A look at Dockside Green

by Kate Howe, urban planner for VIA Architecture

As planners and designers of award-winning projects like South East False Creek in Vancouver, we’re always interested in innovative development approaches that lead to financially viable sustainable neighborhoods. One such project currently in development is Dockside Green in Victoria, BC.

This project is comprised of light industrial and mixed uses along the waterfront, with commercial, residential and open space tied to a walkable neighborhood. At full build-out, Dockside will have 2,500 people in three neighborhoods and 26 buildings totaling 1.3 million square feet.

What is most interesting about DockSide Green is not just its green building and urban design, but that it is financed and 100% owned by Canada’s largest Credit Union, VanCity – which donates 30% of its profits towards community development. For an America bedraggled by our Wall Street bail outs, and besotted with financial institutions who seem to be competing for most out-of-touch, this idea seems simply radical.

The project is still in its first phases, but according to the developer (Joe Van Belleghem, also the head of the Canadian Green Building Council and Windmill West development) overall costs were just ONE percent more than a traditional development. And yet, each of its 26 buildings will achieve LEED Platinum….how is this possible?

Well, when the numbers are added up, it becomes clear that sustainability makes business sense. Windmill West uses what they call a “holistic costing method” combined with integrated site and building design. The commercial and residential buildings share energy costs efficiently with a biomass gasification plant (developed by local company, Nexterra). Green stormwater infrastructure and low water use applications lessened the need to build expensive sewage treatment systems. They also save money by building less parking infrastructure. And much of the parking they have created is shared through programs such as a Smart Car Co-op. The product itself – both living and working spaces - will save buyers money over the long term through lower heating bills, not to mention the many other benefits from going LEED Platinum: better public health through walking, clean air and access to open space.

For all the amenities built into the project, buyers still needed to be educated about the long term savings from going green. According to Van Bellengham:

"What we've tried to train our people [to do] is to really make sure the customer knows what they're getting. Because if you're saving a lot of energy and water and sewage and you start to look over time how much that will save you over a 20-year period, it's phenomenal how many dollars you're saving. Nobody thinks of that."

When put that way, maybe people do care about green building. As of this writing, about 95 percent of the first phase of Synergy's residential units are sold or leased.

Why, in other locations, is it so difficult to convince corporate financial institutions that sustainability is really the only way to design?- And how do we start to build a long term green financing model?

Monday News Roundup

Every Monday, we post links to articles and blogs that you may have missed from last week. Enjoy!
 
America's least wasteful cities (GOOD)
Apparently, the water bottle makers at Nalgene also produce (or simply commission) a pretty good survey of which cities are the least wasteful.

Bring on the Bikes! (Infrastructurist)
Cycling Rises 28% in New York City

Should we plan transit for bikeability?  (Human Transit)
As cycling becomes more and more popular, how should transit planning respond?

Project -- Help us create Neighbor Day (GOOD)
Admit it: Your neighborhood isn’t like Mister Rogers’s. You don’t know the name of your postal carrier or beat cop, or even the person who lives next door. But why shouldn’t you? These people who occupy the orbit of your house have the potential to turn an otherwise dull domestic existence into the rich experience we used to know as community.

British Pavilion; Chelsea Barracks  (Guardian)
'Outstandingly memorable' ... Thomas Heatherwick's design at Shanghai Expo

Sson 028  (Cool Hunting)
A new minimal fixed gear from Stockholm, complete with a travel-friendly bike crate

Recruiting kids for Greenmyparents  (Oregon Live)
Greenmyparents wants to build an army of green kids, lauching on Earth Day

Share your yard (GOOD)
A list of all of the potential benefits when you share your yard with neighbors

Green tracks -- spot the wires  (The Overhead Wire)
It's called, spot the wires. Sure are ruining this nature scene for everyone!

Living in Anticipation of Extinction

by Catherine Calvert, VIA's Director of Community Architecture

I’m starting to get an uneasy feeling. It’s not a new feeling, but one that’s been nagging at me for some time, and has only been heightened since the basic failure of anything substantial to be accomplished at the climate talks in Copenhagen back in December. 

As a part of a firm that spends a lot of time practicing and thinking about sustainable design, it’s been easy to feel that our good work will make a difference toward efforts to change the course of our planet’s climatic transformation. To quote the US Green Building Council, “As the built environment accounts for 40 percent of global carbon emissions, the green building movement has an unprecedented opportunity to make a major contribution to new global carbon reduction targets. [We need to] understand how we can work together to show that green building represents one of the most direct, immediate and cost-effective opportunities to help tackle climate change.”

But it’s not enough. Bill McDonough was so correct in his 2002 groundbreaking book Cradle to Cradle, when he said “being less bad is no good.” Making slightly better choices under the banner of green building only has the potential to slow down the pace at which our climate is changing, but is highly unlikely to prevent it.

It’s kind of ironic that people refer to “destruction of the planet” as the result of our untamed use of energy and resources to feed our voracious consumption habit. Let’s be clear about one thing: the planet will be fine. The planet has been around for 4.5 billion years and has assembled and disassembled its continental masses, submerged itself in oceans before belching up new mountain ranges, covered itself in ice sheets for 4 or 5 times, created habitat for all kinds of species imaginable, then got tired of each of those and nurtured something new.

The planet is really good at rearranging its furniture and maybe even enjoys the process. It’s all of us who live here, humans and animals and plants, who are in trouble. In a hundred or a thousand years, it’s likely that the planet will just be thoroughly fed up, and we won’t be welcome here any more.

In recent weeks, I’ve started to think about what it really will mean to anticipate climate change while we’re waiting for extinction. Sustainable design is good, but we need to make a fundamental shift to adaptive design. Real changes will affect the ways that humans will have to adapt our lifestyles and our buildings in order to survive. A recent article in GreenSource has an excellent summary of some of the building design strategies that we can use now in order to prepare for the future:

• Incorporate passive survivability into buildings by designing buildings that will maintain livable conditions in the event of power outages.
• Raise the cooling design temperature when modeling buildings and sizing mechanical equipment.
• Reduce solar gain and therefore reliance on mechanical cooling mechanisms.
• Design buildings for storm resistance.
• Build on higher ground to resist flood damage.
• Increase stormwater capacity using strategies such as constructed wetlands rather than elaborate civil works.
• Specify materials that can survive wetting and resist mold growth.
• Avoid development in the driest areas.
• Plumb buildings for graywater separation.
• Plant drought-resistant native plants.
• Avoid development in fire-prone areas, which are expanding.
• Follow fire-safe design and construction practices.

To GreenSource’s list I would add the following in terms of lifestyle:

• Grow your own food if possible, or buy from farmers in your community
• Nurture compact communities that reduce the need to travel long distances to meet basic needs
• Treat resources as precious – water, energy, raw materials
• Get creative in making things for yourself – food, clothing, shelter
• Conserve the embodied energy in things we already have
• Generate your own power if feasible, or live in an area where locally produced district energy is available
• Unplug yourself from consumerism

It’s certainly possible that those who dispute the idea of global warming might be correct, but then again they might not be. If these strategies could help us survive just a little longer, then why not adopt them?