Ryan Parzick recently had a conversation with Cityfi affiliate Nico Larco, Director at Urbanism Next Center at the University of Oregon, Co-Director of the Sustainable Cities Institute, a Principal at ELEMENT/UD — an urban design firm, and a Strategic Advisor to TNO — a Dutch thinktank. Nico is the author of the newly released Sustainable Urban Design Handbook, which gathers the best sustainability practices and latest research from the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, planning, development, ecology, and environmental engineering and presents them in a graphically rich and accessible format that can help guide urban design decisions in cities of all sizes. He has worked with our team on a number of projects and engagements, so we are big fans of his work!
Ryan Parzick: In addition to the many roles that you have professionally, you decided to write a book with all the free time that you have! Can you tell me the inspiration you had to actually create a book like this?
Nico Larco: Sure. So first of all, the book has taken more than 10 years to put together (just the book itself) and another two or three years before that to develop the Sustainable Urban Design Framework that the book is based on. The whole book is based on inspiration stemming from work earlier in my career dealing with walkability, mostly in suburban areas. During that time, I started to wonder about all the different aspects of sustainability that exist around Urban Design. I thought at the time that I would be able to just look up some people who had done a lot of this work before and run from there. I was surprised to find that there was nothing truly comprehensive which hit on the various physical aspects of the built environment and looked across all these different dimensions of sustainability. I was going to teach a class on this topic as a way of immersing myself into some of these things and it created a little bit of a panic for me — there was nothing out there that really combines all of these different pieces and I kept thinking there’s a strong need for this. And from that kind of an inspiration (necessity being the mother of invention), I thought how would one organize all of this? That’s where The Sustainable Urban Design Framework came from.
The Framework itself is organized around five main outcome goals and four main project scales of Urban Design. This was the first piece of the puzzle where I could see how to get my arms around the entire topic. If you’re working at a specific project scale, what kind of questions would you possibly need to ask? If you really want specific outcomes, what kinds of things might you need to do on all these different scales? And that was the first “a-ha!” moment, which then resulted in two to three years of work in developing the Sustainable Urban Design Framework, which was published back in 2016. The next piece was recognizing that we needed a lot more information on each one of these topics. There’s over 50 different elements within the framework that we needed to understand better. Other people need to understand these better. We had to find a simple way to organize and convey this information, so that people could make decisions about projects and understand the relationships between different aspects or elements they were working with.
That’s where the idea for the book came from. We wanted to develop each one of the elements in the framework into its own chapter that could be easy to use and easy to reference. That’s how the book came about. 10 years later, here we are … and now it’s finally out and published!
RP: I’m really glad you did a lot of focus on describing the whole way the book is organized because I think the simplicity of the way information is presented actually is something that really sets apart this handbook from other things that I’ve seen trying to accomplish the same goal. To me, it is organized in a very digestible and easy to navigate manner. So we talked about why you wrote the book, can you now give me an example of a way you envision somebody using the handbook?
NL: Absolutely. It’s great to hear you say that, by the way. That’s the reaction we were going for with the book — the idea was to demystify this fairly complicated topic and make it easily accessible, so that people could jump right on in. Our targets of people who should use this book are designers but also planners, developers, elected officials, and even community stakeholders — people who day-to-day see the development that’s happening around their community or people showing up for community meetings about new projects and helping them understand the types things that they should be looking for and asking for in their community.
Overall, this book can be used in a number of different ways. First, it can be used as a design tool. For instance, you’ve got a project at a certain scale and here are all the sustainability-related questions that you should probably be asking about. Will you be able to address all these questions? Unless you’re tremendously fortunate in terms of a budget, political will, and schedule you might not be able to — but you should at least be able to figure out where the low-hanging fruit is and how you might be able to find synergies within these needs.
Second, it can be used as an evaluation tool. What are the existing conditions in a project now? What’s the ground level reality here? What might be easy to improve? What’s already working? What’s going to be more difficult? What’s within the project’s jurisdiction? What partnerships do I need to make? This tool can help you create a baseline, help you prioritize, and help you understand where you need to develop new strategies.
Third, you can also use the framework as a stakeholder engagement tool. Community stakeholders often know the outcomes they’re interested in, but not all of the physical urban design implications of the built environment that will help create those outcomes. The framework and this book are almost like a translator tool that help you understand how the built environment works and how it impacts our world. So you can use it as a stakeholder engagement tool to help identify the outcomes people are most interested in, and then help them and your project team understand how you would translate that into the specific physical moves you need to make in a city or neighborhood.
