The Urban Design Handbook

This episode captures a vision of creating resilient communities that are not only eco-friendly but also accessible and inviting. We explore the five central themes of "The Sustainable Urban Design Handbook," with author Kaarin Knudson's, offering insights on energy efficiency, community connectivity, and innovative design strategies that cater to diverse urban settings.

Show Notes:

• To help support the show, pick up a copy of the book through our Amazon Affiliates page at https://amzn.to/3EKly0z or even better, get a copy through your local bookstore!
• Further Reading: 
  • Homelessness is a Housing Problem by Greg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern 
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Chapters

• 0:54 Sponsor Thanks: Introduction to Olson
• 3:52 Closing Thoughts & Resources
• 13:22 Olson's Mission for Better Communities
• 29:18 Introduction to the Booked on Planning Podcast
• 1:08:29 Interview with Karin Knutson
• 1:25:36 Key Themes in Sustainable Urban Design

Transcript

Stephanie Rouse: 0:00

We wanted to take a moment to thank our episode sponsor, Olsson. Founded in 1956 on the very mindset that drives them today, Olsson seeks to improve communities by making them more sustainable, better connected and more efficient. Simply put, they work to leave the world better than they found it. Olsson can perform professional services nationwide and has more than 2,000 professionals offering a comprehensive list of services, including planning and design, engineering, field services, environmental and technology. You're listening to the Booked on Planning podcast, a project of the Nebraska chapter of the American Planning Association. In each episode we dive into how cities function, by talking with authors on housing, transportation and everything in between. Join us as we get Booked on Planning. Welcome back, bookworms, to another episode of Booked on Planning. In this episode, we talk with Kaarin Knutson about her book the Sustainable Urban Design Handbook. This was a really great conversation on the resource that this book provides not just to young professionals or students, but to veterans of the field or even elected officials and residents working to make their community a more sustainable, resilient place.

Jennifer Hiatt: 1:27

Yes, I think you will find Kaarin's book useful, no matter where you are in your practice. I stated in the episode that I wish I'd had this book earlier in my career, but as I was reading through it, I found tips and ideas to incorporate in some of my current projects, even.

Stephanie Rouse: 1:40

And I thought Karin's answer to your question about what she considered urban was a really great way to think about it. That takes a lot of the conflict out of discussions around urban design or urban areas. Urban doesn't equal density. It's really about the development pattern which, as she points out, a lot of small towns are examples of good urban design patterns.

Jennifer Hiatt: 2:00

Absolutely. I actually think it's the best answer we've ever got into that question on this podcast.

Stephanie Rouse: 2:17

Kaarin, welcome to the Booked On Planning Podcast. We're happy to have you on to talk about your book, the Sustainable Urban Design Handbook. Your book is broken out into five main themes, and each theme is then further broken down by its scale, going from the region down to the parcel level. Why did you choose to organize the book in this?

Kaarin Knudson: 2:31

way. That's a great question to start with. Thank you so much, stephanie and Jennifer, for the invitation to be here on Booked on Planning and to share this work. The reason for the organization of the Sustainable Urban Design Handbook traces back to the body of research that helps us to organize this book and also the goals and the objectives that we're hoping to help planners and communities to accomplish. So, when thinking about sustainability broadly and our goals to design and plan and accomplish more sustainable cities, if that goal is serious, you have to look at the things that have measurable influence on sustainability, and so the five main topics that organize this book are the five topic areas that have measurable influence on sustainable outcomes in the built environment, and so, of course, looking at energy use and greenhouse gas is critical. Thinking about our transportation and land use systems, specifically with that topic area, understanding water and water resources within cities, ecology and habitat, as well as energy use and production, so essentially, the use of energy that is in buildings and is outside of transportation, and then equity and health. So those are the five key sustainable urban design topic areas that also relate to key outcomes, the other way that we've organized this book and this was one of the great challenges of researching and editing and designing this book has to do with the different scales that people enter a project at.

