Tomorrowland
(Page 2 of 3)
September-October 2008
by E.B. Boyd, from Conscious Choice
It’s a heady goal, given that development costs of just one block are likely to run into tens (or hundreds) of millions of dollars. But the project’s creator, Stacey Frost, a former real estate developer who used to butt heads with builders over the toxic materials involved in construction, is optimistic. “I’m hoping that the design we come up with will be able to be communicated in such a way that, on paper, it wouldn’t make sense to say no,” she says.
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Sustainable design and green building are burgeoning and energetic, though ultimately scattered, fields. Designers and entrepreneurs tend to tackle individual pieces of the puzzle—building practices, new ways of creating energy, alternatives to toxic materials—but few are thinking systemically about how all the parts fit together. Frost hopes Urban Re:Vision will help stimulate more organic thinking and produce solutions that could be applied holistically.
Competitions for energy, transportation, commerce, and community have already wrapped up, with just two contests remaining: one for sustainable building, and the final city-block competition. Eric Corey Freed, the principal of San Francisco–based OrganicArchitect and a key adviser to Re:Vision, says he was surprised and encouraged by the breadth of ideas submitted: everything from using playgrounds and sidewalks to generate energy, to city-wide delivery networks for groceries and other purchases, to social networking systems that connect users to commuters with similar interests.
“I went into it thinking we would get 400 designs for solar-powered skateboards,” Freed says. Instead, the variety of ideas that were submitted give him hope that the ingenuity exists out there to solve the many daunting challenges in making city life healthy and sustainable. Freed says he was further buoyed by the absence of entries focused on fossil fuels. It was, he says, a telling development: “I didn’t see one proposal for a new use for oil,” he says. “We’re done with that.”
About 70 percent of entries for the conceptual competitions have come from students, says Urban Re:Vision’s competitions director Nicole Cassani, and 30 percent from working professionals. The organization hopes that the remaining contests will attract entries from people who don’t necessarily have specific design, environmental, or urban planning experience—people who simply have great ideas. “There are a lot of people out there who desperately want to do something about global warming,” Cassani says. “But they don’t know what, and they don’t know how. We provide hope that there’s going to be a way to make that change.”