News

A recent post in the APA Sustainable Communities Division Newsletter (http://us1.campaign-archive2.com/?u=0a196b8525f96edf44a4b3f53&id=50187e3c1b, e-Bulletin for 05/21/2015) included the following snippets of recent nature-in-the-city resources and events.   The larger movement these snippets represent is that of biophilic city planning and design being pioneered by, among others, the Biophilic Cities Network (launched October 2013, as the culmination of an […]

The sustainability sessions in APA California’s Conference 2015 reflect emerging best practices in sustainability planning across the planning-design-build professions.  Topics covered include water reuse, urban food, GHG cap & trade, green infrastructure, spaces for makers, health, affordability, district-scale initiatives, equity, innovation economics, and resilience (the new sustainability).   These innovative techniques and policy trends can be

Cross-post from UCB IURD Blog, by Professor Charisma Acey. See also, the APA/UCB Class events: Evaluations–UCB/APA CompPlan Sustainability Criteria Testing APA’s Sustainability Accreditation Criteria on 11 Bay Area Cities Regional-Local Sustainability Planning in 11 Bay Area Cities [Post prepared by Scott T. Edmondson, AICP, founder/past co-director and Research Program Lead of the Northern Section’s Sustainability

[cross-post from California Planning, March 2015, Vol. 15, Issue 02, p. 8 (here)] Imagine waking up one morning, turning on the tap, and water does not flow . . . , for the next 1,000 years, or it’s saltwater, or toxic! Extreme paranoia or our new normal? Hopefully the former! Yet each day we read stories

Interested in a seeing-is believing tour of Passive House HQ Brussells?  Why . . . , not!  In September 2014 NYC Mayor De Blasio released an energy efficiency Plan for NYC called ‘One City: Built to Last‘. The Passive House standard is celebrated in the plan as the target benchmark for future energy performance of both new

Making meaningful progress towards California’s climate mitigation goal — reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050 — is one of the front-line sustainability challenges facing planners. This reduction is the minimum required globally to stay within a safe trajectory of global warming and, hopefully, climate re-stabilization. Meeting this challenge requires