Urban agriculture added to the Living Building Challenge and more
Yesterday I heard Eden Brukman present briefly on the updates to the Living Building Challenge - v2.0 - and was excited about the inclusion of Urban Agriculture, among other new features.
The Challenge now also includes ‘car free living’, ‘biophilia’, ‘human scale and humane places’, ‘democracy and social justice’ and ‘rights to nature’ - a few of these under the new ‘Petal of Equity.’
Not sure what a Petal is?
Petals are the category areas such as Site, Water, Energy, Health, Materials, Equity and Beauty. Petals are subdivided into a total of twenty Imperatives, each of which are required to achieve Living Building Status. Imperatives are renamed (formerly Prerequisites), and rightly so!
Within one performance based rating system, the Challenge covers small and large scopes of buildings and communities. Good going guys.
From partial building renos to entire new construction projects, individual landscape to infrastructure projects and whole communities, ’scale jumping’ within the system is permitted. It’s the bookshelf concept that USGBC is only beginning fully realize.
The performance requirement of one year of continuous operation remains the same.
Go straight to the source here, and download the new rating system today!
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November 24th, 2009 at 9:43 am
A ‘green roof’, becoming increasingly popular as a way of improving the water run-off from buildings, keeping them cool and providing a wildlife habitat or place for plants, can be area for agriculture too if vegetables are grown up there. There’s an article on this subject on the blog of SolarUK, the solar thermal designers and installers:
http://solarukweblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/03/high-level-gardening/
Their own new research and development centre, which they are moving into shortly, is a recycled building. Scheduled for demolition, it was bought on Ebay and moved from the Midlands to its new site in East Sussex. Even the door handles were salvaged.