In the community lottery, I’ve been really lucky. I live in Glen Park, an intimately-scaled neighborhood in San Francisco recently voted the country’s most walkable city by Walkscore.com, a rankings system that evaluates how easy it is to live in the nations’ cities and neighborhoods without a car. cIn our neighborhood, we get by with just one car and we live within 10 minutes walk of a grocery store, café, bookstore, public library, three playgrounds, two bus lines, a BART station, a taqueria and French bistro, and a nature preserve that’s home to hawks, owls, and the occasional coyote. Because I’m always out walking, I know, for the first time anywhere I’ve ever lived, every person on my block and am on a first name basis with most of the merchants in our little town square. It’s truly a sustainable community.

But here’s the trick: Glen Park isn’t the product of some detailed master plan but rather something that evolved over decades, with good periods and bad, and intermittent bouts of NIMBYism as well as important examples of Herculean community efforts for the greater good (as when a group of Glen Park residents stopped the construction of an interstate through the aforementioned nature preserve back in 1958. And again in 1967.) The question remains of whether this sort of organic evolution of a neighborhood can be replicated.

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The fact is, it’s no easy feat to create a community from scratch. And many recent attempts at community building, whether urban, suburban, or exurban, struggle with how to integrate building types, services, and shopping in ways that feel authentic. As a result, we see varying degrees of success, and in recent years, too many failures, particularly in former boomtowns like Phoenix and Tampa.

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If we’ve learned anything from the last few brutal years (and I sure hope we have), it’s that we need to design and plan using broadly defined sustainable strategies (not just environmental but economic, social, and cultural) to help promote healthier, more vital communities. The reasons for doing so are becoming ever more clear: a recent report in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine has shown that green neighborhood design can help mitigate growing childhood obesity, diabetes, asthma, and hypertension rates. It’s not entirely surprising to discover that some of the highest foreclosure rates are in the country’s exurbs, those master planned communities built further and further away from town centers, necessitating ever longer commutes and thus decreasing human interaction. Accordingly, we all should be thinking about our homes in relation to all the other routine yet essential details of life: can I get a cup of coffee nearby? is there adequate public transportation? How much green space? Will I feel a sense of community? The focus—of homebuyers, renters, homebuilders, developers, planners, and lenders alike—should not just on the features of the home (which are getting smaller and greener in the form of things like solar panels, drought-resistant landscaping, no or low-VOC paints and the like) but on what’s just beyond the front door. What public transit is available? What are the amenities and services? Is the community multi-generational? Does it have a diversity of economic and ethnic backgrounds?

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As we enter into a new decade beset with millions upon millions of empty square feet, the result not only of maddening mortgage lending but also badly conceived blocks and neighborhoods, the time is right for innovation. It’s not just a good idea to rethink the way we live; it’s imperative.

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Urban Revision works to help cities create sustainable futures. Just last year, we worked with the Central Dallas Community Development Corporation, inviting architects to imagine in the 2009 Urban Revision competition what an urban sustainable future might look like. The city of Dallas has committed now to build one of the winning entries from that competition, “Forwarding Dallas” from the Portuguese-based firms Atelier Data and Moov. This urban paradigm-defying design eschews traditional tall towers for undulating structures modeled after one of the most diverse systems in nature, the hillside.  Conventional curtain walls have been replaced by vertical gardens, energy-sapping HVAC units give way to “hilltop” solar and wind harvesting. Other innovative features include a rooftop water catchment system, plentiful open space and public green houses, and a 100% prefabricated construction system designed to increase building efficiencies and decrease onsite waste. Multi-generational community is celebrated vis-à-vis varied housing types, from studio apartments to three-bedroom flats, and the inclusion of both childcare and eldercare facilities. And a diverse cultural life will be enhanced by the presence of a gallery, spiritual space, gymnasium, and café. Not least, the stunning visual statement expressed by “Forwarding Dallas” will afford all citizens of Dallas to experience the exciting possibilities not only of one inspiring block but of a more sustainable world.

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This is exciting news for anyone interested in the future of our built environment., perhaps most notably for the fact that this project is about a coherent, cohesive system. So much of city development seems to be about monuments—the tallest skyscraper or the flashiest cultural institution. A single building does not a city make—instead, it is the complex interconnectedness of things, of buildings, landscape, services, amenities, and people that create the urban fiber.

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