Kaarin Knudson: 3:51

So what you mentioned about this book reaching from the city and regional scale all the way to the project and parcel scale. That's because when communities or organizations or design teams or planners are engaging with a project, they're almost always entering through a particular scale right A regional parks plan, a neighborhood park, a particular street improvement or a bicycle facility that's being designed, or a larger scale watershed plan, or a larger scale transit or comprehensive plan right. All of those different entry points to a project immediately reveal to you the kinds of influence you can have on sustainable outcomes. And so we've essentially created this cross referenceable collection of integrated concerns between both those measurable outcomes in those topic areas and the scale of work where a project initiates, to help people understand how they can have the most influence and the most positive outcomes on the built environment through their work.

Jennifer Hiatt: 4:46

As I was reading through the book, I was really wishing that I had had a copy a few years ago, as I was beginning my journey into sustainable design, which Stephanie has had to help lead me through. So who were you thinking about when you were writing the book and who are you thinking about as your target audience?

Kaarin Knudson: 5:02

I love hearing that, that this book is helpful to you as a person first engaging, or engaging in what you might describe as earlier on in your career, related to sustainable urban design.

Kaarin Knudson: 5:12

I think one of the things that's very interesting about the planning profession is that not all planning professionals, even those who are accredited in their degrees, members of the APA not all of them have background and training related to urban design.

Kaarin Knudson: 5:24

In many schools and many accredited programs, the focus in planning is much more on the regulatory structure and understanding planning, as it is largely separate from physical planning, and so our hope in organizing this book in this way and reaching out to planning professionals, young professionals, students, but also community groups, elected leaders, people who are trying to engage with and make decisions about their communities and their environments that this would be an accessible point of entry, and that is one of the things that I have talked with people a lot about all over the country is the fact that, because urban design lives in this overlap between many areas of specialized expertise and professional accreditation, right Like architecture, landscape architecture, transportation planning, civil engineering, you know political community engagement, work planning, you know proper right as a larger area of work, it's easy for the concerns of urban design to be sort of left in between, with no one really understanding how to more directly engage with and advance, you know, shared goals, so our hope is that this book helps people at all different levels of their familiarity with urban design to better understand the full picture of sustainable opportunities in our communities.

Kaarin Knudson: 6:36

Right, you think everyone who's engaging with the built environment in their city, in their community, is thinking about wanting this place to be a better, more sustainable community, is thinking about wanting this place to be a better, more sustainable, more affordable, more equitable, more livable, more sociable place. Right, and to accomplish that goal, you really need a sense of the integrated sets of concerns, because that will help every design project and every community engagement project to stand on better shared understanding of the challenge and, I think, likely accomplish an outcome that feels more like something that people can be really proud of and that can actually deliver measurably more sustainable outcomes.

Jennifer Hiatt: 7:11

I work in redevelopment now and when I walked into this job, I thought it would be, from the legal perspective, only negotiating out an agreement, but it's so much more because you're having to talk about what is the building going to look like? What materials are you going to use? So as I was reading through, I was able to like tag different areas. I think I'm going to bring that up in our next building negotiation. Start thinking about that. So it's not just for new people either. It's people well into their career.

Kaarin Knudson: 7:36

That is, for people who pick up this book and I hope that everyone will do that either at local bookstore or from Routledge, our publisher.

Kaarin Knudson: 7:43

It's also available on Amazon and other online booksellers. The hope is that the entry point is broad right Like it's a wide door and very accessible, helping people understand every one of these more than 50 elements of sustainable urban design that compose influence within our cities towards these measurable improvements. But that also within each of those chapters which, within each of those 50 plus chapters, the information goes quite deep and you can kind of use as much as you need, all the way to the fact that every chapter ends with a collection of guidelines and recommendations related to urban design decisions. Every chapter is structured with an introduction and a sort of snapshot of each urban design element in action in one way or another a quick summary and overview, but also an overview of how that element is measured, specifically because that's probably the language that planners will most frequently first hear from their constituents and community members, or from their colleagues in integrated design teams and then a whole collection of cross-referenced related elements that show how each individual element of urban design is influenced by and influences other elements.

Kaarin Knudson: 8:52

So when thinking about something like a robust urban forest canopy, that obviously you know that is influenced by patterns of development, by street design, by transit design, but it also has enormous influence over things like ecological corridors through cities and open space networks and the accessibility of open space and the equitable distribution of amenities, services and uses within cities. So that kind of cross-referencing early on is important for people, because that is also a place where often we're missing a stitch in our integrated conversations within community.

