Event Details — Salon Des Refuses: New Urban Counter to LID

The Congress for the New Urbanism-Houston, host of this event, includes the following details on their website:

The idea of sprawling, auto-dependent development in the Katy Prairie as environmentally responsible may sound absurd, but that’s exactly what the architectural and engineering community is trying to sell Houstonians. CNU-Houston members Dan Barnum and John Jacob will share their award-winning counter-proposal for the recent LID competition. Their project makes the case that Walkable Urbanism at the size and scale of American small towns is a far more environmentally responsible and cost-effective development solution. Don’t miss this compelling presentation!

In December 2009, a team of new urbanist architects, planners, and scientists put together a plan for a development on a 640-acre tract on the Katy Prairie west of Houston. The plan was a submission to a Low Impact Development contest hosted by the Houston Sustainable Land and Water Forum. All of the other submissions, including the winning entries, used all of the 640 acres. All of these entries reduced stormwater runoff through a variety of low impact development practices.

The new urbanist plan rejected the basic premise of the competition that the development had to conform to the reigning pattern of sprawl, and was instead based on the principles of proximity and walkability. This avant-garde losing entry, named the Salon des Refuses project in the spirit of 19th Century impressionists similarly rejected by the status quo, preserved 480 acres of prime farmland and high quality Katy Prairie habitat with the same or greater lot yield as the mainstream entries. The proposed 160-acre development included a diverse array of housing types, including single family detached, as well as town homes and mixed use areas, in a complete neighborhood plan that reduces vehicle miles traveled and that is transit ready. The Salon plan had an equal or lesser stormwater runoff volume and pollutant load compared with the mainstream entries.

The Salon des Refuses Project lost the Low Impact Development contest, but won a coveted Congress for New Urbanism Charter Award at the 2010 Congress in Atlanta, Georgia, for being a “radical counterproposal that goes beyond greenwashing to create a real urban community that meets development objectives while only consuming on quarter of the original site”.

Some would argue that no additional development should be allowed on the Katy Prairie, given the nature of the irreplaceable prime farmland and unique wetland habitats. In addition to the unlikely-hood that such a ban would ever be enacted, an argument could be made that some development nodes on the Prairie will be needed in a post-peak oil era when it may no longer be feasible to ship food long distances. Labor will be the only substitute for the hydrocarbon-intensive inputs we use in agriculture today. Proximity to the land will be critical, and the Salon des Refuses project demonstrates how a limited set of nodes on the prairie could accommodate much if not most of the population projected to cover the prairie in sprawl in the next 30 years, in such a way that most of the ecological and agricultural infrastructure would be preserved for generations to come.

Can stormwater infiltration practices alone render a development “low impact”? What kind of development has the smallest environmental footprint? Is there a market for pedestrian-friendly development in auto-centric Houston? These are the questions raised by the LID contest and this LID counterproposal, and that will be discussed at this event.

The Salon des Refuses team included Dan Barnum and John Jacob, members of the Houston Chapter of the Congress for New Urbanism. Dreiling Terrones Architecture from California and the Crabtree Group from Colorado were the lead technical designers.