Living Buildings

The Global Warming is Real blog posted a great explanation of living buildings last week:

The concept of the “living building” has now emerged as a new ideal for design and construction. The Cascadia Region Green Building Council (CRGBC)—the Pacific Northwest chapter of the USGBC—defines a living building as a structure that “generates all of its own energy with renewable non-toxic resources, captures and treats all of its water, and operates efficiently and for maximum beauty.” The group has been pushing for adoption of the concept by construction industries here at home, and also helped to launch the International Living Building Institute to promote the concept internationally.

In essence, the call to architects and builders has been answered by over 60 projects that are currently in the "wait and see" phase. Seasonal variations in daylight, temperature and rainfall were the impetus for the one year requirement, which may ultimately help gauge against long-term climate change. What's also interesting are some of the unique challenges created by the comprehensive approach to both planet and people. As stated by Global Warming is Real:

Another challenge is finding materials that meet LBC standards, since many common building materials—such as PVC piping for wastewater transport—off-gas chemicals and have other hazardous attributes... remains confident that costs will come down as green materials, technologies and methods become more commonplace within the general building industry.

And this is where we stand today. We know what needs to be done, but we are confronting logistical challenges from systems and technologies that are based upon artificially cheap energy and materials as well as a long-standing ignorance toward personal health and environmental well-being. We are still a long way from critical mass, where the general populace demands meaningful progress with building technologies. Green sounds good enough, but as Global Warming is Real reminds us:

Over the past couple of decades, architects and builders looking to green their projects turned to the addition of various piecemeal elements to save water here or cut down on electricity there. Those who added more than a few green touches could apply for and get certified by the United States Green Building Council (USGBC) under its Leadership in Energy and Efficient Design (LEED) program. While these efforts have been laudable—essentially launching the green building industry as we know it today—they represent merely the infancy of what green building might someday become.

 

BALLE

The Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) is one of my favorite organizations. Their goal is to transform communities for the better by strengthening and connecting networks of locally owned independent businesses, which can then work cooperatively toward a shared vision.

On their website, they speak of cities and towns of every size and political stripe engaged in shared learning. They speak of building community assets like sustainable agriculture, green building, renewable energy, community capital, zero-waste manufacturing and independent retail - what they call the building blocks of Living Economies.

BALLE envisions a time when local economies not only generate community wealth, but also are catalysts for civic action, social diversity and ecological health -- for sustainable communities. It is particularly exciting when they cite success stories like the 3,000-person community of Hardwick, Vermont, which has prospered by creating a new "economic cluster" around local food.

Call me an idealist but isn't this the way it should be? We've got work to do and we can't very well do it alone!

Conflict and Appreciative Inquiry

One of our course requirements at BGI is Leadership and Personal Development (LPD), which runs through six consecutive quarters. Here in my fourth quarter I am learning about a technique called Appreciative Inquiry (AI). The premise is that we are all looking to do our best, based on our own perceived reality. What's interesting is that our realities vary immensely based upon our individual life experience. This is due to our human tendency to compartmentalize these experiences into right/wrong, good/bad, etc. We begin this process as children and by the time we grow up each of us has a laundry list of assumptions, which makes it more challenging to get along with people with backgrounds that differ from our own.

I believe with all my heart that a diverse community is a healthy community, but I also know that a diverse community demands a commitment to learn through AI. This last month I've been both disheartened and moved by the commitment of the BGI community to address an issue that arose last month. Most of us were unaware that the acronym we use for Community Process Time has a meaning that some people find offensive. The announcement opened up a dialogue of diverse opinion, but there were some important voices missing from the conversation. This is an opportunity for all of us to use AI to reach a higher level of understanding and compassion, and I really hope that we do.

ABCD Defined

We were interested in Asset Based Community Development and how it compares to community asset mapping, so I contacted Alyssa at Second Stories, who hosted the event. She describes ABCD as the principle and asset mapping as the tool, and sent me a pdf to further describe the principles. I pasted the outline below.



