Tiny Footprints Communities | A Program for Housing Sustainably as We Grow and the Land Shrinks, November 2014, Seattle, WA
Tiny Footprint Communities proposes a strategy to build sustainable planned communities in the United States. The Census Bureau forecasts an 84-126 million population increase by 2060 and Climate Central predicts 3-8 million people displaced by sea level rise by 2100. Where will all these people live? How can we proactively respond to these conditions, starting today?
Accommodating a growing population and a displaced population due to rising sea level at the suburban fringe where cities have traditionally grown, would lead to HIGHER carbon outputs per capita. Existing communities also need to shrink their carbon footprints (the Transition Towns movement is doing great work in this area). We need to start looking at communities designed at the outset for tiny carbon footprints to accommodate at least part of the projected need.
What does a low carbon, tiny footprint city look like? We can already see examples of innovative green, low carbon development from projects and communities that are being built around the world. The biggest difference from today's cities is that land use, buildings and transportation systems are designed from the outset to make low carbon living automatic.
Why is this so urgent? Sea level rise is actually occurring now. Its scale and speed mean that the US faces major population displacement. The time for debate on this aspect of climate change is past and the time for action is here!
How do we develop new communities on higher ground? Site selection must be a grassroots effort, although many other actors will be involved in subsequent phases. Research regarding why planned cities thrive versus disappear suggests that where management of the commmunity is handed off from the founder(s) to the population, the city gains a vitality and a life of its own that patriarchal top-down management does not achieve. Planned new cities under this small carbon footprint program will require a challenging concensus among environmental, economic and government sectors.
Who should initiate such a program and fund it? The main question is not Should new tiny footprint communities be built? but rather, Under what conditions can they be built successfully and how can those conditions be created? This talk seeks to answer these questions and calls for a specific process to get the program rolling.