It’s Thursday, April 2, at the Congress for New Urbanism’s Sustainability Summit in Portsmouth New Hampshire. Steve Mouzon of the New Urban Guild in Miami is pointing out the disconnect between our stated sustainability goals as a country and the reality of solving sustainable problems. Our government is setting ‘green’ goals which are then not achieved; these goals are not necessarily in line with an actually sustainable world.

We cannot achieve sustainability no matter how efficient our cars are. We simply cannot keep driving to work. When governments talk about increasing gas mileage or driving electric cars (I just recently read a NYTimes article on China gearing up to make electric cars that pointed out the electricity for those cars will come from coal fired plants thus canceling the apparent benefit), the key to sustainability is completely lost. This key is living in walkable cities and towns.

One key argument Mr. Mouzon makes is our false focus on LEED buildings. Individual buildings if placed by the highway or anywhere which is not in a walkable city are fairly useless in dealing with global climate change in that everyone is still driving to get there. Even if we met these auto efficiency or LEED building government targets, we would still be consuming more and more energy. Again, governments are missing the big picture which is living in pre-industrial planning urbanism.

When we look at the big picture we eventually arrive at a place called vernacular tradition. If one looks at how people lived before they had access to unlimited electricity and fuel, one finds all the answers. We had houses placed very close to each other and lived in neighborhoods we walked to (letting family farms aside for another discussion). We also were handy in that we used to be skilled at doing common chores such as fixing things and growing our own food. Now, the Industrial Revolution has left us with stacks of goods and our own ability to do only one thing well for salary. We have become specialists who cannot perform every day car repairs despite the fact that we all drive them. We do not grow our own vegetables or any of the many every day chores. We are completely diconnected from our immediate environment.

He points out how one of his favorite places is a small 9 block hamlet built in 19th century with no architects involved by people who used their common sense. This pragmatic humanism of the local vs. the pragmatic industrial efficiency of the machine is the thread woven through his pitch for a return to walkable cities (and agriculture woven into the town vs. placed like a factory on a large flat parcel). 

Essentially, Mr. Mouzon is arguing quite convincingly for the kind of pre-intellectual vernacular growth associated with organic planning. Planning which grows naturally from circumstances such as weather and food gathering. This reminds me of the book, “Architecture Without Architects”, by Bernard Rudolfsky which accompanied an exhibit at MOMA in 1965. This book pointed out that amazing adaptable, sustainable communities developed over many centuries function very well without the use of any design professionals. Mr. Mouzon continues this point by discussing the link between the genetic Darwinian adaptability of species and our need for continuously adaptable sustainable environments.

He describes the need for a continuous mix of design which is both lasting and leading. Lasting implies continuous use over a long period of time. However, buildings which are merely traditional and replicate the past as fixed, are not adaptable to continuously evolving circumstances. Leading implies taking advantage of technology, the present, and the future, as a society. However, the merely leading must involve all of the knowledge from the past or leading can be simply one off pieces of architecture that add nothing to the greater good if they are not linked to human needs.

Mr. Mouzon’s position, again, is to let nature’s example (genetic adaptability and efficiency of using solar energy as a plant does) and pragmatic pre-industrial pedestrian development (based on a more heuristic, many centuries, paradigm) guide our building decisions.

Many slides are shown of welcoming streets for positive examples of livability. Mr. Mouzon show’s an example of new 1 bedroom houses in traditional vernacular and well designed that sold like hot cakes despite the conventional wisdom advocating McMansions as the only desirable prototype. There are many simple ways to make our streets welcoming and bubbling with activity and they involve using pre-auto pedestrian tools like front porches, sidewalks, trees between road and sidewalk, etc.

Most of our troubles come from the addiction to the auto and I think if we look at the last 50 years as an organic growth of the life of the car, we can begin to replace the life of the car with the life of the human and other plants and animals. If you pretend the car is an animal and it’s reproduction is vast and out of control then you immediately understand the organic growth of roads and freeways and parking lots/garages (car homes). We can see the depletion of car food (oil) with this unchecked growth in car population and the threat of starvation if this ‘food’ supply diminished. So cars look for another supply and this may be electricity generated by many other ‘food’ supplies. I believe it is clear that when we place our own well being before the well being of the car, we reclaim our youth. Kids naturally gravitate to cozy villages rather than expressways and parking lots. When we reclaim our bodies moving through the built environment, we reclaim our youth and health. When such a small portion of the country has ever experienced living without a car in a safe, happy place, our job as urbanists who advocate such a life is extremely difficult. However, perhaps the tipping point has arrived thanks to climate catastrophe and peak oil.

Another aspect of sustainability Mr. Mouzon would like us to be aware of is not only the patterns of village growth which are human but also that as time goes on, we use our buildings, for many uses -not necessarily the original one. Therefore, buildings which are layed out to be adapted to many different uses are much more sustainable, avoiding destruction, etc. In the same vein, using materials in ways not connected to their functionality leads to disconnect between reality and appearance. For instance using brick as a veneer is not related to it’s function as a load bearing sustainable material. In the same way, he shows how plastic siding or railings may appear to be low maintenance but are in fact not patchable and maintainable over the long haul like wood.

Mouzon wants us to look carefully at this ‘green’ movement and work on ways which avoid the monopoly of the discussion by what he calls the, ‘Gizmo Green’, movement. This aspect is soley focussed on those engineered products, and LEED carbon footprint mandates which are only one small aspect of surviving on this planet (I would say it merely reenforces the industrial revolution engineering and efficiency paradigm which got us here in the first place).

Mouzon asks us to use function as a means combined with artistry to bring us back and forward to a, ‘Living Tradition’. One closer to the Renaissance in it’s celebration of the pedestrian experience and one closer to the medieval symbiosis between agriculture (or food production) and urbanism. This can be done by developing codes which reward compact urban life. Mr. Mouzon makes a very thorough and compelling case. Visit www.originalgreen.org for more information on his work.

-Michael Belleau at the CNU New England chapter sustainability summit in Portsmouth NH