Last week, I attended a Town Hall lecture by David Owen, a columnist at the New Yorker and author of the book ‘Green Metropolis.’

Owen spoke about his own experience of living in both Manhattan and in the countryside, and about which is greener (cities because people have everything they need at their fingertips).

But he also said something striking: that big, tall buildings in cities are actually the greenest projects we

Inherently green?

have, not projects that are LEED certified. High-rises get lots of people working in one space. That gets lots of people living nearby and walking between the two. The effects of this and the concentration of people, he said, is far, far greener than a LEED certified project in the middle of nowhere (though he didn’t mention if it were greener than a LEED certified high-rise in the city). The premise touches on one of the main problems of LEED: that it only looks at pieces instead of the whole.

For example, Owen discussed Sprint’s (now Sprint Nextel) headquarters outside of Kansas City, Mo. The corporate campus, he said, consists of 15,000 employees spread among a 50 building low-rise campus. The space also has 15 parking lots and an underground parking garage, providing one parking space per worker because everyone has to drive to the headquarters in the middle of nowhere. Though the campus was planned before LEED came out, one of the buildings at the site ended up receiving LEED certification. The space also preserves 200 acres of property as open space.  How is this a greener situation, he asked, then simply letting the farmland be that had previously existed?

He argued that setting up a business in a location that requires car travel is not green, even if the buildings are certified as such.

Should buildings in the middle of nowhere receive LEED certification? And should organizations that are about sustainability - like the Rocky Mountain Institute and its headquarters in Snowmass, Colo. - be held to a higher level of accountability and locate in a dense area? Or is there value to having great environmentally friendly buildings in the wilderness?

I suppose it comes down to what you prioritize and what you think the future of cities and urban planning is.

In this economy as well, it’s worth noting that cities across the nation have vacant high-rise buildings that currently are not at capacity, and are likely wasting large amounts of energy.

What do you think? Is Owen right on or way off base? If Owen is right - and the greenest project is in a city be it LEED certified or not is a high-rise - than should LEED reflect this in its rating system and how so?

Incidentally, his book also argues that New York City is the greenest city in the world. That seemed to touch an interesting nerve at Portland’s The Environmental Blog here.

In the last couple of weeks, I wrote two different articles in the DJC that looked at making public city space more pleasant for the pedestrian. Though one is an ice skating rink and one is a “park boulevard,” they are essentially riffs on the same theme.

Both projects are looking at new ways of creating friendly, inviting open space in a dense, urban area. I’m wondering if this is the future of open space in Seattle?

Let’s start with the park boulevard. The idea for the park boulevard seems very Scandinavian. If approved by city council, the Seattle Department of Parks and

Re-imagining Bell Street

Recreation would take away a lane of traffic on Bell Street from First to Fifth Avenues downtown and add a park in the extra space. The park would have a couple kid’s play areas, picnic space and places for people to linger. It would also act as a connector through downtown. To see what the street looks like now, go here.

The ice rink would go in Occidental Square Park, in Pioneer Square. Though the area is already a park, it’s also a center for homeless people to hang out and doesn’t always

Occidental Square Park

present the most friendly of faces (for example, while taking a picture there last week, I managed to get cat-called three times in about as many minutes). The idea is that the ice rink would bring more people to the square at more times, making it a tad more friendlier. To see comments on posts relating to this story in the PI, click here. For comments in the Stranger, click here.

I spoke with Donald Harris, property and acquisition services manager at the parks department for the Bell Street story, and he said one of the reasons the park boulevard makes sense is that land is simply too expensive to buy in downtown Seattle to turn into parks. In addition, the department has also had trouble with some of the parks that are there such as Regrade Park, another magnet for homeless people and drug dealing.

One could say that the same potential will exist on Bell Street, once it’s a park. I’m guessing the argument against that is because it’s not enclosed, people will be continuously moving along it. Also, once it’s a park, park rangers will be allowed to patrol it.

Do you think this is the future of our parks and open space? To take existing rights of way, and to re-imagine them as public space, or to reconfigure existing parks to bring more people to them? If you had limitless power, what public area would you reconfigure into a park? How would you re-invent the city?

It seems like we might be seeing more of these ideas. According to City Council Resolution 31073, relating to the Parks and Green Spaces Levy,

“In an increasingly dense urban environment, such projects present an opportunity for the city to improve the quality of life for its residents without having to incur the significant expense of property acquisition and major park development.”

Are you one of those people who is dismayed by the elevation of the pedestrian over the car or is this where the city should be heading? I, for one, will be curious to see how Bell Street turns out.

But what really strikes me, is that the reason parks decided to do this project now is Seattle City Light is replacing utilities along Bell Street from Second to Fifth Avenues, and someone made the connection between that work and reinventing the street as a park. What if that person never made the mental connection? How many other opportunities are we, as a city, missing?

P.S. If you read this today - Thursday - parks will be discussing the boulevard at a meeting tonight at 7 p.m. at the Woodland Park Zoo Activity Center. If you’re reading this Friday, city council’s Parks and Seattle Center Committee will hear a preview of the project at 9:30 a.m.

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.

Now that the very last remnants of ’snowpocalypse’ are gone, I thought it would be a good time for the DJC Green Building Blog to ask “just what did we learn?”

(For those of you not in the Seattle area, a thick blanket of snow carpeted the Pacific Northwest for most of the past week and a half. In Seattle, this amounts to a once-every-15-years-event).

