Hi, I'm Haley and I'm a student at the University of Michigan. I'm here with Professor Doug Kelbaugh to talk about how the design of the built environment can affect climate change and sustainability through the lens of New Urbanism. Professor Kelbaugh is a renowned architect and former dean of the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning here at the University of Michigan. He's one of the founders of New Urbanism and is highly regarded for his work in trying to bridge architecture, urbanism and sustainability. Thank you so much for joining us today, Professor Kelbaugh. My pleasure. All right let's get into it. So can you tell me a little bit about how you and your colleagues went about developing the idea of new urbanism and its principles? Okay, it started in a roundabout indirect way. We have to go back to the oil embargo of 1973, which was the first time America experienced serious energy shortfalls. There were two hour waits at gas stations and it was a wake up call about energy. It wasn't about climate change then. We didn't really know much about climate change in the early 70s. It was more about energy. So a lot of young architects thought, well you know, let's design more energy efficient buildings. And what's the best way? Probably using solar energy and in particular something called passive solar. That's where the building itself is the solar collector, the solar storage device, and distribution system. It's not active solar which is where you have collectors on the roof with fans and pumps and thermostats. That's a more engineering oriented solution or engineering driven, whereas, passive solar is more about the architecture. So we started to design passive solar buildings. The cadre of people who really got it rolling were from Arizona and New Mexico. And oddly enough, from sort of New Jersey, Philadelphia, and New York, which is not as sunny. But for some reason there was a group there. That was a group I was in. I did a passive solar house in Princeton designed in '74, built in '75 which was the first trombe wall passive house built outside of France, where there were a couple of test cells. It was a huge gamble. No one knew if it would work or not. But I had the good luck of having just enough resources to build a house for my young family. So, I designed it and actually general contracted it and did a lot of the construction myself. And it turned out to work really well. We had heating bills for the whole winter in New Jersey, which is a climate a bit like Ann Arbor here. That were on the order of a $100, $150 for the whole six month heating season. It attracted a lot of attention. It was unusual architecturally and it was in like 200 books, magazines, newspapers, you name it. And so it sort of launched this career which hadn't been planned to be focused on energy, but that's the way it happened. And I had lots of friends and colleagues doing similar stuff in the southwest and also in the mid-Atlantic area. So it sort of took off as a movement. It was called the passive solar movement and it attracted a lot of people, particularly young people. We had big national conferences, about 15 of them, that would get fifteen hundred people, typically. So it was a genuine sort of grassroots movement but it had one major flaw. And that is, we were mainly designing freestanding solar suburban houses. So we were compensating for large, sloppily built energy inefficient houses that were typical of American suburban subdivisions, and making them perform better but not addressing an equally big problem, auto-dependency, because all these suburban houses may have been more efficient to heat and to cool, but they were still driving two cars many miles, essentially every trip they took. Very little walking or biking. So we realized that we were sort of compensating for a stupid land use policy in America and not very resilient land use practices. So we realized the townhouse, the apartment house, the urban dwelling, we... even without solar was more efficient than a solar rise suburban freestanding house. So that made us think, well maybe we're barking up the wrong tree, maybe we ought to look more at urbanism and less at the solar technology. Mind you it was low tech. Passive is low tech and that's one of the reasons I think it's, it's had such endurance because it just doesn't break. It's durable. It's simple. It's... There's only one moving part, the sun, unlike active systems. So anyway, we started to look at applying solar principles to townhouses and apartment houses. Not high rises or mid rises, that would come a little bit later. And then we realized if you'd made energy efficient townhouses and apartments, you were really cutting the energy footprint per capita. And you were making them, you know, more ecologically resourceful or efficient as well. They were using less land, less materials to build. Infrastructure costs per capita were less. It was just more efficient in many ways. Not just heating, cooling and lighting but it cut back on transportation, energy consumption and in many ways units tended to be smaller. They shared walls, they shared floors. So, like you know we're now the heating and cooling bill are less because we're not exposed on all