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Two decades ago, I visited Michael Corbett in the future.
Corbett and his wife, Judy, bought 70 acres of tomato fields
in the college town of Davis in 1976. There, they built Village
Homes, the first fully solar-powered housing development in
America and one of the modern world's first examples of green
urbanism.
As Corbett escorted me around this 200-home neighborhood,
I was struck by the inside-out nature of the place. In Village
Homes, garages were tucked out of sight; homes pointed inward,
toward open green space, walkways and bike paths.
In a typical planned community, you would find martially trimmed
postage-stamp yards and covenants that prohibit or restrict
variables on the developer's original theme. At Village Homes,
I saw a profusion of flowers and vegetable gardens. On roofs,
grapevines thickened in the summer, providing shade, and thinned
in the winter, letting the sun's rays through. Residents were
producing nearly as much edible food as the original farmer
had.
Instead of a gate or wall, this community was surrounded by
orchards. Corbett's teenage daughter, Lisa, elaborated, "We've
got a group of kids called 'the harvesters.' The orchards
are set aside for the kids; we go out and pick the nuts and
make money and sell them at a farmer's market at the gazebo
in the center of the village."
By nearly every measure, except one, Village Home succeeded.
From the time Village Homes was launched, people lined up
to move in. Among them: liberals, conservatives, libertarians
(including economist Milton Friedman's daughter); this was
never a counterculture commune. Last year, a professor of
Environmental Science at UC Davis told CBS's Charles Osgood
that the typical Village Homes resident's energy bill was
a third to a half paid by residents in surrounding neighborhoods.
Developers and architects from around the world visited Village
Homes.
And as the years passed, similar eco-communities started springing
up across parts of Western Europe, where green design is now
considered mainstream.
In America, however, no commercial developer replicated the
Village Homes concept, a fact that deeply disappoints Corbett.
Still, the morning is young. Timothy Beatley, a professor
at the University of Virginia and author of Green Urbanism
and the new book Native to Nowhere: Sustaining Home and
Community in a Global Age, reports an array of new U.S.
experiments in green urbanism.
The city of Davis now requires new developments to be connected
to a greenway/bikeway system that extends through the city.
"An important objective is that elementary school children
be able to travel by bike from their homes to schools and
parks without having to cross major roads," according
to Beatley.
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Under the leadership of Mayor Richard
Daley, Chicago has launched a campaign to recreate wildlife
habitat, greenways, stream corridors and other natural land.
Daley's goal: make Chicago the greenest city in the nation.
In Oregon, Portland's Greenspaces program calls for the creation
of a regional system of parks, natural areas, greenways and
trails for wildlife and people. A 1997 study by Portland State
University students identified that a third of the downtown's
roofs could be converted to "greenroof" design, a
covering of vegetation that offers environmental and aesthetic
advantages. This rooftop area could potentially reduce the volume
of combined sewer overflow by up to 15 percent, achieving a
huge savings to the city.
Green architecture is catching on. In San Bruno, the new Gap
Inc. office has a greenroof of native grasses and wildflowers
"which undulates like the surrounding green hills,"
according to Architecture Week. The roof reduces sound
transmission by up to 50 decibels.
In Utah, the new 20,000-seat Conference Center for the Church
of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is capped by a greenroof.
In Michigan, designers of a Herman Miller furniture factory
constructed a wetlands system for collecting and treating storm
water runoff.
The most ambitious green building of all is the new Adam Joseph
Lewis Center for Environmental Studies, at Oberlin College in
Ohio, according to Beatley. Designed to be disconnected from
the outside power grid, the building treats its own wastewater
and generates its own power through a combination of southern
orientation, rooftop photovoltaics, geothermal pumps, and energy
conservation. Carpet tiles, replaced in future decades, will
be returned and recycled at the end of their useful life. As
one designer put it, the Oberlin building "comes closest
to achieving the metaphor of a structure functioning like a
tree."
Perhaps the most moving representation of green urbanism was
offered last month by The New York Times, when it presented
the proposals of several architectural firms to green part of
ground zero at the World Trade Center site. The proposals provided
"ample proof of the power of landscape to transform a scarred
and haunted place," according to the Times.
Designers would turn the crater into a tree nursery, "a
memorial arboretum - a large sunken garden of extraordinary
tree specimens, flowers and wildlife from all over the world."
Trees germinated there would be carried along "the same
routes once traveled by daily commuters from the World Trade
Center on their way home," to be planted in neighbors and
parks throughout the city.
That serious consideration is given to such ideas today speaks
well of Mike and Judy Corbett's vision, which they struggled
to build in that tomato field so many years ago. |
