Public Engagement and the Anti-Urban Bias
Why does the environmentalist movement ignore the environmental benefit of cities?
Written by Bob Chapman.
“We were creating a new academic discipline, Environmental Studies. If we’d only had a few more weeks before the first Earth Day, we would’ve included human settlement patterns in the syllabus. We should have.”
— Steven Kellert, founding professor, School of the Environment at Yale, from the first Transect Seminar in 2001 (paraphrased)
Society pivoted on April 22, 1970—the first Earth Day. An estimated twenty million people participated in communities and on college campuses across America. The atmosphere was electric, coming at a time when “environmental problems were proliferating like a many-headed hydra.”1 Millions of citizens were ready to mobilize. Earth Day was the catalyst.
Just four months before the first Earth Day, a full-page ad in the Sunday New York Times provided the spark for the global environmental movement. The Earth Day organization is now global, engaging over one billion people each year,2 but “the months leading up to Earth Day had been frantic,”3 and the hurried effort to launch by April 22 meant at least one very important thing was left out. All of the college and university programs in environmental studies that emerged in Earth Day’s wake failed to incorporate a crucial topic into their DNA: the built environment. In other words—urbanism, cities, and how the design of human communities affects the world’s environment.
This missed opportunity is even more painful given Earth Day’s focus on effects (such as pollution) over causes. The ad in the Times was blunt: “A disease has infected our country.” But what caused the disease?
Within eight months of Earth Day, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was up and running. The Clean Air, Clean Water, and Endangered Species Acts quickly followed. “These laws have protected millions of men, women and children from disease and death and have protected hundreds of species from extinction.”4 Such achievements are an impressive legacy. Still, it’s worth examining what the first Earth Day did not yield.
Fast-forward to May 6, 2001—31 years after the first Earth Day, as society began another pivot. It happened in Hastings Auditorium at the Yale School of Architecture as Andrés Duany, Léon Krier, and 11 other scholars, planners, and architects led the first Transect Seminar. Their goal was to combat a root cause of environmentally disastrous diseases: soulless, placeless, automobile-dependent suburban sprawl.
They presented a convincing argument that America’s system of forcing new communities to comply with use-based zoning codes (a key driver of sprawl) could, and should, be replaced. What they offered instead was an idea based on the categories used to describe the world’s natural ecologies: a form-based transect for planning human settlements (cities, towns, villages, and neighborhoods) that would promote building compact, mixed-use, transit-friendly, pollution-reducing, healthy, walkable, immersive communities.
The need for this New Urbanist type of planning might seem obvious today. But at the time, it was a revelation. Earth Day and all the new environmental studies programs had omitted the effects that contemporary human settlement patterns have on the environment.
When the first Earth Day event took place, there was no conversation about how the built environment could help the planet. The assumption was that it could only be a source of harm. As a result, animosity toward any kind of development was baked into modern environmentalism and, ultimately, into urban planning.
I’ve visited environmental studies programs at several universities. I see eager young students grinding up fish to measure dioxin. When I visit schools of architecture, I see students designing sleek, edgy buildings. When I visit planning schools, I see students focusing on street design, buffers, and open space. At engineering schools, I see students focused on traffic, trip generation, and stormwater management. I don’t see anyone focused on building communities that actually create less pollution and more happiness.
This brings me back to that day in New Haven in 2001, which I was fortunate enough to witness. I recall how Professor Stephen Kellert explained that in response to the upcoming first Earth Day, Yale’s Forestry School had decided to expand its offerings and become one of the country’s first schools of the environment. In the lead-up to that seminal event, Kellert was asked to design the curriculum and prepare the syllabus outlining the course of study for the new academic discipline.
The most poignant moment came when Kellert related one of his great regrets: The syllabus had been incomplete. If there had only been “a few more weeks before the first Earth Day,” he said, there would have been enough time to include the effects of human settlement patterns. Instead, by rushing to meet the Earth Day deadline, they missed a one-time opportunity to include that critically important aspect of environmental studies. In other words, they left out the built environment. They left out urbanism. They left out cities.
The costs of these events remain enormous. If they had unfolded differently, what could have been?
