Patricia Chase of International Sustainable Solutions sent out an e-mail recently regarding the death of Svend

Svend Auken

Auken, the Danish gentleman who helped turn Denmark into the energy efficient country it is today. He passed away in August. When Auken was last in town in June of 2008, I had the honor of personally interviewing him after his talk at city hall. My story, available here,  focuses on how Auken said green was a very tangible and possible thing as long as government set rules and got involved. He suggested rules regulating energy use per square foot of a building. I also blogged about our discussion here.

An event will celebrate his life Nov. 6 at 5:30 p.m. It will be held at the Nordic Heritage Museum, 3014 N.W. 67th St., Seattle.

Here’s what Chase wrote in the e-mail:

“I was sadly aware the last time I had the pleasure of enjoying Svend Auken’s company, that it might be the last. In spite of weekly blood transfusions, radiation, slurred speech (terrible for someone who loved to talk as much as he did), Svend insisted I come over to sit on his veranda with him, drink his favorite Barolo, and talk about everything from how grateful he was to have reconnected with the Pacific Northwest to the perilous situation with Israel and Gaza. Fully aware that all treatments had failed to halt his prostate cancer, Svend was still as optimistic and full of life as ever. He was excited about his recent speech to Congress about Denmark’s energy independence, and believed that his party, the Social Democrats, were poised to regain government. In spite of his condition, he was actively campaigning for people in his party, and was looking forward to upcoming travels. Svend was grateful that he had been able to reconnect with the Pacific Northwest in the past few years. As a student for one year at WSU, in the heady era of the Kennedy administration, Svend took his first steps in his political career as a campus organizer for civil rights in America. The people of the Pacific Northwest were very important to him, and every time he visited, he gave us 250%.”

I’ll leave you with what he said the last time he was here in Seattle: “If we want to change, we can change. We have the instruments and if we can’t do it, who can do it.”

Yesterday, a story of mine ran in the DJC about a project in Greenwood called Piper Village that is installing a “woonerf” street. The stranger’s blog, the Slog, picked up the story here and it has 23 comments so far!  They’re entertaining and I would suggest reading them, if you are at all interested in woonerfs.

The project, next to the Top Ten Toys in Greenwood, will have a woonerf street running from First Avenue Northwest to Palatine Avenue North, and will eventually extend to Greenwood Avenue. The first phase of the project has 46 apartments and 12,000 square feet of retail. For more information, read the story here.

If you’re wondering what the heck I’m talking about, a woonerf is a street designed to slow car travel so pedestrians can take precedence over vehicles. 

The woonerf street at Piper Village. Rendering courtesy Michael Whalen.

Woonerf is a Dutch term, which translates to “street for living.”

I lived in the Netherlands for a while, and the streets (I don’t know if any of the ones I frequented were woonerfs… I doubt it) definitely felt different. They seemed less like a space purely for cars, and more like a vehicle (no pun intended) for other modes of transportation, like bikes.  

Before working at the DJC, I had no idea that the reasons I felt differently about the street I lived on in The Netherlands and say, Lake City Way, were at least partially psychological.

It turns out long parallel streets that seem to stretch on forever encourage us mentally to drive faster. But when there are distractions, like trees or green partitions between lanes of traffic, we slow down. Don’t believe me? Which do you find yourself speeding on more, Aurora Avenue North or your neighborhood winding road? 

In 2007, I wrote a story here about John Moffatt’s ideas on engineering streets to slow drivers. Moffatt is regional administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. In that story, he said, “If you build a wide open freeway and call it a city street, people are going to go 70 or 80 miles per hour. People drive the speed the

A dutch woonerf

road permits.”

Moffatt said “road dieting,” or rechanneling streets to slow drivers down and change their perception of the road is one answer. Refuge islands or space in between arterials for pedestrians to walk is another way to make pedestrians safer.

There’s been a lot of talk about how Seattle should design its streets in the past two years… from the city’s Complete Streets Ordinance to its Pedestrian Master Plan. To read more on these topics, check out these DJC articles: article on keeping the elderly walking, article on national parking day, article on complete streets, article on pedestrian safety.

