Sustainable Transportation Advocates Need to Talk About Sustainable Urban Design

Whether they’re debating the best design of a bike lane or sweating the details of a sidewalk, sustainable transportation advocates often have an obsessive knowledge of the street realm. But what about, well, everything beyond it? 

In his new book, “The Sustainable Urban Design Handbook,” Nico Larco and his co-author Kaarin Knudson hand advocates and professionals a “magic decoder ring” to understand how green, equitable, human-scaled transportation systems fit into the greater puzzle of the built environment, and how we can better use urban design principles to accomplish a vast range of sustainability goals. And in the process, he’s also helping them use the vocabulary of the urban design discipline to find more allies, deepen their advocacy, and amplify their impact far beyond the curb. 

We sat down with Larco to talk about how he hopes Streetsblog readers will use his book as a resource, and what urban design principles they don't talk about enough. And keep an eye out for an interview with Larco on our "Talking Headways" podcast soon.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Streetsblog: What was the genesis of this book? And what’s the elevator pitch?

Nico Larco: So basically, I've done a lot of work in walkability and bikeability over the years when I first became an academic. And I thought, ‘You know, I'm really curious about broader questions. Like: what does it mean to be sustainable, and not just walkable or bikeable? And I thought, well, the best way for me to learn this would be to teach class about it, so I'm gonna teach class called sustained urbanism. 

And there are some really good books out there, but I thought, "Oh my goodness; there's a lot of really great research done in all these areas, but it's all disparate; we need to figure out how we organize this." Like, if I was to ask, "Is this place sustainable," or, "How do I make this place sustainable," what do we even start to ask? And out of panic, because I needed to teach the course. I thought, Well, how could how would you organize all this information? 

That’s where I developed the sustainable urban sign framework. 

Streetsblog: Before we dive into that framework, let me just ask you the 101 level question: What is urban design? How is it distinct from urban planning and the other built environment disciplines? And then later, we can get into, how sustainable urban design is different than them both.

Larco: So basically, the way I think about it is that urban design is just the design of the physical parts of urban environment: the streets, the buildings, the green spaces, where you put in development, the density of development, the types of uses and all these different types of things. It’s everything that's physical that makes up the city.

So buildings we might think of more in the realm of architecture, but that’s part of it; landscape is part of it, planning is part of it, development is part of it. So urban design is kind of this strange mixed field that touches all these sister disciplines. 

The way it differs from urban planning is that urban planning is typically more about policy, and what the rules are around how some of these things are put together. Urban design includes that, and then it [extends beyond it] to questions like: how do we design those things? 

Streetsblog: I do think a lot of sustainable transportation advocates, when they even know what urban design is, their knowledge usually limited to the street realm. And I say this is a representative of Streetsblog; we tend to get a little bit in the weeds on how a specific road is planned and organized, whether there are bike lanes or sidewalks, things like that. That certainly figures in your book, but I'm curious to take your to get your take: do you think that folks who bill themselves as biking, walking and transit advocates are talking enough about the urban design context in which all this stuff operates? And if you think they don't, why should they? 

Nico Larco: So I'm gonna talk about this in two different ways:

On the one hand, people who are working on street design are doing a ton of fantastic work, but it's good for them to understand that they exist within a larger context in terms of scale. So, for instance, if I'm a bike advocate or a walkability advocate, I also need to understand that I need to have places to go to, that are near enough to each other that I can use that mode of transportation, right? 

So that's where you get into questions like, How dense is the development? What are the overall transit networks like? What kind of land uses are near each other? I can design a fantastic street out in the middle of the desert, and not a lot is gonna happen there; we need a supportive urban context to make that street work.

On the other hand, part of what this book's trying to do is get people to understand how the different scales [of urban design] interact and rely on each other. If you're building wonderful pedestrian, bicycle and transit-friendly streets, well, it turns out that with those same streets, you could be helping deal with, say, issues of permeability and stormwater management; you could be helping deal with issues of ecology and habitat; you could be helping with the urban heat Island effect. 

If we want sustainable places, we need a whole bunch of people who are strong advocates for certain issues. But also we also have to understand the importance of having synergy with other sustainability goals – which also increases the political will and potential for support [of our core causes.]

So if I build a bike infrastructure that also helps manage stormwater and creates micro habitats for certain species — well, now, all of a sudden, I've got a whole realm of other people that are gonna be interested in this supporting this. It’s a multiple birds with one stone type of thing — and also multiple funding sources, potentially, as well.

Streetsblog:  Yeah, I did think a lot about how this book could help people who view themselves as transportation advocates not just to find more allies, but also help them do less harm. Because there are ways to build sustainable transportation networks that are unsustainable in other ways; you can build a bike line with terrible stormwater drainage, or a transit network that reinforces social inequities that are terrible for the human environment.

Larco: Absolutely. 

Streetsblog: But getting back to the topic of how transit advocates might use this book, there were a couple of terms in this book that were new to me that I thought would be really useful for advocates to know, and one was ‘embodied energy in infrastructure.’ Since that’s a little bit wonky, could you just tell me, what does that term mean, and why should sustainable transportation advocates have it in their back pocket?

Larco: Okay, so embodied energy is basically the amount of energy needed for the entire life cycle of any one thing. 