four sides and the roof. So, multi-family dwellings, as simple as townhouses, as complexes in apartment houses, are more efficient in terms of the amount of space you have to heat and cool, the amount of embodied energy and all the materials that go into its construction. And if you have solar it's all the better. So, that started in a funny way, New Urbanism. New Urbanism has had a big impact on development in the U.S. It changed the conversation about suburbia, refocused it more on urban infill housing. And it started curiously on the West Coast. There was one group that came out of the sort of passive solar environmental movement. And on the East Coast there was a more formally driven group of sort of more European Urbanism, more traditional. So between the two sides of the country this interesting and vibrant group milled, you know sort of congealed and started having national Congresses, which were even bigger than the passive solar ones or at least equally big. We're about to have our 25th Congress in Seattle in about two months. The movement's probably 30 years old. So, it's now, you know, pretty mature and has many members and it has a lot of traction. For instance, we're looking at city hall out this window. Every elected official in America knows what TOD means, Transit Oriented Development. That's a term that came out of a charrette we did, a charrette design workshop at the University of Washington 30 years ago, that sort of developed this idea which is embarrassingly simple. But now, it's like standard. I just got back from China and their main design strategy now for urban design and planning is TOD, Transit Oriented Development started 30 years ago. It's not an entirely new idea but it was sort of revived 30 years ago at an academic charfette that was led mainly by this young cohort of New Urbanists, who are now older and senior and have, you know, major firms and do hundreds of projects. Not only in the US, Canada, Australia, a little bit in Europe and a little bit in Asia. Can you walk me through a bit more about, you know, what New Urbanism looks like? What it looks like. In actuality and you know what implications it has. Okay, so what is New Urbanism? It's sort of traditional Urbanism in the sense that it's about street oriented architecture. Street oriented urbanism that privileges walking and biking and transit, as opposed to depending on cars and other motor vehicles. So, it's the way cities had always been for 3000 years. So, it was sort of a return to the basic street and basic modes of moving around through the city. You can walk and bike as we do here all the time. We don't drive much at all. We have one car. Typically, if you live in a city you can have one rather than two cars or no cars, if you use shared cars. But you need transit because you can't do everything on foot or on bikes in particularly in a big city you need transit to make the longer trips. You also need a mixture of uses so that there are places worth walking to. It's not monocultural urbanism where huge zones of nothing but housing and a giant mall and then an office park and then a school complex or whatever. The idea is to mix those, like cities have always mixed them, so that it's a short trip there. It's compacted and concentrated so that not only is it physically short distances that you have to walk but it's worth walking because whether it's the grocery store or the hardware store or the restaurant or the cafe or picking your kid up at school or going to a concert or whatever, we can do all that by foot here. We have a Walk Score of 99. Walk Score is a great way to measure these variables. It's become a common factor in real estate assessment and sales, what's the Walk Score. So, New Urbanism has a high Walk Score and usually a high Transit Score or usually a high Bike Score. That's pretty much what it's about. It tends to be a little lower rise. It's still dense but tends to be sort of four or five stories rather than 25 story towers that sort of punctuate a wider urban area. So you can have high rise in New Urbanism but it tends to be more low and mid-rise but very dense. And the shared wall space is really helpful in energy? Yeah, because you're sharing walls and floors and ceilings and heating and lighting. No excuse me, heating and cooling is cheaper. Sometimes lighting is a little more expensive because a freestanding suburban house has windows on all sides, so there's plenty of light. It is, in an apartment building, you might have to have more electric lights. It's not a major difference. Ventilation sometimes is easier in a suburban house. But if you're air conditioning or other using other mechanical cooling devices you're better off in a compact building with multi units. So it's a combination of this morphological issue of compactness and sharing living spaces and in a sense it's compact outdoor space as well. Lots of really walkable streets, plazas, squares, a really vibrant public realm which is important. So, it's more shared green space? Yeah, shared green space, shared Plazas, shared, I mean, street trees are key to any street oriented urbanism. Because we have something called the Urban Heat Island, cities are getting hotter twice as fast as the countryside, because