Sustainability and green design aren't exactly new ideas but they've recently become more mainstream ideas that have come into their own.
The City of Seattle is fine-tuning their codes to encourage more green roof projects. Schools like Portland State have made sustainability an integrated element of the university operations with green campuses, green buildings and green transportation. And ASLA has built a green roof on their building in DC. And when state governments are pushing rain gardens, they aren't really cutting edge anymore. Are they?
During my sabbatical, I read all or part of three different books that begin to speak to some of these issues:
* Design Like You Give a Damn
* William Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency
* Did Someone Say Participate? An Atlas of Spatial Practice
Design Like You Give a Damn was a great book that was just a long illustrated list of creative alternative solutions for design helping folks out. Admittedly, DLYDG was more about housing for the poor and clean water for villages, but this too is a sustainability problem. moreover, it showed how easy it was to create inexpensive project with reused materials, or energy efficient techniques to make life better in places as disparate as NYC's Bowery and rural Africa.
I tend to be very sympathetic to those who are arguing that the next great movement in design will not be a style so much as a philosophy that embraces more environmentally and societally friendly solutions. Landscape architects should have a leg up on the other design professions on this count, but there is limited evidence of it being true.
What is less clear to me is how environmental planning should change. It should already be sensitive to natural processes, working to minimize impact, and improving opportunities for open space within the urbanizing landscape. What's new in planning may be better policy tools and increased support for environmental initiatives.
UPDATE: The photo is a rain garden at MIT which I understand to be an Olin design as part of their larger efforts at the Stata Center which is just out of sight in this photo.
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