Raj Mankad

Is ND the real sustainability?

Editor – Cite Magazine, Nov 29, 11.

Tagged with sprawl, sustainability, walkable urbanism

LEED certification is often a sham. The point system used by the U.S. Green Building Council is too easy to manipulate for the sake of marketing. For example, bike racks and showers earn points even if the building is sited on the edge of a freeway. The proximity of one bus line in the suburbs is equal to a downtown grid crisscrossed by public transportation. I’ve seen aerial pictures of LEED-certified, green-roofed buildings surrounded by moats of asphalt parking. The situation is perverse. Isolated features are used to green wash environmental time bombs—the architectural equivalent of putting a few pieces of organic lettuce on a factory-farmed beef patty.

A new type of LEED certification, LEED for Neighborhood Development or LEED-ND, promises to address some of these deep flaws. I attended a workshop on October 25 at CITYCENTRE, 14 miles west of downtown, to find out about the new point system. Douglas Farr, the original chair of the committee that developed the standard, gave the presentation.

LEED-ND came about as a collaboration between the U.S. Green Building Council and two partners: the National Resource Defense Council and the Congress for New Urbanism. This last group is vilified, especially among academic architects, for requiring nostalgic aesthetics into their codes and for the distance between the ideals they espouse and the resort developments they design. So I went into the workshop skeptical both of the LEED point system and the New Urbanist partners.

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On the whole, I was convinced that widespread legalization and normalization of LEED-ND would move the world closer to sustainability. It turns the technical architecture and urban planning world of sidewalk widths, intersections per mile, façade permeability, density of residential units, and diversity of uses into a branded, comprehensible process that a non-expert can more or less trust.

Full Story: Is LEED-ND Sustainability We Can Believe In?
Source: OffCite, November 23, 2011

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