Kaarin Knudson: 9:22

We don't see how one decision influences another and that it's not always good and bad. It's trade-offs most often, because you're dealing with space and you can't do everything in every inch of space. And then from there, each chapter includes, essentially, a recommended approach and how that is different from what we might see typically, especially in the United States, and an overview of why each element is important to sustainable outcomes in cities and in communities and the background that might have more to do with research and foundational elements that are related to that importance. And then, as I mentioned, ending with diagrams of how to implement these different elements and what we hope is good early advice for planners, for architects, for community members, for how you might deploy this element of sustainable urban design. Not to say that it will tell you exactly how everything should be everywhere, but that it will help you make good early decisions that will then allow you to gather more expertise and deeper input from consultants, design team members, community members, to be able to accomplish even better outcomes.

Stephanie Rouse: 10:23

Yeah, as I was reading it. So Jennifer and I always read the books front to back. We go chronologically and that I think could be really great for a student reading it or someone getting in the profession wanting to get a really good understanding of sustainable urban design. But it also works really well, as you mentioned, all the cross referencing and how the book works. If you're working on a specific project or with a specific plan, you can kind of drill into that and it 'll cross-reference you to everything you need to know to elevate that design and to make it a more sustainable urban design approach. I appreciate how the book works in both ways.

Kaarin Knudson: 10:56

Thank you, that was really a hope.

Kaarin Knudson: 10:58

And in the way each of the five larger topic area chapters or super chapters is introduced, and for people who again are newer to this conversation or who have been in it for a long time but have never really heard some of that earliest information about why this topic is important to sustainable outcomes, our hope is that that it would be very readable to people.

Kaarin Knudson: 11:17

That meant a lot to me as an architect who was first trained as a journalist, that it would be a very readable and accessible resource. I don't think we do a very good job of being accessible. A lot of times in the building culture and with the built environment, there's a lot of jargon that can be pretty impenetrable to most people, even professionals who just don't know that work or that area of expertise. So our hope is that what you're describing would be possible, but that, as people are using the book for years into the future, that it can actually be a useful design resource and project reference. What Jennifer was describing about, like we're dealing with this redevelopment site, what are the issues that we might want to be thinking about right now that could pay back all sorts of positive dividends for this project in this community that a more typical approach that's not centering sustainability wouldn't necessarily integrate, so it's wonderful to hear that it has that utility for you too.

Stephanie Rouse: 12:08

So within those five sections, you cover 61 different elements of sustainable urban design, which often overlap or build on one another. Is there one element that you feel, if done right, would really set the stage for all the others, for positive urban design?

Kaarin Knudson: 12:22

Oh, I love this question. In talking with this book, oliver, the country people have asked, it feels a little bit sometimes like asking about your favorite child, because we also all know that projects have different opportunities, right, and you might have a favorite project that doesn't necessarily have a particular urban design element as its most forward opportunity. But when asking about influence overall, when thinking about sustainability and all of the other cascading decisions that communities make, the book starts with the urban design element of compact development. It's the first element listed in the first topic area related to energy use and greenhouse gas, greenhouse gas emissions and that element, when you think about how it deploys within communities, both as a central organizing principle of compactness right, and things being more proximate to one another, of infrastructure not having to go so far to deliver services to different places and to different parcels or to different sites that transit right and different multimodal systems are operating in an environment that has destinations that are closer to one another.

Kaarin Knudson: 13:27

Of course, compact development is an element of urban design that has just extraordinary opportunities to set up future good decisions, retrofit a very diffuse and disconnected built environment because the density isn't there to support the services or the infrastructure Financially. It's upside down In terms of sociable relationships. There's oftentimes not a lot of connectedness between people and the public realm. It's difficult to serve with infrastructure and that is more of an amenity, like park space right, because park space needs to be close to people and so all of those aspects that are challenged by a more sprawl-oriented environment. It means that the work to retrofit is just more challenging. It's still very possible. I think that's an enormous opportunity for cities across the United States, for this country, for other countries around the world who have also replicated a more sprawl-like development pattern.

