Sustainable Community Design
This is the view looking East toward the Brazos Cliff from the ridge line of the property.
What is it?
Building a sustainable community requires being clear about what that is. Defining what that means helped us clarify the matter in our minds. Please notice that the definition that follows is scaleable. That means, if you apply it to something the size of a household, a farm, a community, or the world, it is still meaningful.
Sustainable Community Definition
"A sustainable community is a place where residents maintain themselves by employing practices in the areas of land use, agriculture, and resource management that foster independence. A place where residents act in concert with their environment to create a system that balances its capacity to provide with the requirements of daily life.”
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We Chose An Evolutionary Process
We chose a planning and development process that is evolutionary because we think it is easier to create a sustainable community that way. It takes the participation of the residents to create a living system that constantly adapts to circumstances.
Modern design and build methods deal mainly with structure. That is, what will it look like and how much will it cost. That information is given to a contractor. His job is to build exactly what the plans say, as fast as he can, and for the agreed cost. This closed system does not leave room for important stakeholders that are at the heart of a sustainable community system.
An evolutionary approach to design and build is not a new idea. Until the last 100 or so years, it was the way design and build projects were done. People are beginning to rediscover traditional approaches that rely on “pattern languages” to communicate design ideas and “generative codes” (a sequential set of instructions like our genes) to provide instructions for building. This approach requires people on the ground to be closely involved in the process for a "living system" to develop. They assist in molding or adapting aspects of the community, including the structure of it, into a working system.
The author of “A Pattern Language”, Christopher Alexander, is widely credited with bringing pattern languages back into focus. His later work on generative codes expands on his earlier work. Generative code is defined in the column on the right where you will also find links to further details on this subject.