During that first Transect Seminar, Kellert’s research showed that the more emotional attachment people have to the places where they live, the better the environmental outcomes will be. In focusing on the important connection between human social systems and ecological ones, he “theorized that positive feedback loops cause the correlation, arising from incremental, mutual changes of behavior, attitude and the environment.”5 According to Kellert, “An exclusive focus on low-impact design leads to terrible mistakes because it ignores the many ways people develop affinity with place.”6
I’ve visited environmental studies programs at several universities. I see eager young students grinding up fish to measure dioxin. When I visit schools of architecture, I see students designing sleek, edgy buildings. When I visit planning schools, I see students focusing on street design, buffers, and open space. At engineering schools, I see students focused on traffic, trip generation, and stormwater management. I don’t see anyone focused on building communities that actually create less pollution and more happiness.
What academics, architects, planners, and scientists built a case for on that day at Yale was simple—abandoning use-based zoning and adopting transect planning. But despite the setting, this conversation was more than a mere theoretical exercise. When Krier closed the seminar, he highlighted how transect planning should be treated moving forward: “It is not an escapist abstraction; it should be adaptable to fit real-world conditions. It is panoramic and it allows people to address sweeping social and design issues to achieve a better quality of life.”7
Transect planning belongs in the environmental studies syllabus. As Andrés Duany and Emily Talen have written: “The ultimate goal under the transect system is to foster quality environments, whether rural or urban.”8 The result of this approach “could eventually produce a seamless, non hostile integration between natural and human ecologies.”9
As we work toward healing the planet—or at least toward successful adaptation to change—we should urge schools of the environment to include urban design. Transect planning gives us the tools we need—not just to make better cities, but also to make a better Earth.
Bob Chapman is a new urbanist developer with built projects in Florida, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Missouri.
Jack Lewis, “The Spirit of the First Earth Day.” EPA Journal, vol. 16, no. 1 (January/February 1990).
“The History of Earth Day,” EARTHDAY.ORG, https://www.earthday.org/history.
Lewis, “The Spirit of the First Earth Day.”
“The History of Earth Day.”
Laurence J. Aurbach, “The First Transect Seminar,” New Urban News, vol. 6, no. 5 (2001): 18-19.
Aurbach, “The First Transect Seminar.”
Aurbach, “The First Transect Seminar.”
Andrés Duany and Emily Talen, “Transect Planning,” Journal of the American Planning Association, vol. 68, no. 3 (Summer 2002): 249.
Duany and Talen, “Transect Planning,” 264.
The summary of school curriculums and their lack of integration with basic human desires for happiness and belonging is poignant. Also glaring is how these programs lack integration with each other.
What I am witnessing in my city and elsewhere is a corporate interpretation of the “transect” that obliterates sense of place as an essential ingredient of human happiness. In cities held hostage to “density” as an ideology, perfectly functional neighborhoods with lowrise architecture that could last for many decades are being stripped of existing zoning and torn down, house by house. In their place, a homogenized style of 3-story townhomes and monolithic apartment houses lacking harmonious scale, surface treatments or setbacks— with zero integration into the previous neighborhoods. We are legitimizing a faceless and uniform style of building that is what people hate most about the suburbs. And it is far more expensive per square foot than anything it replaces.
I think a lot of it is generational, as well. The environmentalists of the 1970s had very different priorities than today's environmentalists.
Since the problems of Global Warming weren't yet nailed down yet, 1970's environmentalism was really more focused on local pollution, meaning that solutions tended towards the idea of having lower density. In other words, they saw cities as part of the problem.
Today's environmentalists are more worried about global scale issues, for which well designed cities and towns provide a lot of the solution, as these tend to be much more efficient at lowering emissions.
To somebody on the outside, though, it looks like a massive shift in focus, which I think leads to folks dismissing it all outright. It's quite tragic.
Back to the core topic at hand, I'm actually a member of my city council and I'm very interested in Transect-based zoning. Specifically in regards to tying development levels with infrastructure (with higher density areas getting more intensive infrastructure, according to their financial productivity). As it stands today, we will often give massive lot development the same infrastructure as high density development, which is totally out of sync.