GEOG 346: Days 21&22 Fusing the Natural and Built Environments

Housekeeping Items A reminder that today and tomorrow, students will be presenting their research in the upper cafeteria. “Bottled Life” will be showing in Building 200, Room 203 at 7. Here are the stats on the Champlain Housing Trust in Burlington and northwestern Vermont. In Burlington alone, it has over 2500 members, with 410 owner-occupied houses, 100 co-op apartments, 1200 units of rental housing, and fifteen non-residential buildings and condos. And this in a city of only 40,000 people! A potentially useful document from CMHC comparing conventional and new urbanist developments: schl.gc.ca/odpub/pdf/67802.pdf?fr= schl.gc.ca/odpub/pdf/67802.pdf?fr= One book I would highly recommend is Healing Spaces: The Science of Space and Well-Being by Esther Sternberg (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard, 2010). Before we move on, I want to finish the slides from Thursday.

Fusing the Natural and Built Environments There are a whole array of strategies:  Greenbelts  Greenways/ core and corridor systems in the city that serve as habitat/ wildlife migration corridors and also as alternative transportation pathways  Parks of varying degrees of wildness  Conservation subdivisions  Botanical gardens  Japanese gardens/ quiet oases in the city  Community gardens  Green buildings, green roofs, “living buildings”  Alternative stormwater management systems (swales, etc.)  Living walls

Randall Arendt on Conservation Design He contrasts conventional subdivision design with conservation subdivision design. Conventional design is “where all the land is divided into houselots and streets, with the only open space typically being undevelopable wetlands, steep slopes, floodplains, and stormwater management areas” – or SLOAP, Space Left Over After Planning. In these subdivisions, there are usually few places to walk, for community events, or children to play. The Planned Residential Developments (PRDs) of the 1960s were somewhat more flexible in layout, but they didn’t provide better treatment of open space. [See

Randall Arendt on Conservation Design In conservation subdivision design, at least 50% of the site is reserved for open space, and half of that in a relatively natural state. The other half can be used as playing fields or parkland for picnics, etc. The half of the land that is developed contains as many units as would exist in a conventional subdivision – that is, to say, the development is “density neutral.” It achieves this either through narrow, smaller lots and narrower houses or through duplexes, townhouses, or other denser forms of housing. The key thing is to select the conservation lands first. See next page for contrasting examples.

Conventional Design Conservation Design