Sustainable Development Principles Find Their Way in Urban Design

"It's a vicious circle," says Noel Keough, executive director of the Sustainable Calgary Society. "Everybody is going full steam ahead, approving area structure plans all over the perimeter of the city."

It's a recipe, he says, that is unsustainable. Sprawl continues unabated, stretching the expensive network of roads ever wider, making public transit less and less feasible and creating communities reliant on energy-burning, polluting cars for most everything. Indeed, he says, Calgary has the largest ecological footprint of any city in Canada.

"A lot of people can see the impacts this has on climate change and energy use," he says. "But changing directions is like trying to alter the course of a supertanker."

Breaking the business-as-usual habit, Keough says, will first require more visionary political leadership - from provincial legislators willing to amend an outdated, inflexible Municipal Government Act to city and town councils prepared to insert sustainable principles into municipal development plans that will guide urban development for years to come.

One doesn't have to look far for a shining new example of this process at work. Strathcona County, on the eastern outskirts of Edmonton, has embraced sustainable development in its new Municipal Development Plan. This commitment started with its Centre in the Park development and has fully blossomed with the planning and design of Emerald Hills Urban Village in Sherwood Park.

This 20-hectare sustainable development will contain 1,630 units of mixed housing, at a density of 81 units per hectare, with stepped-back buildings of up to 14 storeys.

Emerald Hills Urban Village will be an inspirational neighbourhood benefiting both people and the planet, now and in the future. It will integrate beautifully designed natural, public, private and commercial spaces into a pedestrian friendly, mixed use community for young families, active adults and seniors. It will make sustainable living easy, attractive and affordable by transforming homes, shops and services into opportunities to live, work, play and relax that enhance the health and well-being of both its citizens and the ecosystems upon which they rely.

The key to the success of this initiative has been collaboration. Everyone - municipality, developers, designers and citizens - has been engaged in charting the course of not only this project but the entire community. "No matter how green or technologically advanced your project is, if the community is not involved, you're not going to succeed," says project sustainability coordinator Wil Mayhew of Howell-Mayhew Engineering. "The municipality's support was absolutely critical. And you must have the full commitment of developers, who are the ones who are ultimately going to move sustainability into the mainstream.

"You're not going to find a development like this in Canada. Sustainability principles and a sustainable living lens have been systematically applied to all decision-making throughout the planning, design and implementation process. Emerald Hills Urban Village will become a model of true sustainable urban neighbourhood development."

Just west of Calgary, the Municipal District of Rocky View recently approved a conceptual scheme for 3,500 residential unit development in Springbank. The Harmony project will focus on sustainable, mixed land use, renewable energy generation and the social integration of residents of all ages.

"It's important when you design these developments that they be complete communities, so you don't have to leave them to do everything," says Stephanie Sanders of Urban Systems Ltd., which is involved in the Harmony project. "While a lot of subdivisions are still being developed in a conventional way, things are changing. Sustainable principles are finding their way into high-level planning acts, and they'll increasingly make their way into the implementation stage in

the next few years."