The extension of suburbs further and further out from the core of businesses and services not only consumes acres of land, with its attendant loss of woods, fields, wetlands, farmland, and animal habitat, but it also requires miles of pavement, and the attendant infrastructure (sewers, phone and power lines, etc.) to support the new development. Residents of these displaced communities are forced to rely on cars for more and more of their access to various services and amenities, and very often travel greater distances to work as well as other destinations. This increases both the consumption of fuel resources and the pollution caused from the extra travel.

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But does that have to be the case? Suburbs might not have been developed with New Urbanism in mind, but maybe they could be reinvented. Perhaps they could become the 21st Century version of the 18th Century farm community, with lots of individual homesteads dotted across a wide swath of agricultural land.

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Sometimes, some of the greenest solutions come from the simplest of ideas.  Take the cottage community.  What could be simpler than the idea of building houses that are radically smaller in square footage than the national average?  Not everyone wants all that extra space, and many would rather have a smaller home built well than a cheaply made box full of emptiness.

Cottage communities are not yet widely known in planning and development.  Cottage communities are primarily located in the Pacific Northwest, though there are indications of interest, if not actual communities yet built, in other parts of the country.

The individual cottages have a small footprint.  The first cottage community built in Langley WA had half the cottages no bigger than 800 square feet, and the other half no bigger than 700 square feet.  These homes are far smaller than the average size house in the U.S. (which was almost 2,400 square feet in 2004).

Cottages serve a niche community.  Obviously, a family of more than 3 or 4 people would start to feel crowded living the typical American lifestyle in such a space.  But many households have only one or two people, and a 700-800 square foot house is perfectly adequate for them.

Cottages work best where several cottages can be placed near one another.  If you still require a full size lot for every home, a cottage doesn’t really do anything towards reducing sprawl.  But a cottage development typically has twice the number of houses as would normally be permitted.  So a piece of land that could normally accommodate four houses can be developed with eight cottages.  By developing as a community, cottages also benefit from common amenities such as landscaping and shared parking areas.  (The small size of the cottages precludes attaching garages to them.)

While cottages reduce the amount of land needed for development, they also reduce the volume of resources needed in their construction.  It is intuitively obvious that an 800 square foot cottage takes much less material, from studs and shingles to pipes and cupboards, than an average sized 2,400 square foot home.  In addition to all that material saved, the smaller cottages also need fewer resources to keep them heated and cooled.

Cottage communities can break up the texture of an otherwise undifferentiated development, and provide opportunities for other kinds of owners to be added into the housing mix.  While they serve the needs of a limited part of the population, they can contribute to better communities with just a simple idea.

See other related Green Building Elements stories:
Green Communities, Part 1: New Urbanism
Traditional Neighborhood Development and LEED Go Hand in Hand
Living Green in the 21st Century

images via: The Cottage Company

If you missed the news last week, Google Maps has added a new feature letting users request walking directions rather than car or public transit directions for trips of less than 10 kilometers (a little over six miles).

The appeal of the new feature is that it gives you directions that don’t make you go out of your way because of one-way streets or paths that aren’t drivable. While a set of car directions might have to follow a circuitous path to get you from Point A to Point B, a set of walking directions lets you take advantage of routes that cars can’t travel but people can.

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There are a string of eco-friendly New Urbanist developments along Highway 30-A, a long and well-kept secret until stars, like Sheryl Crow, Britney Spears and most recently, Jessica Simpson and Tony Romo began vacationing in the region. Seaside is one of the first and perhaps best examples - it is such a beautiful and surreal community that it actually serves as the backdrop for Jim Carrey’s movie, the Truman Show…yes. It is a real town, not a movie set.

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Here’s a shocker (not really): living in a walkable neighborhood reduces your chances of being overweight.

It should seem obvious, but a new study from the University of Utah has tracked the connection between walkable neighborhoods and weight statistically. The researchers found that the average guy living in a walkable neighborhood weighed 10 pounds less than his more car-dependent counterpart, while the average woman weighed six pounds less.

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The question of whether to walk, bike or take public transportation is a no-brainer if you live in a city like New York, where driving can often be more of a pain than a pleasure. But what about the rest of the country? Not every community is large enough or dense enough to offer the auto alternatives the Big Apple does. And what about people who live in rural areas where everything is a half-hour’s drive away or more? Can we refashion our country’s way of getting around to be more European? Or are those of us in unwalkable communities doomed to either move elsewhere or live like so many billions do in the rest of the world, consigned to life in a radius of space measured in only a few miles?

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“As greater awareness of global climate change emerges, each professional involved in planning, designing, managing or governing Florida communities has an obligation to know the facts and potential solutions to this grave threat,” says Rick Hall, chairman of CNU’s Florida chapter.

The Florida chapter meeting, scheduled to be held Jan. 24 and 25 at Rollins College in Winter Park, is aimed at highlighting the message that “New Urbanism is the convenient solution to the inconvenient truth.”

Among those expecting to attend the statewide gathering are Anthony Wayne King of the Carbon-Climate Simulation Science Group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, who will discuss global climate change; Stephen Adams, lead staff member for Florida Gov. Charlie Crist’s Interim Climate and Energy Action Plan; and Lizz Plater-Zyberk, dean at the University of Miami’s School of Architecture and principal of Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co.

The concept of New Urbanism holds that “walkable, human-scaled neighborhoods (are) the building blocks of sustainable communities and regions,” according to the national Congress for the New Urbanism.

Image courtesy of the Congress for the New Urbanism, taken by Michael E. Arth