mart for god’s sake, are responding. The initial tactic of making green desirable, as elucidated by Bruce Sterling at the beginning of the Viridian Design movement, has achieved its success – people want green. Environmental purchasing has arrived.
This is a small victory, but it raises a larger point: with every step we take – with every small success, we must leverage it to go further. There is so much to be done in such a short time. If we stop at environmental purchasing – lifestyle environmentalism – we will fail to discover sustainable prosperity. We must remember that there will always be people who participate reluctantly, and will ask at every step of the way… “Are we there yet? How much is enough? What more do you want from us?”
This represents a failure, in part, to make the goals clearer, to communicate the scale of the challenge better, and to make the bright green future more compelling. But since the future toward which we are pushing is unknowable, we probably cannot ever fully show or explain what sustainability looks like.
However, one answer to the question revealed itself on the last night, during the closing soiree. A few people from the Art Center spoke to the vision for the school: bringing sustainability in as an equal aspect to their other goals. This is admirable, but it demonstrates nicely the distance yet to go. It reveals an attitude to ‘add on’ sustainability as an aspect of their work. Like the mVIP game (see below): you have to design this car, because that’s what the client wants – it has to be this, it has to be that, oh, and to the extent you can, make it ‘sustainable.’
So when will we be able to answer the question “are we there yet?” When sustainability is not an afterthought, or even a forethought, but the foundation out of which decisions come. When we do not have to consider sustainability in our designs, our plans, our products, because it is implicit, it no longer occurs to us to do something unsustainable. In other words, we will achieve sustainability when we no longer think about it as an option – maybe when we no longer think about it at all.
II. Lloyd Walker, one of the professors at Art Center, introduced a card game that the school developed called mVIP, for mobility Vision Integration Process. It is a scenario-building game around the issue of mobility in the future (2040), using potential constraints and events as a framework for design. Although several interesting ideas emerged (including a few previously discussed here: Personal Rapid Transit, including a flooding/ waterworld model of pods that congregate into cities; modular housing that disassembles for shifting needs; delivering systems instead of products; ‘smart’ transit, wired to fulfill car-based needs during trips; and more advance car-sharing), it was interesting to note that the game was still based in a world model where designers were essentially creating new cars for their clients; it was a world in which perhaps future constraints were not made realistic enough. To be fair, the game was sponsored by Ford.
Walker led into the game with a discussion of models, and utilizing visioning games and processes to introduce new models (as Bucky Fuller said, the best way to make change). He recalled that modern cities were designed with an ideal of the ‘empowered mobile individual’, a useful conceptual opposite to the models we now need. This future scenario building process also provides greater insight into the unforeseen and unintended consequences of design choices – a process-based precautionary principle.
The game seemed ultimately useful – it left me wondering what a WC deck of cards would look like? Anyone want to take a proverbial stab at it?
III. There was a great presentation from Martin Tillman, of Steer Davies Gleave, about some of the innovative work they’re doing in the UK, focusing on two types of intervention: government (taxes/financing) and design (density/walkability). Check out one of their projects at www.journeyon.co.uk. Another focus of the whole conference was on what Tillman called ‘government interventions,’ shifts in taxing and funding mechanisms. If the national gas tax rate were constant and adjusted for inflation, it would be $.42 today, instead of its current $.18. Chalk up another subsidy for automobiles. However, emerging technologies like GPS and electronic tolling could make such taxes irrelevant; Wachs called for a tax based on what, where, when, and how much we drive – abolishing the gas tax altogether.
One of the better pieces of the conference was a panel discussion with Scott Bernstein (President/Founder of the Center for Neighborhood Technology), Martin Wachs (Director of Transportation, Space, and Technology at RAND), and William Browning (Co-Founder of Terrapin Bright Green LLC).
As I mentioned, among this more academic crowd, the emphasis lies clearly in creation of a better public realm over a bigger or even a greener transportation system (narrowly defined). As Martin Wachs put it, an emphasis on ‘changing management and institutions, not technology’. A few notable pieces from their talk was a PricewaterhouseCoopers study that there is over $700 billion invested in green and Transit-Oriented developments – a sign that current rates of development are not sufficient to meet demand. Though they publicly support these development trends, planners, developers, and politicians have been cautious about implementation. But it is increasingly clear that density reduces car trips (as well as per capita resource use – which green density reduces even further) and transit proximity increases property values. The argument is growing stronger every day, that density increases personal prosperity.
IV. The conference included a few other participants, which space prevents me from writing more on. Nike was there, as was Nokia, in a showing of corporate interest (if not understanding); and there were several excellent ideas generated from within the student body. There is also some blog coverage here that's perhaps of interest (thanks Nathan). If you have any specific questions, please post them in the comments.
