Sustainable Agricultural Village

The global sustainability movement has begun looking at the development patterns of cities in an effort to get a better understanding of what we have done wrong and what we need to do to create a more sustainable environment.  Certification processes like LEED, Green Globes and others have established systems designed to encourage green building strategies in building design without prescribing a singular approach.  These approaches have also instituted evaluation processes to determine both the level of commitment to green building strategies as defined by their checklist and the effectiveness of new designs in the finished building through a commissioning process.  This approach is a positive development, but its incremental, checklist approach fails to effectively address the broader systems of a larger environment like a village, city, or region.  This realization has led others to pursue policy development efforts to broaden the consideration of sustainability to the urban scale.  One effort along these lines has been titled ‘Smart growth’.  This design approach champions walkable neighborhoods; mixed land uses; preservation of open space, farm land and critical environmental areas; pursuit of a distinct sense of place, and public participation.  This effort represents another step forward in developing sustainable environments, but its primary focus on the ‘urban’ side of land development fails to pursue a truly integrated environmental systems approach, necessary to achieve a sustainable environment.

Research