Land and Natural Development (LAND) Code: Guidelines for Sustainable Land Development (Wiley Series in Sustainable Design) - Hardcover

Balmori, Diana; Benoit, Gaboury

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0470049847 ISBN 13: 9780470049846

Verlag: Wiley, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

Land and Natural Development (LAND) Code offers a pioneering method to develop sites in harmony with natural processes. While the LAND Code can be readily used in conjunction with LEED, EPA, and other guidelines, it features several unique characteristics, including recommendations based on peer-reviewed scientific research, a system that is accessible to non-experts, and extensive use of photographs and diagrams to illustrate practices and procedures.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

DIANA BALMORI, PhD, is the founder of New York City–based Balmori Associates, a firm that is internationally recognized for its success in realizing complex urban projects that integrate innovative sustainability systems and patterns of use within an overarching sense of place. Her firm has created master plans ranging from a blueprint for Bilbao, Spain, to the design for the Farmington Canal Rail Trail to a waterfront park on the Mississippi River. Balmori Associates is implementing a 46,000-square-foot network of green roofs in Long Island City, New York. She has been appointed to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts through 2007. Balmori teaches at the Yale School of Architecture as well as at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.

GABOURY BENOIT, PhD, is associate dean for research and professor of Environmental Chemistry and Environmental Engineering at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. At Yale, he is also director of the Center for Coastal and Watershed Systems and codirector of the Hixon Center for Urban Ecology. Dr. Benoit's research focuses on the behavior, transport, and fate of chemicals in natural waters, soils, sediments, and biota. Special areas of interest are non-point source pollutants, toxic contaminants, and human–environment interactions in urban areas.

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Sustainable land development strategies based on scientific information

Land and Natural Development (LAND) Code offers a pioneering method to develop sites in harmony with natural processes that is solidly based on peer-reviewed scientific findings. While the LAND Code can be readily used in conjunction with LEED, EPA, and other guidelines, it features several unique characteristics, including:

• Recommendations based on peer-reviewed scientific research
• Rating scheme that weights each development and land use practice based on its environmental benefit and difficulty of implementation
• Straightforward, step-by-step system that is accessible to non-experts
• Focus on land rather than buildings
• Extensive use of photographs and diagrams to illustrate practices and procedures

After an introduction, the book begins with chapters covering water, soil, air, living resources, energy, and materials. Throughout these chapters, the authors recommend tested and proven strategies that minimize disruption of the natural processes. Each chapter provides background, describes benefits for both developers and ecosystems, and recommends protective strategies in simple, non-technical language (a glossary is provided explaining all terms not in common usage). A toolbox of environmental engineering methods to implement the strategies follows, and the final chapter of the book provides a series of examples of actual development projects in which a variety of approaches have successfully attained sustainable development. With its emphasis on scientific understanding, the LAND Code offers you the information needed to make and implement decisions for ecologically sound land development.

Land and Natural Development (LAND) Code offers a pioneering method to develop sites in harmony with natural processes that is solidly based on peer-reviewed scientific findings. While the LAND Code can be readily used in conjunction with LEED, EPA, and other guidelines, it features several unique characteristics, including:

• Recommendations based on peer-reviewed scientific research
• Rating scheme that weights each development and land use practice based on its environmental benefit and difficulty of implementation
• Straightforward, step-by-step system that is accessible to non-experts
• Focus on land rather than buildings
• Extensive use of photographs and diagrams to illustrate practices and procedures

After an introduction, the book begins with chapters covering water, soil, air, living resources, energy, and materials. Throughout these chapters, the authors recommend tested and proven strategies that minimize disruption of the natural processes. Each chapter provides background, describes benefits for both developers and ecosystems, and recommends protective strategies in simple, non-technical language (a glossary is provided explaining all terms not in common usage). A toolbox of environmental engineering methods to implement the strategies follows, and the final chapter of the book provides a series of examples of actual development projects in which a variety of approaches have successfully attained sustainable development. With its emphasis on scientific understanding, the LAND Code offers you the information needed to make and implement decisions for ecologically sound land development.

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Land and Natural Development (LAND) Code

Guidelines for Sustainable Land DevelopmentBy Diana Balmori Gaboury Benoit

John Wiley & Sons

Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-470-04984-6

Chapter One

Introduction

WHAT THIS BOOK IS ABOUT

The Land and Natural Development (LAND) Code is a research-based guide to ecologically sound land development intended for architects, engineers, landscape architects, developers, city officials, students, and interested individuals. Our goal in creating the LAND Code has been to delineate a clear and practical pathway for developing sites in harmony with natural processes. Land will be developed, and this manual shows how that can be done with the least environmental harm. That does not necessarily mean leaving nature alone; sometimes the best results can be achieved with intensively engineered methods. Nevertheless, we try to recommend ways that natural processes can be partly retained or re-created by the use of engineered structures and practices that emulate the natural processes they supplant. These engineered methods cover the gamut from vegetated rain gardens to storage tanks, which gather and reuse drainage water for irrigation or other nonpotable uses. The engineered solution needs to be close in its workings to the natural process it supplants. Each kind of site will require treatment appropriate to its nature and context, and the LAND Code is suited to many kinds of land uses, from greenfields to redeveloped urban brownfields to converted farmlands.

