Across North America, cities are in crisis: With housing affordability increasingly out of reach for millions of residents, floods, fires and hurricanes make the devastation of climate change impossible to ignore. Fortunately, the two sides of the “polycrisis” share also some common solutions. In his new book Building for People, Seattle-based architect and planner Michael Eliason makes the case for dense, green and spatially efficient “ecodistricts,” transforming the built environment through low-carbon, transit- and pedestrian-friendly urbanism.

While the broad strokes of the vision are now well-known among architects and planners, the depth of Eliason’s structural critique and research makes for a compelling addition to the urbanist canon. A leading critic of North American building codes and egress regulations, Eliason deftly weaves together a far-reaching scope, demonstrating how public policy and regulation shape urban development and architectural practice. A valuable toolkit for both policymakers and designers, Building for People draws on case studies from around the world to point towards a greener and more equitable future. Below, we share an excerpt of the book’s opening chapter, “The Compact, Climate Adaptive Ecodistrict.”

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“We must shift our thinking away from short-term gain toward long-term investment and sustainability, and always have the next generations in mind with every decision we make.” —Deb Haaland, Secretary, US Department of Interior

We, as a species, have to learn to think differently.

The ongoing and devastating events of the polycrisis are interwoven and interconnected in frightening ways: the lingering effects of COVID, a worsening affordable housing shortage, a social isolation and loneliness crisis, climate change, and more. The postwar patterns of development in the United States, with sprawl being omnipresent among them, have in many ways exacerbated these crises.

What if cities prioritized climate adaptive neighbourhoods with abundant affordable housing, open space, and people-centered places, offering a high quality of life, with good jobs and the ability to adapt to a changing climate? Neighbourhoods focused on high-quality living, with the daily amenities that can be accessed without cars? Places that are lush with gardens, courtyards, playgrounds? Districts that are multigenerational, child friendly, and even quiet?

In many European and Asian cities these are exactly the types of places being developed. Cervero and Sullivan call this green transit-oriented development (TOD), but I prefer the term ecodistricts, short for ecologically oriented districts. Ecodistricts offer the possibility of broadly addressing the polycrisis: neighbourhoods of respite and adaptation to a changing climate. Places that are community oriented and social, to blunt the effects of the social isolation crisis. Places where a broad mix of housing types and tenures allows for a broad mix of residents, addressing the growing housing crises affecting our cities. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development defines the neighbourhood as “an urban neighbourhood designed to have minimal environmental impact by achieving sustainable resource management of energy, water and waste; dense and mixed-use development; and less automobile dependency supported by public transport systems, walking and biking.”

The eco-city and eco-neighbourhood concepts have been a growing global phenomenon, with several realized and planned projects since the 2000s. There is abundant potential for these types of places to be built and retrofitted in US and Canadian cities and suburbs, learning from the exemplary districts happening around the world.

Freiburg’s Vauban and Malmö’s Bo01 are oft-cited examples. In Freiburg, I saw what is possible in redeveloping brownfields into socially mixed, eco- logically focused urban districts. Brownfield development is critical, because cities already have ample room to develop, repair, and reconnect without building new cities in greenfields disconnected from existing infrastructure. Hamburg might have the best motto to highlight this approach: “Mehr Stadt in der Stadt” (“More city within the city”). They have designated 80 percent of new development to be located in the city, rather than in greenfields out- side the existing built-up area.

France requires ecological urban development primarily on brownfields with its ÉcoQuartier (Écologique, “ecological,” and Quartier, “district”) label, which passed into law in 2012. The French Ministry of Ecological Transition defines an ÉcoQuartier as “a development project that integrates the issues and principles of the city and sustainable territories.” The ÉcoQuartier label is used in numerous cities and villages across France, across a variety of scales, from a hundred homes all the way up to several thousand. Proximity and diversity of functions, participatory planning, and social inclusion are all central to the label’s scoring.

There has been a push for ecodistricts in the United States, with the Portland- based nonprofit EcoDistricts that developed the Protocols, a program designed for “a new model of urban regeneration to empower just, resilient, sustainable neighbourhoods for all.” The organization was founded to bring best practices to the neighbourhood and district scales with a focus on equity, resilience, and climate protection. It has focused largely on the incremental regeneration of existing urban neighbourhoods, in contrast to Europe, which tends to focus on new or redeveloped neighbourhoods. Rehabilitating existing neighbourhoods to be more climate adaptive and equitable is significantly more difficult, and although it is not the focus of this book, it is incredibly important. Seattle’s Capitol Hill Ecodistrict was the first certified ecodistrict in that Pacific Northwest, which had largely been achieved in an existing dense, vibrant neighbourhood. In 2021, EcoDistricts was incorporated into the Partnership for Southern Equity, with the program renamed Just Communities.