Kaarin Knudson: 14:24

That we really need in the 21st century for all of our city areas to be higher performing and not just in terms of economic performance but environmental performance and their performance socially, like really thinking about performance profiles as they relate to the triple bottom line. So compact development is hugely important but I would say overall that any city working from any development pattern or from a different scale, that thinking about some of the principles of compact development and for a lot of our emissions you know, and wanting to reduce those and give people a higher quality of life, that sort of neighborhood center retrofitting there's a lot of opportunity there for people to be able to walk to the store or safely walk and bike to a local park or safely, you know, have kids walk and bike to school.

Kaarin Knudson: 15:23

That's a lot of life right there. And that's a lot of emissions that right now are otherwise sent out into the environment and turning into pollution in cities because people don't have those opportunities and there's a lot of reliance on people getting in their cars to drive everywhere when things are very far away.

Stephanie Rouse: 15:41

One of the communities that's surrounding Omaha, nebraska, la Vista. They grew as a suburban community. They never had a core area and recently have been rebuilding that neighborhood center, as you were talking about this kind of hub of more dense activity and trying to really spur that some of these communities. Are there other methods or approaches that more suburban development communities should be looking towards to help kind of retrofit and fit that more compact, walkable neighborhood?

Kaarin Knudson: 16:14

I think the strongest influence is around that strengthening of a neighborhood center, what you were just describing because for most people, that will deliver the most benefit in their lives, which will support behavior and also support climate goals and support local goals related to healthy activity and safety on streets, right and traffic safety, but also economic development, because any circumstance within cities where you can get to a critical mass of different uses and amenities together is almost always going to have a positive economic response.

Kaarin Knudson: 16:46

Local business, diversity of different housing types in an area that then support a greater diversity within the workforce within an area, which then supports wages and different industry opportunities right in a more resilient workforce within an area.

Kaarin Knudson: 17:01

There are an enormous number of ways in which the goals outlined in this handbook. Of course, they relate to advancing our goals related to the environment and climate change and reducing the pollution that people in cities and communities are exposed to and also done well. These goals also support all sorts of other goals related to economic development and sociable relationships within community and connectedness within community, which I think right now there is a real hunger for across all communities communities that I talk with across our city and state, talking with communities in other parts of the country, hearing from people around the world, and we in the last 10, 15, 20 years have put a lot on our digital connectedness and I think what we're experiencing right now is that we actually need the physical connectedness. We really need it, and the design of places and communities is how we get that, and most of that is through the public realm, which means most of that is through community decision-making and community leaders and design professionals, and planners organizing together to build stronger networks and connections.

Kaarin Knudson: 18:06

So I think it's a reason to feel optimistic even as there are a lot of really challenging data points related to climate and pollution and the extreme weather events driven by climate change that communities and cities are going to be grappling with in the coming decades and are grappling with currently. It will just be a challenge of those events being, I think, closer together.

Jennifer Hiatt: 18:27

And potentially of larger magnitude as they keep rolling through too Exactly, yep. So, being a good Nebraskan, I'm always curious what people are thinking about when they think about the word urban. Our largest city is around 600,000 people. When we covered the book Rural by Design, the author was thinking that rural would be a community of 100,000 or less. Oh, interesting, yeah, yeah. So did you have kind of a like guiding definition of the idea of urban as you were working through it?

Kaarin Knudson: 18:59

Yes, and I'll also say I am currently the mayor of Oregon's second largest city. But Oregon's second largest city is a city of 180,000. That's the center of a metro area of about 300,000. And the University of Oregon is here in Eugene, proud ducks, and really fortunate to have all the connections with that institution that our community and city have. I also grew up in a city and was born in a city of about 250,000, but I spent time as a child in communities and rural communities as small as a couple of hundred. So my experience in different parts of our country, from Midwest to Alaska to the Pacific Northwest, is, I would say, diverse.

Kaarin Knudson: 19:37

And when people ask about and my students ask this question too, I think there's a lot of confusion about the term urban, that urban somehow means just big, bulky, tall and big.

