Cities have made great strides lowering energy consumption in new buildings. Vancouver is taking the next step: reducing emissions from the building process itself.
By Philip Preville
Five miles south of Vancouver’s downtown core, among the detached homes of the Sunset neighborhood, the finishing touches are currently being applied to the city’s first net-zero emissions building: Fire Hall 17. The design has been widely celebrated, with certifications already bestowed by Passive House and the Green Building Council. The building features a vast array of cutting-edge building technologies: rooftop solar panels, improved insulation, heat recovery ventilators, heat pumps, geoexchange heating systems, and more.
Once completed this summer, Fire Hall 17 will emit infinitesimal amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, contributing to declining greenhouse gases for…
The work of Phoenix-based Studio Ma, which blends low-energy design and climate technology, offers something of a bellwether for sustainable building.
By Laura Raskin
Over the last two years, the architecture firm Studio Ma has been designing a 13-story residence hall atop a three-story arts hub for Arizona State University in downtown Phoenix, set to open in the fall of 2021. The form of the L-shaped residence tower on its rectangular base was derived from exhaustive studies, using cutting-edge technology, to reduce the heat and glare from the desert climate while consuming as little energy as possible. Christiana Moss, principal and co-founder of Studio Ma, compares the building’s skin to the self-shading saguaro cactus.
The new dorm is just the latest…
Faced with worsening floods and aging sewers, the city has become a national leader by combining green infrastructure with digital technology.
By Philip Preville
A mere two blocks away from Diane Hershberger’s home, in Kansas City’s historic Marlborough neighborhood, there are two sewer outfalls into the Blue River, a tributary running north past downtown and into the Missouri. Most of the time those outfalls are dry. But during heavy rainfalls, stormwater runoff enters the city’s aging combined sewer system, where it mixes with raw sewage, fills the pipe beyond its capacity, and discharges its overflow through those outfalls and straight into the Blue River.
“Kansas City has close to a hundred outfalls like those ones,” says Hershberger, a retired civil engineer…
Underground trash systems can eliminate curbside bins and improve recycling rates. Cities are catching on.
By Philip Preville
Wembley Stadium has hosted a long list of memorable cultural and sporting events throughout its history. Until recently, however, the grounds that surrounded the stadium have been distinctly unmemorable. “What we had, in the area surrounding Wembley, was an old area of industrial units and parking lots in desperate need of regeneration,” says Chris Whyte, the director of environment services for the London borough of Brent, which Wembley calls home.
Over the last 12 years, Whyte has helped Brent lead the transformation of the 85-acre site into a vibrant neighborhood of mid-rise residential and commercial buildings. Now…
Stockholm’s Royal Seaport district seeks to go beyond carbon-neutral and actually remove emissions from the environment. It hasn’t been an easy journey.
By Philip Preville
In 2009, Stockholm was planning the redevelopment of its Royal Seaport district — a 583-acre brownfield adjacent to the city core — when the city’s mayor at the time, Sten Nordin, realized he had a unique opportunity. The C40 Cities organization, in partnership with the Clinton Climate Initiative, had just announced an ambitious program devoted to “climate-positive” development: large-scale projects that would not only eliminate their own carbon emissions, but remove carbon from surrounding areas as well. …
Nijmegen is home to the world’s first successful neighborhood freight hub. Why has it worked out where others failed?
Edited by Eric Jaffe
When Birgit Hendriks set out in 2007 to create a more efficient, environmentally responsible system for freight deliveries in the Dutch city of Nijmegen, she knew she was up against steep odds. “I talked to a Ph.D. candidate who was defending his research on sustainable urban freight solutions in Europe,” says Hendriks. “He’d been analyzing 106 initiatives in Europe, and they all failed.”
She laughs. “We decided not to be Number 107.”
Hendriks was trying to solve a problem that has long bedeviled municipalities: How to combat truck traffic while still helping businesses and residents receive…
The city has launched several initiatives designed to leverage technology for the greater good—and set an example for others.
By Philip Preville
One day back in March 2016, a Barcelona resident went online and — using the anonymous handle “Eiyeitis” — voiced an opinion about the city’s 010 telephone information service. In Spain, dialing 010 is like dialing 311 in North America: it’s a one-stop hotline for municipal information and service requests, everything from upcoming council meetings to uncollected curbside waste. The difference is that Spanish cities charge a fee to dial 010. In Barcelona’s case, it cost €0.37 to place the call and €0.09 …
Already on the path to post-industrial recovery, South Bend, Indiana, is preparing for the future of work—and its libraries will play a pivotal role.
By Christian Belanger
For much of the latter half of the 20th century, South Bend, Indiana, was a poster child for Rust Belt deindustrialization. In 1963, Studebaker, one of the country’s largest car manufacturers and the city’s largest employer, departed for Canada, taking the jobs and pensions of about 7,000 auto workers with it. Between 1951 and 1994, the number of people employed in manufacturing dropped from 55,000 to 23,000.
The city was at least home to the University of Notre Dame, which became the largest employer in the county. …
To keep families, more North American cities are turning to a suite of planning and design innovations, from play space to stroller ramps to adventure parks.
By Amy Crawford
Emily Morrice lives with her husband and three young children in a 1,000-square-foot, two-bedroom condo in Montreal’s Le Plateau-Mont-Royal, just north of downtown. It’s a cozy neighborhood of tri-level apartment buildings, one-way streets, and small-scale retail, with plenty of parks and playgrounds. An elementary school is two blocks away, a metro stop three. The sidewalks are safe and the neighbors friendly.
There’s just one problem.
“We know we’re going to need more space eventually,” says Morrice, who writes about her family’s minimalist lifestyle on her blog, Our Nest in the City. “It’s like a ticking time bomb…
Like many global cities, Toronto has become increasingly segregated into wealthy enclaves and boroughs of poverty. But one area that bucked the trend offers lessons for the future.
By Philip Preville
For two decades, Toronto’s condo boom has been the envy of the world. It has felt like a kind of global confirmation of the city’s identity and its ambitions: diverse, dynamic, cosmopolitan, egalitarian. Yet even as Toronto has led the world in construction cranes, those same values have been quietly under siege.
Ten years ago, just as the boom was reaching its peak, a groundbreaking academic research project at the University of Toronto told a striking counter-narrative: the city’s neighborhoods were transforming from middle-income communities into enclaves of the very rich or boroughs of poverty. Back in…
Sidewalk Talk Features
Reported stories focusing on innovations in technology, design, and planning that can help improve urban life.
