Buildings and Infrastructure

Introduction

This page focuses on ways to make our communities more efficient, comfortable, safer, and eco friendly. 

How to Build Neighborhoods We Actually Like

9:09 minute video discusses what makes a community comfortable for humans and environmentally friendly, vs what designs are problematic.

Density

This is an increasingly important topic as the human population expands with despite our increasingly limited spaces. Sea level rise is already cutting into communities around the world, pushing people to live closer together, but there are ways to make this functional, comfortable, and efficient for everyone.

Higher density communities use less energy and create less waste than suburban or other single, spread out housing options. They allow people to share the benefits of heating and cooling with shared walls, while reducing travel emissions when groceries, libraries, and public transit are walkable distances from their front doors.

We Need to Talk About the “Missing Middle”

8:42 minute video explores semi-detached housing, town houses, and other examples of homes that fill the housing gap between wasteful and energy-intensive single unit/suburban houses and high density apartment towers. The video explores how these are more common than people realize because they can hide multiple homes within relatively small buildings, improving housing conditions for the communities they serve.

Buildings

Infrastructure

Flood-Resistant Communities

How China is Designing Flood-Resistant Cities

6:49 minute video explores how urban parks or greenways, green roofs, permeable infrastructure, rain gardens and other flood-wise features can make our communities better survive increasingly intense rainfall due to climate change.

Transit

Active Transport Infrastructure

Passive Transport Infrastructure 

Passive transport refers to any transport that doesn't require the user's energy, including cars, trucks, planes, and ferries.

Combinations of Infrastructure & Buildings

Buildings and infrastructure interplay in a variety of ways. Roads and rail help deliver building materials to communities, while harbors, warehouses, train stations, and airports are key to the storage and transition of resources which traveling along our infrastructural routes.

Types of Communities

Ecocity

"An ecocity is “a human settlement modeled on the self-sustaining resilient structure and function of natural ecosystems.”

Here is a longer working definition by Ecocity Builders and the International Ecocity Framework & Standards (IEFS) advisory team.

An Ecocity is a human settlement modeled on the self sustaining resilient structure and function of natural ecosystems. The ecocity provides healthy abundance to its inhabitants without consuming more (renewable) resources than it produces, without producing more waste than it can assimilate, and without being toxic to itself or neighboring ecosystems. Its inhabitants’ ecological impact reflect planetary supportive lifestyles; its social order reflects fundamental principles of fairness, justice and reasonable equity.

— February 20th, 2010, Vancouver, Canada" - Ecocity Builders: What is an Ecocity

Pocket Neighborhoods

"Pocket neighborhoods are clustered groups of neighboring houses or apartments gathered around a shared open space — a garden courtyard, a pedestrian street, a series of joined backyards, or a reclaimed alley — all of which have a clear sense of territory and shared stewardship. They can be in urban, suburban or rural areas.


These are settings where nearby neighbors can easily know one another, where empty nesters and single householders with far-flung families can find friendship or a helping hand nearby, and where children can have shirttail aunties and uncles just beyond their front gate." - Pocket Neighborhoods

Raised Walkways and Bike Highways

These can help keep pedestrians, cyclists, and other active transit users safe from dangerous traffic without slowing or obstructing vehicles. The following are some real-life examples.

Skyways

Also called skybridges, skywalks,  or sky walkways. These have connected two or more buildings since at least the Han Dynasty, though modern examples are usually less pretty, and use glass panes to protect people from harsh weather.

Drawbacks & Dangers

This article warns that elevated pedestrian bridges can be uninviting to pedestrians, and encourage more dangerous driving, making roadways more dangerous instead of less so.

There's also the prohibitive cost of raised transit routes, so it is vital that planners assess whether this infrastructure is the best course of action, or if safer roadway design or even eliminating heavy vehicles from an area would be the safer and cheaper choice.

Building Materials

The (Modern) "Holy Trinity of Construction"

Concrete  

Produces around 622Kg of CO2 for every 1 tonne of cement produced. Cement is an ingredient of concrete, and we make about 4 billion tonnes every year. That's roughly equivalent to 700 pyramids. This single construction material makes up about 8% of global CO2 emissions (3 times more than aviation). - Why We Should Paint Our Roads White

Glass

Steel

Energy

Parking Lot Solar Canopies

Car parks already use up far too much of our land and often go unused, especially in places with zoning rules that prioritize minimum parking spaces over walking and biking infrastructure.

Parking lot canopies could not only protect users from intense weather, while providing local energy for local energy grids or micro-grids.

Schools

Schools in particular could benefit from cheap, local energy for their growing electric bus fleets. School buses have the benefit of working as mobile batteries which can feed extra power back into the local grid, or even to help power the school itself during non-peek energy production hours.

8:31 minute video "In the video above, we explore one option that could help: parking lots. Solar photovoltaics researcher and professor Joshua Pearce goes into the data on how placing solar canopies over parking lots could be a worthwhile investment for many cities. And as more countries, like France, are moving toward retrofitting parking spaces with solar, we look at what it could mean in the US."

Buildings

Energy use in buildings makes up 27% of all global energy needs. This includes heating, cooling as the major energy users, followed by heating water, and other uses such as lights, security, and appliances.

By building new buildings and retrofitting existing buildings to use passive heating/cooling elements, communities can massively reduce their energy needs. At the same time, those in charge of those buildings will benefit from massive energy and money savings over the lifetime of each building.

Transportation

Personal vehicles and delivery vehicles make up a huge percentage of travel emissions. Cars sit around eating up valuable space as much as 99% of the time, then contribute to road congestion which produces serious health consequences for everyone in the community, as well as the climate.

We can reduce the amount of space and energy wasted on transportation by focusing on providing safe passive transit infrastructure, as well as timely and accessible public transportation. 

For those who need their own vehicle, electric and other non-fossil energy sources need to become more available. Check out the Charging Stations page to see how your community fares. You may already have enough charging stations nearby to easily convert to a green vehicle, and if not, then contact your local leaders and let them know there is a demand for more!

Urban Heat Island Effect

Most people understand that the heat island effect is caused by materials such as concrete and metal absorbing the sun's radiation, then releasing it back into the atmosphere. Increasingly often this is causing deadly urban heatwaves as cities and towns are often 10 degrees hotter than surrounding rural or forested areas.

Recently vehicles have also come into the spotlight as the metal bodies, hot engines, and steaming emissions all add considerably to this heat island effect. This is why traffic jams in hot weather can be particularly dangerous to people trapped in their cars, as well as those who are forced to live alongside major roadways.

Solutions

Resources & Tools

Europe

UK

Organizations

International

Africa

Asia

Europe

UK

North America

Canada

Mexico

USA

California

Oceana

South America

Colombia

Companies

The following include architecture companies and others who are focused on creating more sustainable and livable communities.

Europe

Denmark

North America

USA

California

New York

Maps

International

Asia

North America

USA

Oceana

Grants & Funding

Asia

North America

USA

Connecticut