WHY THIS BOOK

Readers may ask: Why the LAND Code? Don't other recent "green" or sustainable guidelines already provide guidance for environmentally sound land development? Many of the principles of the LAND Code do appear in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recommendations and in the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Council rating system. But the LAND Code has several unique characteristics:

It has a rigorous scientific basis. LAND draws heavily and almost exclusively on peer-reviewed scientific research to derive its recommendations. Other systems are much more the product of expert judgment.

It provides a rating scheme that strives to weight each practice according to the scale of its environmental benefit and the difficulty of it implementation. LEED, by comparison, gives 1 point to nearly every recommendation no matter how beneficial and costly.

It is nearly self-contained. LAND does not rely on several voluminous and complicated external protocols (e.g., the ASTM E1903-97 "Phase II Environmental Site Assessment"; the EPA 832/R-92-005 "Storm Water Management for Construction Activities," Chapter 3; or the EPA-840-B-92-002 "Guidance Specifying Management Measures for Sources of Nonpoint Pollution in Coastal Waters"). Instead, the LAND Code provides a simple and straightforward step-by-step system. Most of its recommendations can be carried out by nonexperts, especially on smaller sites.

It is comprehensive, covering water, soil, air, energy, materials, and living resources.

It focuses on the land, not on buildings.

It makes extensive use of illustrations, both photographs and diagrams, to make many issues clear and understandable.

LAND also can be used readily in conjunction with LEED, EPA, or other guidelines. Perhaps the most important difference between LAND and other documents is the explicit reliance on scientific studies as the basis for its recommendations. It uses the latest research about natural processes and engineering methods; thus, it will necessarily be an evolving document. The field of sustainability is quite new, and its science will continue to reveal new truths about natural processes, which LAND will need to incorporate over time.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

The core of the text consists of seven major subject areas that are critical to developing land sustainably: water, soil, air, living resources, energy, and materials. These are followed by a seventh, environmental engineering methods, which presents technical information about some of the tools that are available to achieve sustainable results. At the risk of oversimplifying the distinction, this last chapter deals more directly with urban sites where development density often prevents "natural" bioengineered systems from being constructed. The other chapters place somewhat greater emphasis on less intensively developed lands, whether forests, greenfields, or farmland, where more space is available. Another way of looking at the first six chapters compared to the seventh is that the earlier ones provide recommendations to achieve sustainable development based on scientific research on natural processes. The seventh describes a toolbox of material ways and means to get there.

At the end of the book, Chapter 9, " Different Paths to Sustainability," gives case studies of development projects that aim for sustainability and that have been recently built or are underway now. The projects have been chosen to provide snapshots of a variety of approaches to green development, as well as some specific examples where one of the six main topics (water, soil, air, energy, materials, living resources) has been addressed successfully. The case studies vary in length according to the complexity of the examples-that is, on how many fronts the project has features relevant to our guide. In some, the structuring of the development group may be the point of the example (e.g., the partnership of one developer with a conservation group, Scenic Hudson Inc., to give the green agenda a more prominent place in the development project). In others, it may be how sustainable approaches were used to allow a regional mall developer to build upstream from a water supply reservoir, with benefits to both the developer and the water utility. The examples given in this last section, therefore, give a quick overview of the very fast-growing field of sustainable land development. They are there to demonstrate that real projects succeed at developing land sustainably.

HOW LAND CODE POINTS WERE DETERMINED

It was clear that a rating scheme would greatly increase this book's utility to the user. But how do you compare the environmental benefit of a constructed wetland to that of full cutoff light fixtures or proximity to mass transit? One approach is to simply assign one point to every action, but, clearly, the benefits of some measures are much greater than others. On the other hand, fully understanding the relative environmental value of each strategy might take years of research and still not yield clear answers. Consequently, we opted for a hybrid system that relates points to total benefits, but doesn't require unrealistically detailed knowledge of ecosystem structure and function. Part of the answer came when we struggled to assign each strategy to single areas of environmental benefit (water, soil, air quality, energy, etc.). Some measures (e.g., retaining mature trees on a site) provide gains in almost every category, whereas others (e.g., providing bike racks) narrowly benefit only one or two. It seemed reasonable to provide a point for each environmental subsystem or function that is protected by a given recommended structure or activity.

Furthermore, some measures are much easier or cheaper to implement than others, and the difficult and expensive ones need to be rewarded, or they will never be implemented. Points are, therefore, awarded for difficulty. Also,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Wiley
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0470049847
• ISBN 13: 9780470049846
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Wiley-VCH GmbH; product_safety@wiley.com; ; Boschstrasse 12; Weinheim; 69469; Deutschland