Small-Scale Urban Development

There is a lack of granularity in US development today that is found in the historical patterns of development. Blocks in historic neighborhoods contain multiple different parcels, often with different owners. As those blocks are redeveloped and reintensified, small-scale projects are no longer possible, and parcel assemblage is required. Small-scale urban development in the United States is really limited to buildings of three stories or less. As described in Chapter 6, this is primarily due to building codes, planning codes, and finance regimes that in effect require significantly larger and deeper buildings. However, this is not the case for new development in many other countries, as their planning allows for small, fine-grained development that can be used in both new and historic neighbourhoods. One city that does this really well is Freiburg.

Although this book focuses on larger developments, these concepts and strategies can be used in smaller ones as well.

Currently, Freiburg is planning a new ecodistrict on the periphery of the city, called Dietenbach. Dietenbach is split into separate quarters, each containing several semipermeable perimeter blocks. The city is specifically aiming for staedtebaulichen Kleinteiligkeit, or small-scale urban development at the block level. The city is doing this for a number of reasons but primarily “in order to generate varied and lively building structures, which also enable mixture of different uses & have a high degree of adaptability to future structural changes.” They are specifically aiming to avoid the banality of large post- war estates or contemporary development, in order to allow a more mixed, vibrant, and varied streetscape.

Building on the experience of previous neighbourhoods, proposed regulations in Dietenbach would induce a diverse and mixed district, even at the block level. Blocks would be composed of different-sized parcels, generally a minimum of eight, although several would have more. In order to ensure a broad variety of housing types and tenures, each block would contain four of six different housing types on the Development Framework Plan. These housing types are attached small-plexes, four-plexes with stacked flats, small apartment buildings of five to eight dwellings, medium apartment buildings with ten to twenty dwellings, and large apartments of more than thirty dwellings. This typological and ownership mix would ensure a broad economic and social mix of residents, rare in US development. Developers would also be limited to a maximum of forty dwellings per block, on at most two parcels per block. This would enable a broad diversity of tenure at the block level, as well as housing including apartments, condos, social housing, cooperatives, and Baugruppen (German for “building group,” self-developed urban housing similar to cohousing). Instead of a development trying to look like several smaller ones through modulation or a messy material mix, the development would be separate buildings. This is exactly as we used to build in US cities but forgot along the way.

On Form

Ecodistricts come in a variety of scales, from small settlements of a few acres with a hundred homes to massive projects such as Dietenbach or Hamburg’s Oberbillwerder, planning for 7,000 homes on 292 acres. The urban form can range from almost pastoral to incredibly dense, with towers and mid- rise buildings spanning for blocks, up to a half mile from a transit station.

Pound for pound, the midrise building of four to eight stories is one of the most effective and appropriate for compact, walkable development. An analysis by the City of Berlin found that buildings containing five stories, including an inhabited attic, had virtually the same residential density as buildings greater than ten stories.

The form of development at the block level also plays a role in urban character, density, and climate adaptability. The dense urban perimeter blocks found in the historic cores of cities such as Paris, Vienna, and Amsterdam allow for an incredible amount of density without much height. Alternatively, the urban form of Hong Kong or Singapore’s towers allows for a significant amount of density over very little land but may not be the most resilient, as climate-change-induced events such as wildfires or heat events result in power outages that prevent elevator usage. US land use codes generally only look at floor area ratio (FAR), the ratio of the allowed building area on a given site divided by the site area. There are numerous other issues that can be considered, such as lot coverage (the percentage of lot occupied by building).

When it comes to urban form, there are several options, although in the United States they tend to not play a role in urban planning. These are detached buildings, rowhouses, slab buildings, perimeter blocks, and towers in the park—and then there are hybrids combining aspects of these. The urban housing types all have a different character to them, but the perimeter block is one with the most character. It also provides for much more open space, density, and interesting opportunities for mixed-use urbanity.

Spacemate is a visualization tool for understanding the relationships between density, open space, and urban form developed by Meta Berghauser Pont and Per Haupt that looks at FAR, lot coverage, the number of floors, the The Spacemate is a matrix designed to help visualize the connections between open space, Floor Area Ratio (FSI), and building height (L) at the block level. Midrise blocks stand out as the superfruit of walkable urbanism, allowing for optimal levels of proximity, open space, and density. (Credit: Meta Burghauser Pont) amount of open space at ground level, and network effects. When I first saw this diagram in 2009, I could not get my head around why perimeter blocks and super blocks scored so much better than high rises, and then it hit me: It was the compactness paired with open space. It took me a few more years to realize that the increase in open space was directly related to thinner buildings, with more stories than typical in the United States, but this was just part of the picture. The key was figuring out what enabled the buildings to be thinner in the first place; as described in Chapter 5, this key is point access blocks.

