Session 1: Communities, Sustainability and Land Preservation

Beth Henning - Sustainability and the Idea of an Eco-Community
Visiting Assistant Professor, Chicago - Kent College of Law

As sprawling low-density development patterns consume acres of natural habitat, the force of urban growth is increasingly bumping up against the need to protect biodiversity. Successful action to conserve biodiversity must address the full range of causes of loss and embrace the opportunities that ecosystems provide for sustainable development.

The features of land use practices over the past several decades have converged to generate haphazard, inefficient, and unsustainable urban sprawl. Sustainability requires a transition from poorly managed sprawl to land use planning practices that create and maintain efficient infrastructure and community, and preserve natural systems. Land use planning needs to ensure that we use remaining undeveloped lands intelligently, while protecting and preserving the environment.

Despite a general endorsement by Agenda 21, it may not be self-evident that resource-based land use planning and zoning can lead to an effective legal strategy for pursuing sustainable development. Control of new land uses is an important filtration device. Fully integrating environment and development in land use planning is a major task. At a minimum, the planning process must identify affirmative, but realistic economic development goals. Mounting a proactive approach that yields actual economic development is possible, with the help of agencies and market incentives that include the self-interested activities of local and international business.

Sustainable community planning can recognize and respond to a diversity of interests and desires in our communities by encouraging land uses that cater to a variety of interests. The "New Urbanism" theories respond to the needs of planning for sustainable communities; rather than a traditional application of these theories to existing cites, the integration of this concept with commonly accepted ecosystem approaches brings us to an idea of an "Eco-Community," a new way of integrating artificial environments with natural environments, and of studying human settlements as ecosystems.

Indira van't Klooster - Contrast is a Must! The Architect as ‘Environmentalist'.
TANGRAM Architekten, Olympisch Stadion 8, 1076 DE AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS

With 382 inhabitants per km2, the Netherlands is one of the most densely populated countries in Western Europe. It is less densely populated than Taiwan or South Korea, but more densely populated than, for example, Japan or India. This high population density is chiefly due to the fact that the Netherlands has very few large-scale, unspoilt nature areas. Virtually every square millimetre is in use. Nevertheless, some 700,000 new dwellings will have to be built over the next eight years.

The growing realization that we cannot continue to concrete over 'vacant' land is increasingly resulting in buildings in which dual land use and a mix of functions are integrated. Densification of the existing urban structures is now essential in order to preserve the country's scarce nature and to increase the contrast between unbuilt and built-up areas. In practice, this is giving rise to new typologies, which do not automatically fit into existing frameworks.

The design task now comprises not only an architectural scheme, but also involves a variety of sub-areas which are outside the range of the architect or urban designer. TANGRAM Architekten is carrying out research into the possibilities and consequences of densification, both in theory and in practice. We are currently preparing a book about high-density development. In addition, our office is working at various locations on high-density to very high-density schemes, which will be dealt with further during the lecture. Our departure-point is not the maximization of density, but rather the creation of attractive living, working and social environments with high, but acceptable building densities.

Overview of paper:

1. Introduction to the Dutch situation.

2. Government policy aimed at stimulating densification and dual land use.

3. Various aspects connected with high-density development in North-West Europe.
- regulations (to what extent do existing regulations help or hinder?)
- methods of measurement (how do we measure high density in a scientific way?)
- ecological aspects (is high-density development more environmentally friendly?)
- psychological and cultural aspects (how do people experience high-density living?)

4. Architectural and urbanistic aspects of high-density development in North-West Europe, and in particular in the Netherlands, based on all the foregoing.

5. Conclusion.

Bruce Weaver - Land Preservation, National Parks, and the Human-Land Relationship
Speech Communication Department, Albion College, Albion, Michigan 49224

Frequently, when people argue in favor of land preservation, and especially when they decide whether a landscape should be included in their most valued natural areas as national parks, they explore their most cherished values and often find themselves embroiled in heated debates of conflicting principles and arguments. The author has spent the last decade investigating the persuasive campaigns that have successfully led to the establishment of national parks and monuments in the United States. The focus of these many studies has been on identifying arguments consistently used by communicators to argue persuasively for land preservation, while simultaneously they explore the conflict that arises between land preservation and expulsion of peoples from preserved areas. The United States has the tradition in national park designation of preserving "empty" landscapes, even when people occupy the lands and have a long history with the land now included within the park. The campaigns leading to park designation explore issues of aesthetics, ethics, power and submission, ethnic identity, money, and environmental justice. The paper I propose for the conference in Copenhagen explores the twenty-year campaign that led to the establishment of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1940. This campaign is of special interest for your conference because approximately 4000 mountaineers were forced to leave their ancestral homes before the "wilderness" park was established. It is one of the most obvious cases in United States national park history where a prescribed vision of what constitutes sacred nature dominated park discourse throughout the campaign and led to an environmental justice debate. Earlier, I have published an article that discusses the verbal arguments presented in this campaign that justified the elimination of the mountain people from their homes. Recently, I have revisited Great Smoky Mountains National Park where I looked at hundreds of photographs designed to "sell" the Park from 1920 through 1940. Most of these early photographs reinforce the mistaken but persuasive vision of the mountains as being unspoiled and uninhabited, while they represent the mountain people as quaint but dangerous obstacles to enlightened conservation. These positive representations of the mountains and negative representations of the inhabitants of the mountains compliment the verbal arguments and justify expulsion from the park. Through a discussion of selected photographs, I will trace the argument used by park promoters to save a quaint and charming natural landscape at the expense of a people, a history, and an indigenous culture. Surely this case study has significance for environmental studies anywhere in the world where people are attempting to construct persuasive cases for land preservation that consider the importance of human relationships with the land.