Kaid Benfield's Blog
Roger Lewis’s Rx for greening a city
September 29, 2008
Posted by Kaid Benfield in Green Enterprise , Living Sustainably
I've long been a fan of University of Maryland architecture professor Roger Lewis, especially for his "Shaping the City" columns in The Washington Post. Roger was articulating the principles of smart growth and livable urbanism long before the rest of us, and his column has in many ways been a model for this blog.
In his newest entry, "Thinking of Bolder Shades of Green," Roger poses the question whether we can go beyond green building techniques and greener personal choices such as using CFL light bulbs and "make an entire city green." He lays out seven sensible principles for doing so:
- Employ smart growth so that future land development and density are linked to transit and other transportation infrastructure
- Create and maintain a fine-grain street pattern for walkability and managed congestion
- Invest in state-of-the-art bus and rail transit
- Use street trees and plantings to provide shade, reduce heat, and filter runoff
- Expand and preserve a city-wide network of connected parks and other open space
- Use open drainage swales and ground absorption to absorb Stormwater rather than relying exclusively on underground piping
- Employ renewable energy technology to generate electricity on a metropolitan scale
Well done, Roger: what a great framework that would make for guiding future investments in city infrastructure.
These ideas and more were discussed at a forum on "greening the world's capital cities" (although their 
applicability certainly isn't limited to capitals) held last week in Washington. Roger served as a panel moderator, and conference participants included NRDC's Frances Beinecke as well as numerous NRDC collaborators and friends such as Harriet Tregoning (now head of planning for DC), Dick Moe (National Trust for Historic Preservation), Tom Hicks (US Green Building Council), and Congressman Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), among others.
Read Roger's column here, and see a list of his others, all well worth reading, here.
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- Kaid Benfield
- Director, Smart Growth Program
- Washington, DC
- I was raised in the mountains of western North Carolina, surrounded by some of the...
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Comments
Chris Cheatham — Sep 29 2008 11:29 AM
Thanks for pointing out these great articles, Kaid. I am not sure how I missed these in the Post! It is going to be very interesting to see how designers start moving beyond the green bulding rating systems.
Chris
www.greenbuildinglawupdate.com
Kaid @ NRDC — Sep 29 2008 11:49 AM
My pleasure, Chris. Unfortunately, it is easy to miss Roger's columns, which are buried in the Saturday Real Estate sections once or twice a month.
There's usually a mention in the upper right hand corner of the RE section when "Shaping the City" appears. They should be on the front page of the Metro section, which for unfathomable reasons prefers to highlight architectural reviews of buildings in New York and the like.