Many architects reach a point in their career when a certain project stops feeling like a building and becomes more of a responsibility. These kinds of assignments go past simply designing a structure. Instead, your designs will influence the street the building stands on, the neighborhood it calls home, and the people who will walk by it for generations.
Across the US, city planning is increasingly prioritizing environmental factors and community well-being. Turning environmental sustainability and quality of life into main design drivers, rather than secondary considerations.
Here’s a closer look at how sustainable design choices can support better development for future cities and communities.
In this article:
→ Building with the right materials
→ The case for sustainable transportation
→ Green infrastructure for urban strategy
→ Community-focused design and the future of our cities
→ Building cities for a greener future
Building with the right materials
Creating sustainable cities starts right at the beginning, and with asking a question that can be easy to overlook: Where do your materials come from?
In construction, supply chains can be long and convoluted. Steel is fabricated overseas, aggregates are shipped over countless miles, and glass is trucked across several state lines. All of these activities carry a carbon cost that doesn’t typically appear in a project’s budget, but will certainly show up in the atmosphere.
The World Green Building Council reports that materials and construction account for 11% of global energy-related carbon emissions, making this a prime target for sustainability optimizations.
By using locally-sourced materials, you can dramatically reduce the environmental impact of your projects, since the biggest variable in a material’s embodied carbon is often how far it has to travel. If structural timber is sourced from a sustainably managed footprint within 500 miles of the project site, it will have a dramatically smaller environmental impact than the same volume of timber that’s shipped from overseas.
There’s also an economic angle: sourcing locally will keep money circulating in regional economies, support local manufacturers and trade workers, and help build supply chain resilience for a local community.
Prioritizing recycled or repurposed materials can round out your sustainability initiative. Reclaimed wood can add authentic character to a project, and also divert material from the waste stream. Recycled-carbon composites can retain a lot of the structural performance found in virgin material and also support a circular construction model.
Choosing these materials isn’t a compromise. Attitudes in the industry are shifting, and choosing greener materials is increasingly seen as a mark of design sophistication.
The case for sustainable transportation
No conversation about environmentally friendly cities can take place without addressing how people move around them. Transportation is one of the largest sources of domestic greenhouse gas emissions in the US, with the latest EPA study showing it accounted for roughly 29%.
The dominant pattern of low-density, car-centric layouts in cities has made emissions exceedingly difficult to reduce at a structural level — people can’t walk to a destination when they’re surrounded by six lanes of traffic and a huge parking lot!
Sustainable transportation and moves to increase urban mobility are a core part of any serious urban sustainability strategy. Compact, mixed-use neighborhoods can make car-free living more practical, as proximity enables walking and cycling, while dense designs can make public transportation systems more economically viable.
Transit-oriented city development, building for density and walkable streetscapes within reach of rail and bus rapid transit, is one of the most effective methods for sustainable public transport.
Designing these environments effectively is fundamentally an architectural challenge. Buildings have to activate the street, public spaces have to feel welcoming, and ground-floor users have to generate foot traffic that makes neighborhoods feel lived-in. Even the experience of boarding transit, from contactless fare transit payments to account-based ticketing, is increasingly relevant to smart city infrastructure planning. Frictionless access directly impacts widespread adoption and the viability of an entire sustainable transport network.
Green infrastructure for urban strategy
One of the biggest developments in sustainable urban design has been the gradual way green infrastructure has become mainstream. An urban network of natural and semi-natural systems can provide ecological, social, and economic services to a city, all while reducing the environmental impact of individual projects.
Green roofs are one of the most visible expressions of this shift. Chicago’s long-running Green Roof Initiative has transformed thousands of square feet of rooftops, helping to reduce stormwater runoff, improve insulation, and limit urban heat island effects across the city.
Visualizations of stormwater management basins in a park in Pisa, Italy.
Aside from green rooftops, bioswales, rain gardens, permeable pavements, and urban tree canopies can all help manage stormwater at its source, filter pollutants before they reach shared waterways, and cool streets through evapotranspiration. Research has also linked green spaces in cities to better mental health outcomes, lower crime rates, and higher property values. These are all outcomes that matter to general urban development just as much as carbon figures do.
Community-focused design and the future of our cities
If sustainable design ignores equity, then the design is incomplete. The kinds of green amenities that define environmentally-friendly cities, such as parks, tree-lined streets, bike lanes, and transit access, have historically suffered from uneven distribution across American cities, with lower-income neighborhoods shouldering more environmental burdens with fewer benefits.
If sustainability investments are made without proper attention to equity, it can accelerate the process of gentrification and, in the long run, displace the communities they were originally designed to serve.
The most effective examples of urban development embed community engagement from the very start. Participatory planning that involves residents in decisions about public space, land use, and transportation can all produce better outcomes, not just socially, but environmentally, as communities are more likely to maintain and build on the investments they’ve had a direct hand in shaping.
A visualization of an urban redevelopment project in Washington
Future urban planning will be defined by how well designers can hold all these threads together. This means buildings performing well with locally sourced and recycled materials, green infrastructure woven through every neighborhood, and public transportation systems that truly make driving optional.
3D rendering for architecture and similar visualization technology play a key role in making your vision real. These tools empower architects and urban planners to show members of the community exactly what a sustainable neighborhood will look and feel like. By using immersive, photorealistic walkthroughs that convey light, materiality, and everyday life in the streets, the quality of decisions will improve across the board.
By taking this step, sustainable design will stop being a vague abstraction and become something that a community can see, understand, and advocate for.
Building cities for a greener future
Making sustainable design choices for your projects can mean overcoming a lot of obstacles, not least of all going against accepted convention. However, by articulating the long-term positive impacts on materials, transportation, infrastructure and community buy-in, you’ll be able to secure support where it counts and develop cities that will secure a brighter future for your residents.
Learn more about how Enscape can support sustainability in urban design.