TWELVE GUIDING PRINCIPLES FOR COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT ABCD IN ACTION
By Mike Green (mike-green.org)

1.) EVERYONE HAS GIFTS.
2.) RELATIONSHIPS BUILD A COMMUNITY.
3.) CITIZENS AT THE CENTER
4.) LEADERS INVOLVE OTHERS AS ACTIVE MEMBERS OF THE COMMUNITY.
5.) PEOPLE CARE ABOUT SOMETHING.
6.) MOTIVATION TO ACT
7.) LISTENING CONVERSATION
8.) ASK, ASK, ASK.
9.) POSING QUESTIONS RATHER THAN GIVING ANSWERS INVITES STRONGER
PARTICIPATION.
10.) A CITIZEN-CENTERED “inside-out” ORGANIZATION IS THE KEY TO COMMUNITY
ENGAGEMENT.
11.) INSTITUTIONS HAVE REACHED THEIR LIMITS IN PROBLEM-SOLVING.
12.) INSTITUTIONS AS SERVANTS.

Shared Visions

This past Saturday I volunteered to be the scribe for another creative session around diversity in community. What was interesting were the commonalities that emerged from one session to the next. When we design art, we think of an object, plan its construction and present it to the world. The same holds true of many traditional forms of design, including architecture and city planning. Yet the world is changing, becoming smaller as our stranglehold on the planet is revealing its limitations.

As we begin to realize that everything is connected, the need for systems thinking becomes more apparent. The concept of cause and effect is archaic. Everything is part of an evolving system, including neighborhoods. So community design must be acknowledged as an organic process, not something that a government or a developer can reduce to a formula.



I love how this wake up call takes the form of an entertaining video. Clearly, we can't just keep doing things the way we did before. In my humble opinion, we can design all the technology in the world, but if we can't figure out how to work together, live together and grow together we are doomed.

A community is like a farm. Its resilience comes from diversity, while a monoculture is susceptable to all sorts of predators. They key lies in shared values, a diverse asset base, a system for sharing those assets and a commitment to working through the inherent challenges that arise, because that is a given. We're all human and prone to weakness, so we have to work to make it work.

Progress

Earlier this month the White House Blog commended Seattle's South Lake Union neighborhood for its "mixed use and affordable housing development and public transportation solutions (which) showed us how regional economic development initiatives can include and foster smart growth".

Sharon Lee, Executive Director of the Low Income Housing Institute explained, “We need to make sure low-income people can live in middle-class neighborhoods not only in distressed communities.We have changed the look of low-income housing. Not only is it well designed, it’s green.”

This begs a question that permeates nearly all of the discussions we have at BGI - "How much is enough?" In regard to Ms. Lee's quote, the question takes the form of "what exactly do you mean by green?". We all love to give ourselves big pats on the back for initiatives that are a little less bad than the ones we had before - and this is how some of our cutting edge developers and builders are defining the current green paradigm, which is best defined here in Seattle through LEED and Built Green. While it is truly encouraging to see not only a change in civic direction but a change in public attitude toward the "green" movement, one shudders to think of the time it will take for us to meet the Living Building Challenge.




What still remains to be seen is how and when governments will align themselves with developers to create and restore communities with both diversity and regenerative components. Sadly, truly sustainable technologies are still far beyond the mainstream, and in many ways both they and the diverse nature of our Utopian vision represent a push against "progress" as defined by our current economic system. More on the economy coming up next...

Diversity Part II

Last week I held my creative session at Re-vision Labs in Seattle with a fabulous cast of participants who brought professional and personal experience to the topic of bringing and maintaining a vibrant diversity in community. We started with a 3 minute brainstorm around the question:

"In what ways might we define diversity"

We came up with 28 types of diversity, each of which would have a positive effect on community assuming goodwill, willingness to learn, motivation to contribute and acceptance of diverse backgrounds, lifestyles and perspectives. Many questions were explored and answered like:

"In what ways might diversity enhance a community"

• We can learn new things
• We can work together toward larger goals than we could achieve individually
• We can share our personal assets - our skills, our time, our knowledge, our possessions
• We can recognize our commonalities amongst the differences and broaden our perspectives
• We become people who are more willing to open ourselves to possibility
• Diverse communities can be a model for world peace