Sustainable Community Design

As population increases in the United States and worldwide, development pressures also increase. Development is critical to meet legitimate human needs - housing, transportation, jobs - but it can degrade air quality, water quality and other environmental and quality-of-life assets. We need a new way to develop our communities - by creating designs that serve the same human needs, better support landscape conservation and greatly reduce material and energy use. The Institute's Center for Sustainable Community Design and its many campus and external collaborators seeks to advance this "sustainable community design" movement by developing strategies to improve environmental quality through better planning of regions, cities, neighborhoods, buildings and utility and transportation systems.