of the waste heat from tailpipes and chimneys, because of lots of dark colored roofs and pavement which tends to absorb the sun's energy and heat up the air. And the lack of trees makes, you know, lack of shade can be a problem. So, street trees are really important and you need parks to provide psychological relief. But it's all relatively compact and small. They aren't giant parks and giant wide streets and giant plazas. It tends to be very much human scaled. Because about the individual human that can only walk so far so fast. And the automobile has a completely different scale about it. I just got back from Beijing, totally auto oriented city where all the streets are like a hundred and fifty feet wide and just big rivers of vehicles and frankly, it's boring, it's inhospitable and just not very pleasant. So, how can New Urbanism principles be applied to, you know, areas other than the cities, like suburban areas? Well, we're gonna have to retrofit suburbia because we've invested since World... And what does that mean exactly? Well, since World War II, we have invested heavily in suburban sprawl. We have endless cul-de-sac subdivisions in one development after another that leapfrogs out into the countryside, gobbling up land and supported by relatively cheap gasoline that fuels relatively plentiful and cheap automobiles on relatively subsidized highways. It's been a sort of unspoken American project that we would suburbanize after World War II. The automobile companies were in favor of it. The road builders were in favor of it. I mean, I think it was not bad intentions. It was a conspiracy of good intentions. Everybody thought the car was going to deliver us. Well, it did for a while but then after we had 100 million cars, it didn't work so well. And now, we have this sort of wall to wall endless carpet of sprawl that is very expensive to maintain. We're gonna see suburban bankruptcies quite soon, because they're not growing anymore. They don't have the money to support the infrastructure that the developers built, but now they have to maintain. So, it's a bit of a time bomb. It's just very... The carbon footprint, energy footprint, ego footprint of a suburbanite is about twice as high as an urban dweller. It's because of, not just auto use but also the heating, lighting, and cooling of bigger houses on bigger bits of land and bigger plots of land. So, it gobbles up land, it gobbles up energy, gobbles up other resources. It's just not very sustainable. Europe backed a different horse after World War II. They rebuilt their cities and now, I think we're sort of reluctantly realizing that they backed the better horse than we did because we're stuck with all these, all these endless tracts of suburban homes that we're going to have to somehow make more efficient. We're gonna have to make them more mixed use, so people don't have to drive five miles to a giant mall. We're going to have to reintroduce things like, retail and institutions into the fabric of these sprawling suburbs, not easily done. It's hard to make them compact but there will be some densification. We already have seen gray fueled malls, malls that have been mothballed and now are being converted into walkable mixed use centers. That's happening already. That is are a suburban retrofit that's well underway, the sort of greening of these suburban malls which makes them denser and more mixed use with housing, with schools, with clinics, et cetera. It makes some town centers rather than just a machine of consumption. So, a couple of years back, you know, the U.N. announced that, it was the first time in history that, people transition, more people lived in cities. What's this? This is a really critical point, where at least we're about 55 % urban now and we're gonna go in your lifetime easily to 75. In the U.S. this is good news because as I said people who move from the suburbs to the city, your generation is inclined to do that, because you frankly find suburbs boring as do I. That will generally keep the energy footprint down per capita. And the fact that we're not growing as fast also helps keep the total aggregate footprint down. It's really, I call it the environmental paradox of cities that in fact, cities which don't appear to be green, are green because they have smaller footprints per capita. If you decanted New York City into suburban sprawl it would take up every square mile of New England and a little bit of New Jersey. So, in many ways Manhattan is the greenest city literally in terms of energy in the United States. People who live in Manhattan have smaller eco footprints. They don't even own cars, much less drive them. So it is a paradox. Here's where it gets complicated. The cities in the developing world tend to experience this paradox. But in the developing world it's more complex because they're so poor in the countryside, when they move to the city they often get wealthier and assume middle class eco footprints pretty quickly, which means actually their footprint per capita is larger than it was in the country. So, it looks like that's a complete disaster. Well, not entirely because it turns out they have smaller families. Fewer kids, the birthrate goes down, which helps because these