Urbanization is occurring at a historically unprecedented scale.
Most people move to cities in order to gain access to the abundance of work opportunities, especially compared to rural areas. Cities such as San Diego and Austin have undergone especially incredible population growth in the past two decades, while megacities such as Los Angeles and New York are crippling under the immense pressure of an enormous population. Urban sprawl, and the growth of the suburbs far beyond urban cores, are symptomatic of not only a growing geographical issue, but an environmental one as well. The place we live plays a great role in our carbon footprint, because residents of suburbs are more reliant on cars for work than city-dwellers. For example, a UC Berkeley study found that residents of suburbs have carbon footprints of as much as three times that of their urban counterparts. A study from the University of Illinois in 2014 found a negative correlation between population-weighted density and annual household carbon dioxide emissions.
Traditional strategies for architecture and city design have proven to be unrealistic and unsustainable in rapidly growing cities. Never-ending sprawl poses a threat to urban road infrastructure, public transport, housing prices, and surrounding environment. As such, city planners and architects are beginning to place an increasing emphasis on urban densification and zoning. The best way for a government to reduce its citizens’ carbon footprint isn’t necessarily through recycling programs and energy rebates, but rather through better zoning and urban planning.
The primary aim of green zoning is to minimize vehicular travel. This can involve both urban densification and a zoning plan that reduces the distance between residential areas and work opportunities. This is much easier said than done – another factor to consider is the need to evenly distribute the population in order to reduce road congestion and bottlenecks in the public transportation system. Low-density single-family housing and high-rise condominiums are therefore both extreme architectural approaches, each with their own problems in a city.
“Missing middle” housing serves as a compromise: it prevents the ultra-densification that can encumber a city’s public infrastructure, while still achieving walkalble neighbourhoods with much higher population density than single-family homes. The Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) describes duplexes, fourplexes, and bungalow courts as “missing middle” housing that can accommodate a growing city’s population while slowing urban sprawl and increasing walkability. Unlike condominiums, these houses can fit in existing single-family neighbourhoods in the city and will hopefully slowly replace older single-family homes.
The narrative of urban design in Vancouver is beginning to change. Vancouver currently has the most unaffordable market in North America, indicating a need for a new approach to housing design. The Urbanarium Group in Vancouver recently held a competition for new “missing middle” Housing designs, and the winning design was a co-housing project where a group of people in different financial situations could share the project composed of multiple units with drastically different prices and sizes. Such a design has the potential to combat Vancouver’s inflated housing market and create neighbourhoods with more diverse housing types.
Conventional Euclidean zoning is the dominant form of zoning found in North American cities, and essentially divides land into residential, commercial, and industrial regions. This antiquated method, while simple, reduces a city’s walkability and causes poorly-distributed pressure on road infrastructure. The conventional zoning method also dedicates land areas to either low density single-family neighbourhoods or high-density condominiums, thus overlooking the medium-to-high-density “missing middle” housing. The city of Cincinnati’s solution to this is the adoption of the Form-Based Code (FBC), which defines land areas not by its restricted use (e.g. commercial or residential), but rather by its intended character (e.g. neighbourhood main street). Building approvals under the FBC system will be less reliant on a proposed building’s similarity to others in the area, and more reliant on whether or not the building will be a good fit in its proposed location. Such a design is less restrictive on specific density of an area, thereby incentivizing “missing middle” housing, and has the potential to shape neighbourhoods with grocery stores, shopping areas, and workplaces within walking distance.
In this era of urban migration and continuously growing populations, architects and city planners alike need to embrace a paradigm shift in urban design and zoning. Adoption of greener zoning strategies and “missing middle” housing could go a long way in protecting a society’s environment and its people.
By Jim Chen