The last thing I’ll say about how this handbook can be used, is as a team assessment tool. From a company’s perspective it is important to understand where its skills are and where there may be gaps. We’ve done this with a couple places, where we’ve taken the framework and had people just self-assess. They can quickly gauge whether they know this topic really well and feel like an expert on it, if they only somewhat know the topic, or realize this is not something they are familiar with much at all. This handbook helps to really quickly get a landscape of what skills individuals and project teams have. It can help you understand how you might need to organize a new team, specific content areas that you have gaps in, the background you may want to focus on in the next person you hire, or some gaps you have and should probably do some training around. So a whole lot of different uses really focused around getting people and projects well-versed in all the different assets aspects of sustainability and design.
RP: I love that. I love how comprehensive and deliberate the thinking was for the users of the handbook. You didn’t just want to cater to designers or builders, rather the whole spectrum of people impacted by a project allowing the user to approach a project from whatever their perspective is in a way that’s going to be beneficial for the whole group of users involved.
You mentioned that this was a labor of love and it was about a 10-year project. Can you explain to me why? Why was it 10 years?
NL: The biggest reason is really … it is a complicated topic! Addressing sustainability in urban design covers a broad range of issues. I’ve said a number of times, if I knew how much work this was going to be, I don’t know if I ever would have really embarked on this. Makes you realize why it hasn’t been done before since it is a huge range of topics — some of which I had a lot of experience in before the start of this project, but a lot of them I really knew very little about.
There was a ton of research needed. Myself, my co-author Kaarin Knudson, and a number of students put a lot of hours into this. In addition to a large amount of research and reading, there were also a whole lot of interviews with professionals and academics who work in these different disciplines who really helped to synthesize the main topics. It really is a complicated and broad set of issues, so getting your arms around all of that and getting well versed enough that you can actually understand it and then put everything together took a lot of time.
The other piece was simply putting a lot of care into how we organized things, the language that we used, and the graphics. There are hundreds of images in the book, case studies that were used, and just the time used for organization of all this information to make it as easy to understand and easy to apply. We had all this information and research, an idea of how to organize it, but also needed a way to massage it into place so that the most important pieces were included and presented in a way that, hopefully, is easily accessible.
RP: Well congratulations on being done with it! Pat yourself on the back. I’m gonna switch gears a little bit and want to talk with you about your experiences. Can you give me some highlights of your career that have significantly influenced the way you think about urban design and ultimately why you wanted to do this book?
NL: I think probably one of the early things that got me interested in urban design was being trained as an architect and a cognitive psychologist in undergrad. I branched out in my last couple of years from architecture into urban design and then enrolled in the Architecture and Urban Design grad programs at University of California, Berkeley during a time where there was a fantastic mix and collaboration between architects, landscape architects, and planners. Everyone working together helped me understand the breadth of topics that need to come together to make great places happen. The cognitive psychology education helped me incorporate the importance of the human experience.
The last part is this real interest in sustainability, a topic that we really need to be addressing. Having people like Alan Jacobs as a mentor early on, or Michael Southworth, Peter Bossman, Walter Hood — this was tremendously formative for me. Having a mix of working professionally coupled with academic research forming the base, in-depth understanding for some of these topics that got me tremendously interested in a lot of this work. I did work early on with pedestrian and cycling environments. This really helped me understand how things are malleable, that we make decisions that truly shape these places that we live. In other words, the decisions we make to walk or bike are predicated on a lot of decisions that we made beforehand about the built environment. I’ve been truly fortunate to live in many different places in North America, South America, and Europe, which helped me realize how much our built environment shapes how we live.
I’d say another really formative piece was a sabbatical I did in the Netherlands a couple years back, where I got to live in an environment where there’s a substantial amount of density and a fantastic transportation network. There was tremendous support for cycling, interest in ecological networks, and a strong interest in water. I saw how all these things can come together and really function as a system. I think all those things together have pushed the development of this book.
I’ll say the other really formative piece was just frustrations that I had in trying to understand this question of “what should we do?” around sustainability. I’ve had projects where I have been frustrated at the tools that existed that were either tremendously technical or tremendously siloed. Just trying to find something that would help us understand broadly how these components of the project should work together and how design decisions early in the process should be made. Understanding decisions which were big picture and not so technical per say, was really important to me.
RP: Okay, so we just talked about experiences that you’ve had that have led you to where you are. Now let’s think about the future. Based on all your experiences and what you currently do at Urbanism Next, the Sustainable Cities Initiative, your teaching — what do you see as the most exciting trends in approaches to urban design and planning?