countries in Africa and Asia are growing too fast, anyway, much too fast. So there's a compensating factor of decline in birthrate. Sometimes that compensates for the increased footprint of the wealthier urbanite, sometimes it doesn't. But overall, we'd rather see a middle class emerge than have rural poverty. So we can't use rural poverty as a rationale to keep the world's carbon footprint down. It currently does. Without rural poverty, we'd need not one and a half Earths, we'd be needing two and a half Earths right now. So ironically poverty, as painful as it is, is keeping the global footprint down. That's not a workable strategy. Of course. So we want people to improve their lives but we want them to do it in a way that's greener. And one last point about cities that we haven't talked about is the ability to share assets, whether it's a Zip Car or shared bikes or shared cameras, whatever. Sharing assets is a way for wealthy countries like the U.S. to decrease its footprint. Everybody doesn't need a car or two cars and everybody doesn't need a lawnmower if they live in suburbia. We can share a lot of assets. BnB, AirBnB is a good example of that. Uber may or may not work out that way. We'll see. It's a little more complex but sharing assets is something that's suitable. I haven't really answered your question, I realize, about rural areas. Small towns can be very green. If you live in a small town that has a lot of mixed uses in the town center and a lot of housing in the town center, it's a mini city. So small towns can work. What doesn't work so well is suburbia, which is an agonizing compromise. It's either urban or rural. It's not a small town. It's not even a farm. It's not really agricultural. It's just a place to live. It's a bedroom, and bedrooms are not very resilient. Interesting. So, based upon what we talked about today, are there are future readings you would suggest for our learners? There are a couple of books that I have my students read. One is called, "A Short History of Progress" by Ronald Wright, a Canadian historian. It's very short, easy read and gives you the sort of macro historical picture of what is made some cultures resilient and other cultures decline or even collapse. So it's a great overview of the history of humankind and quote unquote progress. The most up to date sort of chilling and sobering book on climate change is Naomi Klein's book, "This Changes Everything". Climate versus, sorry, capitalism versus climate. It takes the gloves off and shows how ingrained consumption is in capitalism and how we're going to probably have to make some basic changes in our economic system if we want to sustain ourselves and be resilient. Because, let's face it, climate change is the biggest challenge to face humanity in the last 10000 years. We've always had poverty, corruption, and disease and crime and greed and all that. Those are still vexing problems, but climate change is qualitatively different and quantitatively more substantial and ultimately more consequential because once the climate starts to unravel everything else follows, from social institutions, to civility, to democratic societies. Drought, famine, flooding, extreme weather, these are, these shake everything up, to the point that you'll probably see, unless we do something quickly. We'll probably see more civil strife and unrest and ultimately violence. Because social institutions are even more fragile than the environment. So we've got to get in front of this, or your generation and your kids are going to pay dearly. So, what would you suggest that people like take action on to help react to climate change? Well you know, I encourage students to do that every year and it turns out that the easiest things for them are to drive less, to walk and bike more, take the bus to campus. And ironically, eating less red meat, particularly beef. Beef, a calorie of beef takes about a hundred times as much water to produce as a calorie of say bread or a legume. And about 10 times as much energy as say, chicken. So, if you have a hankering for meat, I recommend and the students seem to be happy with chicken. Which actually is pretty good stuff. Or you can be a vegan, vegetarian of course, that will also cut your foot print but those seem to be the most immediate lowest hanging fruit for students.The fact that they will live in a city ultimately is also very positive and that they might share their unit with other people until they marry and then stick around and reform the schools and public schools in cities so that they don't feel they have to move to the suburbs like their parents to get better schools. Schools will be a big part of keeping young people in the city as they develop families with school age kids. So it's a whole constellation of things that have to go together. But I think your generation is starting to figure it out. We just hope it's not in the too little too late category. Well thank you so much for that great conversation about the built environment. It was a wonderful time having you here. I hope it was helpful. I hope it wasn't too sobering but it's serious business. And I think your generation is up to it. I really wish you the best of luck, hard work and success. Thanks so much.