So let's say, like, I've got like a pencil in front of me, right? And so on the one hand, the pencil has energy in itself; I can burn it and release that energy as fire. But there's also all this embodied energy in it: the energy it took to mine the graphite, the energy it took to harvest the lumber, to transport that lumber to a place where it can be milled down into the shape of a pencil,  then to be taken to a facility that puts pencils things together — we have to talk about all of it.  

Well, we can think of the urban environment in in the same way. To serve a house on a suburban, auto-oriented block, think about how much street I need to build to serve that house; all that concrete, all that sewer, all that electrical wire, all that was built just to serve that house. 

Now think about that same amount of building we need to do to serve a block in New York City, where we can have 50 units for that same amount of road.

So if you think about building in a less-dense kind of way, it requires so much more energy — not just for the construction of the thing, but for its whole life cycle. 

Streetsblog: And for the suburban house, we have to include the energy it takes to drive everywhere, too. 

Larco: Right. 

Streetsblog: That feeds into my next question, which is about another set of concepts we don't talk about a lot on Streetsblog: the idea of the street network and the street grid and the whole issue of vehicle network connectivity and organization. For the most part, Americans are living in cities where the grid is pretty fixed, and unless we are residents of, like, some very nascent greenfield community like Buckeye, Arizona or something, we feel like we don’t have a lot of say over how our street networks are laid out. With that said, could just talk a little bit about why street network organization matters, what impacts it has, and why advocates should be talking about it — even in our communities where it feels like we can’t really change it? 

Larco: Well, if we only focus at the street level on making beautiful streets, but everywhere that we want to go is far away, that's a real problem, right? There are pretty strict and straight forward relationships between distance and people's willingness to bike or walk. And it’s not just distance as the crow flies, but within a street network. 

So I'll give you a really good example I used to do a lot of research on suburban development, and we’d find these multifamily housing developments that were literally right next to a shopping mall or a strip mall — if you could hop the fence, you'd be there in eight steps. But because of the fence, and the way the street network was laid out, you’d have to walk all the way up and around the block; a short walk turns into a mile and a half walk.  So people do the obvious thing, which is to get in their cars.

A grid network like we have here in Portland [Oregon], on the other hand, works extremely well for getting people from one place to another really quickly. If you have like a suburban network, it’s all loops and lollipops and … dead end streets everywhere. [This is what] makes us more car dependent.

It's true that [the street network] is hard to change once it exists, but there are ways of changing it. So, for instance, you can have cut throughs between blocks;  that's something that you see a lot in suburbia and places where there's these large blocks and very disconnected networks. Sometimes it’s off the paved path, and sometimes it’s unofficial, like a fence that's been knocked down right, and people walk through there.

Streetsblog: So we’ve talked a lot about land use and proximity, but what are some of the other ingredients of a sustainable, human-centered place that you feel like sustainable transportation advocates need to talk more about? If I want to be not just a good streets advocate, but an advocate for great places, what other elements should I be looking for? 

Larco: I mean, we could talk for like four hours, but a couple of things come to mind. One really important part of what makes the street [human centered and sustainable] is the buildings that are up against it. 

The interactions between buildings and streets can really make or break a place. We're talking about, say, high floor-to-ceiling heights on the first floor; uses on the first floor that relate to the street as much as possible; lots of transparency and entrances along that street. Those things make a huge difference to how the street feels.

Streetsblog: And whether people want to actually walk, bike, and wait for the bus there. 

Larco: Yeah. So you can have great street infrastructure and a bike lane and a transit stop and all, but if you have a bunch of blank walls, that totally kills the design. Or you if have rows and rows of parking, that totallykills the design. 

Streetsblog: What about the intersection between sustainability, equity and health? What urban design elements can make cities more equitable that don’t get talked about as much on outlets like ours, but deserve to be? 

Larco: So I think Streetsblog does a fantastic job of thinking about streets in terms of the accessibility. Affordability you sometimes cover, but that's something, I think, that’s really important — thinking about how it is that we organize the built environment, and how that affects how affordable a place is. And that's everything from the way that we lay out the city the size of lots, to the shape of lots, to how it works with topography — those kinds of things which [sustainable transportation advocates] typically don't deal with.

Also things like the mix of uses; on the one hand, the mix of uses is important for walkability and bikeability, but it's also it's an equity question, right? Do I have like access to a range of of uses and services that are important to my daily life? Do I have the opportunity [to access] jobs and healthy food? And open space — how are those things organized so that we have access to all these things?

But different age groups need different things. Obviously, young kids need playgrounds and play spaces older adults need places that they can stroll — and get out of the elements while they're strolling. A lot of the research that looks at older adults and how much they're moving around urban areas has to do with whether there's benches around;  as an older adult, having a place where you can actually rest is super important, and not having that is a huge a deterrent. 

Streetsblog: Well, you’ve hit on a lot of things I planning to ask you, so let’s wrap this up: is there anything I haven't asked you about this book that you think you want a Streetsblog audience, specifically, to know? 

Nico Larco: So I'll just say that the goal of book is to try to demystify this super-complicated topic of how to create sustainable places. Yes, it's for designers, but it's also for planners, and it's also for developers, and it's also for community. Hopefully, this gives you resources to think more broadly, to understand what exists around pedestrian friendly streets, … It can almost be like   magic decoder ring that helps you see all the things we have to do to build sustainable places, and that, hopefully, can help you advocate for those things in your community.