The perimeter block composed of thin and tall buildings is ideally situated for compact urban development. It allows for a high degree of livability, dwellings with views and daylight on multiple sides, family-sized homes, and larger courtyards to congregate in and mitigate urban heat islands and stormwater. The perimeter block allows more dwellings to have good solar access while allowing for moderate levels of privacy. It orients buildings to the street and quieter courtyard, as opposed to neighbours a few feet away. It has better daylight exposure than most other urban types as well. Because of its compact nature, it also tends to have a lower heating demand than other building forms, which tends to decrease with building height.

More restricted airflow is a noted negative effect, but a solution to this that I rather like is the semipermeable perimeter block. A semipermeable perimeter block includes gaps that increase daylight, airflow, and views. Airflow is going to become a larger issue in dealing with overheating from climate change, so allowing for some level of permeability will be increasingly important.

 Height is often a point of contention in development in US cities. The four- to eight-story block structure allows for a wide variety of housing and tenure types and an optimal level of density for walkability. However, mixing in the occasional taller building or tower can help balance out more density and provide accent points within the district. Variability in height not only is visually interesting but allows for increased views and daylight over conventional perimeter blocks. It is also something better achieved with small-scale urban development, as opposed to massive block-sized projects. Skyscrapers in the mix can also work, but when it comes to climate adaptability and resilience and issues of embodied carbon, they score low on these metrics.

Toward Compact, Integrated Ecodistricts

The integrally planned ecodistrict will have an abundance of open and green space, future-oriented mobility, and climate adaptation measures to allow a good life in economically and socially mixed neighborhoods. In aiming for livable, low-carbon districts, it is imperative that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and the parts are arranged through a climate lens. Livability is related not only to climate adaptation but to public health and quality of life. The ecodistrict should offer a quality of life as high as, if not higher than, that found in detached houses. Canadian urban planner Brent Toderian notes that cities should “be unashamed to have a consistently high urban design standard.” These are fundamentally human-scaled places, with a good mix of uses and necessities of life within reach. Cities that adopt these measures will set an example that urban expansion and contraction can be livable, sustainable, and more affordable than today’s inequitable status quo. The opportunities in the compact, climate adaptive ecodistrict are numerous and include the following:

• a functional mix of uses, community spaces, schools, shops, grocery stores, cafes, restaurants, and other amenities needed for daily life (Chapters 6, 9, and 10);
• the productive city, including space for work such as office spaces, work- shops, co-working spaces, and even space for industry (Chapter 3);
• energy efficiency, carbon emission accounting, energy flows, and water flows to enable efficient, low-carbon living (Chapters 4, 15, 16, and 18);
• space for living and working in places that are more adaptable to the extreme and unpredictable weather events associated with climate change (Chapters 5, 15 and 17);
• more future-proof and flexible ways of building, with new low-carbon technologies that result in better, more durable, and more livable homes (Chapters 18, 19, and 20);
• a broad array of housing, for more inclusivity and affordability, with new forms of living (Chapters 9, 11 and 12);
• car-light living encouraged by the prioritization of sustainable mobility and a high-quality public realm (Chapters 8 and 10);
• better public health outcomes, due to reductions in air and noise pollution (Chapter 13);
• innovative, inclusive, and future-oriented forms of co-participation and planning procedures (Chapters 6 and 7).

Pivoting toward the future of sustainable urban development, cities need to prioritize livable, climate adaptive places offering car-light and car-free living, affordable housing, and much more access to green and open space. The chapters in this book highlight several themes that must be prioritized to make these places a reality. Although this book is intended for compact urban development, the concepts and ideas found within are just as applicable to suburban districts, as well as individual buildings, both new and adapted. Architects, planners, developers, owners, institutions, insurers, and politicians must start thinking about how climate in the future will affect their buildings and how their portfolios can be rapidly adapted to these drastic changes. Our buildings were designed for a climate that no longer exists; the impacts will range from incredibly uncomfortable to increasingly deadly. The sooner we come to terms with this, the sooner we might begin to pivot toward a better and more sustainable future.

Building for People: Designing Livable, Affordable, Low-Carbon Communities is available via Island Press.