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Green Acres? — Page 3
Company principal Andrés Duany, a well-known
advocate for higher population density combined with
marketable architecture, is the project’s lead
designer. In an interview last year with Thetyee.ca,
Duany argued against an environmentalist movement that
targets cities. “Urbanism is environmentalism
by other means. The environmentalism of urbanism is
not about more green—it’s about having people
willingly living in high density.”
Duany cites London as an example. “Even intelligent
environmentalists present London as a problem. But London
is part of the solution.”
A disused CPR rail line that divides the property is
expected to be converted into a commuter line, though
no details are available. There will be a fish habitat
and extensive green space, including marsh and wetland
areas, and a “sanctuary island” with no
human access. The developers also have what they claim
is the “first urban songbird strategy,”
meant to attract a wide variety of songbirds to the
area.
THE MEANING OF GREENING
What exactly is
a “green” property? Can you really measure
how sustainable a project is? Is a place “green”
if it’s surrounded by conservation lands, as UniverCity
is? If it includes buildings that have high rates of
energy efficiency, as some do in Southeast False Creek?
Is a project intrinsically green if it accommodates
a large, high-density development that includes enough
basic environmental features to make a measurable difference?
There’s an added complication when you consider
the popular argument that to be green a community must
be economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable—that
it cannot limit itself to just one of those factors
without, by definition, becoming unsustainable.
These days, as
developers find ways to make buildings more energy-efficient
at lower cost, sustainability experts are moving away
from building-specific guidelines in favour of community-wide
ones; LEED’s future expansion into “neighbourhood”
standards is one reflection of that movement.
“The question
we have to ask,” says Alison Aloisio, an urban
planner who serves as UBC’s sustainable buildings
advisor, “is whether the region is better off
or worse off because of this development.” She
believes that an entire community’s ecological
footprint is the best way to determine a home’s
environmental impact; yet few North American municipalities,
if any, have devised a way of making that assessment
accurately. “I don’t think we’re really
asking the right question,” says Aloisio, “and
even if we were, I don’t think we’re at
the point where we’re able to answer it.”
As living in a
green building and a green neighbourhood becomes more
desirable and more widespread, Aloisio points out, the
very word “green” begins to lose meaning.
And as everything gets marketed as “green,”
the pressure will subside on developers to keep pushing
the sustainability envelope, and on municipalities to
keep strengthening their green standards.
So how do we keep
upping the sustainability stakes? For starters, Aloisio
wants to see real-estate listings that include green
accounting, allowing potential buyers to compare the
environmental impact of living or business space as
easily as they now compare square footage and prices.
“We’re still happy with buzzwords and concepts,”
she says. “We don’t yet have the sophistication
to demand the follow-through, the evidence that it actually
works.”
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