In October, I also wrote this article on tips from Copenhagen to make Seattle bikers and pedestrians feel safer. I covered the topic on the blog: to read the post, click the tag below for Denmark.

Should Seattle be focusing more on these kinds of street improvements that take street-space back for pedestrians, or at least slow cars like woonerfs and road-dieting? Or do we just need to accept the fact that Seattle is a city based on the car? What do you think?

For more information on Woonerfs, check out this New York Observer article: http://www.observer.com/2008/real-estate/woonerf-deficit or this wiki on streets.

For anyone who looks to Denmark as a beacon of shining light in green and efficient design, tomorrow is there an event for you!

The University of Washington is hosting a free talk on sustainable design in the Pacific Northwest and in Denmark. Speakers are Louise Grassov of Gehl Architects in Copenhagen, Jim Huffman of Busby Perkings + Will, and Roger Geller of the city of Portland’s Office of Transportation. Peter Steinbrueck of Urban Strategies will moderate. The talk is called “Urban Design for Walkable, Bikable Cities.”

This lecture series, called Global Green, is presented by the Green Futures Research and Design Lab. I’ve been to two of them so far and I highly recommend them. For more information, visit http://greenfutures.washington.edu/events.php.

This week, I (and a packed crowd at Seattle City Hall) heard Svend Auken, Denmark’s former minister for energy and the environment, speak about everything from energy to economics to the U.S.’s responsibility in a climate-conscious world (sign a post Kyoto agreement, lead the way).

Then, I sat down with him in a one-on-one interview to focus his attention a little bit more on buildings. What should we do, I asked? How should the construction industry attack the problem of a changing world?

His answer?  Government.

Government, he said, needs to make very, very strict rules and make it clear to people what they want out of a building. A good way to encourage that, he said, is by requiring an energy goal per square foot of a building rather than a whole-building goal. Once the goal is set, the industry will follow.

Of course government in Denmark is managed differently than government in Seattle and Washington. On multiple occasions, for example, Diane Sugimura, DPD’s director, has expressed exasperation at creating a balance between energy codes and letting untested technologies be used.  As a city government, she’s said, you don’t want to just start using something that might be more efficient but hasn’t been adequately tested. In Denmark, you can be fairly creative as long as you achieve the end energy goal.

But Auken said government has to be very strong on this. Yes, people will moan for a while, he said, but in the end it will make them more creative and will be more profitable (especially in an age of rising oil costs where energy bills are sure to “skyrocket”).

“Once you let architects think in terms of energy efficiency, they get more creative,” he said. “Architects love to do low energy, it’s so much more fun.”

How about it architects? Are energy efficient buildings (like London’s BedZED project above) more fun or a pain in the bum?

For more on Denmark, read my post from last week (click tag ‘Scandinavia’ below). For more on Auken’s talk, what Denmark did and how we could do it, check out my story here.

Face it: everyone who’s anyone in green design says the U.S. is way behind Europe. And one of the areas outpacing us further and further… is Scandinavia. 

Scandinavia’s sustainable strengths are no new feat in Seattle. Local group International Sustainable Solutions has been taking local building and city professionals there for years on a whirlwind eco-tourist trip. It is just about getting ready to kick of a Portland version of the trip,  more here.

Scandinavian speakers have also graced the Seattle scene every couple of months to teach us what we don’t know. One of them, Svend Auken, is going to be in Seattle again on Monday from noon to 1 p.m. He will be speaking at Seattle City Hall in the Bertha Landes room.

Scandinavia also reared its green head when I attended a forum at the UW a couple of weeks ago. At that forum, Jayson Antonoff of Seattle’s green building team (formerly with ISUSTAIN) spoke about how Scandinavia has focused on energy efficiency by looking at different energy producers, varying it’s idea of energy, and requiring buildings to meet an energy requirement per square foot.

For more on that story, and to learn what other sustainability leaders in the Pacific Northwest think about green solutions, check out the story in the DJC here. (more…)