NL: There’s a whole mix of things. I’d say one of the more exciting trends is just an awareness of the importance of sustainability. Even though we have some mixes in this country generally around the topic of sustainability, there’s this understanding that it is something we need to be paying attention to. Ecology is something we need to pay attention to. Equity and health are things we need to be paying attention to. I feel like we’re moving in a good direction with that. It’s better understood now than, say, 20 years ago. When we were starting some of the work on this book, sustainability was still this “edge” kind of thing. Now it’s just like well, obviously we have to address sustainability in everything we do. I think this is a huge move forward.
At the Urbanism Next Center, we look at the impacts of shared mobility, self-driving cars, and e-commerce on cities. We are really interested in the kind of impacts these have on land use, urban design, building design, transportation, and real estate. It’s been interesting to look at some of the trends that we’re seeing with emerging technologies. The ones I’m most excited about are things like micro-mobility and mobility-as-a-service that really have a huge opportunity to help with some of the sustainability related outcomes that we’re interested in: improving energy use, creating more livable places, and a huge help, potentially, on the equity side. I see some of these really being helpful. There are also some trends we see in Urbanism Next which are more worrisome for some of these outcomes. Potentials for a huge increase of sprawl causing worsened vehicle miles traveled, congestion, and energy use wasted on those things. So yeah, a lot of work still needs to be done.
RP: This is why I do what I do! Now I want to ask you a couple questions about your relationship with Cityfi. We’ve worked together with you in many different capacities over the years, how did your collaboration with us begin and also what drew you to working with us?
NL: The collaboration started many years ago. The Knight Foundation was starting a multi-million dollar project working with four cities on how to deploy autonomous vehicles of all different shapes in a way that was going to be equitable and helpful to communities. We came together for that project and really got to know each other working on that — developing the project and providing the technical assistance, doing evaluation. Our whole team at Urbanism Next has deeply appreciated and loved working with the Cityfi team. Tons of energy. Super smart. Super agile. It has been a great partnership. We’re just coming to the end of that project now, and since that time we’ve done a couple other projects together and a number of presentations across the country. We’re working with Cityfi on a project with the Lane Transit District on mobility management approaches, working with OMF and cities with SMART grants on curb management issues, and a few other irons in the fire. Cityfi has been a great partner for the Urbanism Next conferences that we’ve had over the years. Generally, I think the attributes of Cityfi that are really attractive to me are, as I said before: just a super smart, interested, and well-informed group of people who are also just good people to work with. They have their hearts in the right places and are doing this work not because it’s a paycheck, but because they really care about the communities that we work with and the people we work with. Their mission has just resonated a ton from the very beginning.
RP: Well, thank you for saying all those things and we obviously love working with you and your team for all the reasons that you said. I have one more question for you if you don’t mind. I’m a former educator. You are an educator. My brain is always thinking about the future and impacts our next generation could have. Since you get to work so closely with the next generation of advocates for cities, what advice do you give these future generations on how they can impact cities for the better.
NL: There’s so many things! First of all, understand that we create our built environment. We have made decisions that have led to how things are now. We can make different and better decisions about that in the future. It’s absolutely possible. We have a ton of agency in creating our built environment.
Another thing I’d say is being informed and educated outside of our specific silos. One of the things that’s really important in the built environment, that you see in the book, is that you have to understand a little bit about a lot of different disciplines. I think that’s generally the case that we’re seeing across the board in the way that people work now, but if you’re a designer you need to understand planning and development and politics. If you’re a politician, you need to understand physical design and development issues. So, I always encourage people to work hard to be fantastic in their discipline, but also get well informed about their sister disciplines so they can understand how they are affected by those disciplines and how they can affect these sister disciplines — allowing them to be, overall, the most effective they possibly can be in projects.
A takeaway from doing all this work for the book and thinking about sustainability, is that one problem that we absolutely have to tackle is density. There’s so many things that we do, and especially in the US, which are Band-Aids on the fact that we just don’t have enough density. If there is density, the transportation system works more efficiently, there is more equity, and there are less issues with ecological habitat impacts. It’s just a key ingredient. So I’d say one of the things that I encourage people to think about is how can we create a greater denser environment which are places that you don’t feel trapped in or shoehorned into? Wonderful, beautiful, livable, great environments that we can all enjoy. I think that should be a key focus for all of us.
RP: I couldn’t agree more. Nico, thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk. We look forward to working with you more in the near future.