As a city there weren’t many surprises: we learned Seattle doesn’t really know how to deal with snow and local drivers understand how it works even less.

But as individuals did we connect to our immediate environments a little bit more? I did. I live in a very walkable neighborhood with a market, restaurants and a coffee shop all across the street. A little further away there’s a retail district and a movie theatre. I walk to these places constantly and use them frequently.

But here’s the thing: beind snowed in forced me to think about my local amenities differently. No longer did I have the choice to drive to the movie theatre. If I wanted to go, I had to walk. And if I wanted other entertainment not across the street, well I had to reconsider just how much I wanted that too. Was I willing to walk for it?

Cutting out the choices shifted my perspective. If city planners ever hope to make the car a defunct item, that’s the kind of space they’re going to need to create.

Apparently I wasn’t the only one who was thinking differently: all of my local restaurants were packed whenever I passed by them (even sushi.) People I know who never take the bus were doing it. Or walking to places they had never considered walking to.

The Seattle Times  reported on local retailers seeing big foot trafffic. Looking back on the week and a half, it was annoying, yes. But having Mother Nature limit my choices for me was also kind of nice.

Green building is about creating a structure that gives back to its community a little bit more than the standard product. But a green building in the middle of nowhere only does so much good. Sustainable living, on the other hand, is about creating a community that doesn’t just take but gives back. In a way, the snow made me give back more to my community because it forced me to interract even more with it.

There’s a kind of momentum there, if a city could only capture it. But how is it possible to capture a forced locality, if you will, and turn it into better urban planning? It seems like there’s a great opportunity there, if only someone would step up and find a way to take it.

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.

I’ve been on vacation the last week in Chicago/Michigan/Indiana so here’s some news items you might have missed:

Seattle is a walkable city!  According to Walk Score’s listing of the 138 most walkable neighborhoods in the country, Pioneer Square hits number 18, Downtown Seattle (wherever that is) is 33, First Hill is 46, Belltown is 61, Roosevelt is 64, the International District is 83, South Lake Union is 85, University District is 86, Lower Queen Anne is 97 and Wallingford is 133. And overall, Seattle is the 6th most walkable city, following San Francisco, New York, Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia. I don’t know that I agree with the ranking, do you? For more opinion on whether Seattle reeeeallly outranks Portland, check out the Seattle Weekly here. For more on urban development visit Seattle MetBlogs here, and  Sightline’s has more here with some pertinent reader comments!

The first meeting of the Green Building Task Force is tomorrow from  3:30 to 6:30 p.m. at the downtown library. The goal of the force over the next six months is to figure out how to actually make Seattle the “green building capital,” and help achieve Nickel’s February goal of improving energy efficiency in commercial and residential by at least 20 percent. I wrote about that in the DJC here. They’ll be looking at policy options, financing programs, efficiency incentives and regulatory mandates.

There will be two teams: one will work on existing building stock, the other will work on new. That’s an important point, as many energy efficiency programs or government mandates only look at new projects, and not existing, even though there is by far much more to fix in existing buildings.

I love sources that provide a virtual who’s who of green people and this task force does just that. Members include reps from AIA, AGC, BOMA, Master Builders, Mithun, NBBJ, Touchstone, Seattle Steam… you get the idea. To see the actual list, go here.

In other news, I learned on my trip that US Weekly has a spread in its current edition about green celebrity tips. I’m not sure how I feel about this, but if you (or your kids) want to know what Cameron Diaz does to go green, check it out. I must admit the part comparing carbon emissions from celebrity perks (like personal jets and yachts) to everyday life (coach seating, a little sailboat) was a tad - shall I say - enlightening (or depressing, take your pick). Treehugger covers it here.

Seattle projects represent a third of nine prestigious awards given out in London yesterday by the Urban Land Institute and the Financial Times.  Winners are The Cascade Land Conservancy, Kennedy Associates and Vulcan.

The Seattle winners are in good company: a fellow winner is the city of Greensburg, Kansas (at right), the current poster child for just how far a city can go to rebuild itself green. If you don’t already know this story, it’s truly a fascinating one that is on its way to becoming a Leonardo DiCaprio-voiced documentary TV show.

Greensburg was a small farming town with a population of 1,389 when 90 percent of its building stock was destroyed by a tornado in 2007. The citizens of Greensburg used the traumatic incident as an opportunity and are rebuilding it as sustainably as they can.

But there’s no place like home and the Seattle winners are also an interesting mix.  We’ve got Vulcan, and if you haven’t heard about Vulcan’s green accomplishments (and you’re from this area) you might be living under a rock. The team is redeveloping South Lake Union as a pilot program for LEED for neighborhood development and uses a lot of green features, etc.

There’s the Cascade land Conservancy who is well known in these parts and won for its 100-year visioning exercise to preserve 1.3 million acres of forest and farmland through incentivizing smart growth.

And there’s Kennedy Associates who operates under the idea that buildings should be developed and managed sustainably because they have a competitive advantage over traditional structures.

The point of the awards was to honor global examples of “ongoing programs that exhibit new ideas and perspectives for best practices in sustainable land use.” Each winner highlights the concept of sustainability in real estate.

It’s some pretty interesting stuff. If you’re interested, check out the winners here. And if you want to read more on what Vulcan’s doing in this area, check out the DJC’s stories. Go here for info on the Westlake/Terry building, go here for Vulcan’s sustainable philosophy, go here for Alley24 (pictures above left) or click here for their award-winning pull-apart sales center.