October 4, 2023
Designing the Climate Responsible City: Climate Mitigation, Material Innovation, and Social Well-being in Urban Design
Cities consume significantly more energy and produce a disproportionate share of greenhouse gas emissions, making urban areas critical in mitigating the severity of global climate change. How do we get to the places we need to go? What volume of emissions is generated by essential services like fresh water provision and sewage disposal? How are materials – along with their embodied emissions – disposed of or reused? And how can community health and social wellbeing be prioritized alongside climate mitigation efforts? To address these and other pressing questions, Green Futures Lab interns produced a series of three booklets: Designing the Climate Responsible City, Materials Matter, and Climate Mitigation and Social Well-Being in Urban Design.
Designing the Climate Responsible City presents actionable guidance for landscape architects, planners and urban designers seeking to mitigate greenhouse‑gas emissions and sequester carbon through their approach to shaping the built environment. The guide introduces clear frameworks for decoupling carbon from urban systems, mapping inputs, metabolic processes, and outputs, and demonstrates how circular‑flow thinking can be applied to energy, water, transportation, food systems, and green spaces. Illustrative diagrams unpack complex material and energy flows, and can enable practitioners to pinpoint high‑impact interventions across the urban realm. The publication equips professionals and students with analytical tools, precedents, and design practices to catalyze climate‑responsible cities.
Building on the foundation laid by Designing the Climate Responsible City, this companion guide turns its attention to the embodied carbon locked into the materials and processes that shape streetscapes, landscapes, and other urban sites. The publication distills a clear set of principles for climate‑mitigative site design, outlines ideal material selection practices, and analyzes manufacturing methods and products that either minimize or actively sequester greenhouse‑gas emissions. Illustrated process diagrams and case studies demystify the path from traditional, carbon‑intensive techniques to climate‑positive alternatives. This guide aims to help engineers, landscape architects, urban designers, and builders the knowledge needed to specify responsible materials and implement low‑carbon construction workflows. It serves as a further catalyst for inspiring truly climate‑responsible cities.
As shapers of the built environment, landscape architects and urban designers are primarily concerned with people and places. Today, we are facing a global climate crisis that threatens the health and well-being of people and places. Simultaneously, social connections are unraveling with the rise of technology that tends to pull people apart rather than bring them together, a severe loneliness epidemic, and significant polarization on topics such as politics, culture, economy and race; all of which were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, more than ever before there is an urgent need to address the human impact on the climate, and this tremendous effort will be easier if we work together with improved social connections. As designers and planners continue to create and implement solutions to reducegreenhouse gas emissions, they must also consider how climate design interventions can also support people’s social well-being. This book explores the reciprocal relationship between climate mitigation and social well-being, building a case for why every urban design project must address both. The goal of this book is to provide designers and planners with resources and a framework on reaching carbon reduction goals and supporting social well-being.
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