Kaarin Knudson: 19:48

I've talked with a lot of people in our community about the quality of our urban design and the quality of our public realm, the way in which we build our city and, fundamentally, when I'm talking with students and community members about urbanism, that has to do with understanding the fact that each project is in relationship to a network and a collection of other concerns and that in totality, that single project is stronger if it has good relationships and strong connections that reinforce the positive things around it.

Kaarin Knudson: 20:25

Urban to suburban or urban to sprawl as a development pattern. Many of our smallest rural communities have really fantastic development patterns, right. Really simple, small, original plats with nicely scaled blocks, nicely scaled streets, a consistency to that grid of organization or that pattern of early organization. Rural communities don't tend to be sprawling as a first endeavor, right. So I do think that we can't ignore the time when most cities and communities sort of grew up in the United States being the latter half of the 20th century and there being a real focus on essentially single passenger automobiles being able to take you anywhere, and that cities and communities and counties would provide the infrastructure to make that work. We're running into a real problem in the early 21st century, as we realize.

Kaarin Knudson: 21:08

Wow, these systems never paid for themselves and the development pattern that we have doesn't work in that way, without additional inputs to the system, and those inputs can either be adding more people to more efficiently use that land or it can be increasing taxes and having people pay more for the existing infrastructure they have. Most people, when they begin to kind of dig into this question about the quality of the urban environment, realize that they really love beautiful urban places because those are the cities that they go to visit as tourists and walk around in and think, like, what a wonderful street with sure trees that are offering shade.

Kaarin Knudson: 21:45

It told me something about the local ecology of this place and the native species of this place.

Kaarin Knudson: 21:50

And look at these fantastically charming storefronts and small businesses and cafes and restaurants and it looks like there are people living on the upper floors along this street and that's you know, jane Jacobs talking about eyes on the street, and you know, living above the store, as Howard Davis from the University of Oregon would be talking about.

Kaarin Knudson: 22:08

That's a pattern that exists across the world living over the store, across cultures across the world, and it also almost always relates to a really high quality urban place, right, even if the population is small, the pattern of urbanism can still be really fantastic. So I do think that's a huge misunderstanding. You think about the pattern of sprawl and its disconnectedness and inefficiency if you don't have access to a personal vehicle, and the siting of buildings floating in space. If we were talking about a figure ground diagram, which architects and designers often talk about, planners sometimes talk about, you would just see a lot of oddly shaped elements floating in white space right, and not in a relationship to the public realm, not creating an outdoor room in the street, between buildings or in the public space between buildings, just elements in a field. But then when you look at it in section or as elevation, you see that sometimes these elements are quite tall or mid-rise. And then you look at that in comparison to a really great city and a very walkable place and the difference in that pattern is immediately obvious.

Jennifer Hiatt: 23:08

I love that concept of urban. I'm from a town of around 500. And I've been working with our village board on some updates to some of our planning documents and I didn't really think about it and I was talking to our board president I was like, yeah, I really do love our urban core and he just looked at me like I was the weirdest person ever.

Kaarin Knudson: 23:26

He's like we're not urban. I was like, okay, well technically that's fair.

Jennifer Hiatt: 23:29

My bad, but our downtown, your city center, the heart of your community, right Exactly.

Kaarin Knudson: 23:36

I think this is so important to where we're going in the remainder of the 21st century, right.

Kaarin Knudson: 23:41

It's not getting hung up on that language, but also like, fantastic that that partner, that community partner you've got that relationship with, has a strong enough relationship with you to immediately observe, like, what are you talking about? That's not what I'm thinking. So it gives you an opportunity to actually engage. When I think about really delightful small towns that I've spent time in all across the country, the pattern where people are able to be out of their cars and walking and in relationship to a slower and a quieter experience, right and something that doesn't just feel like infrastructure flying through, that's a pattern that's everywhere, on the ground, in most smaller communities. That means there needs to be, you know, recognizing the context of where we are.

Kaarin Knudson: 24:20

There needs to be a real focus on managing the impact of the automobile in those places Because unaddressed and unmanaged response, that's just sort of a cookie cutter response to redevelopment or new development. In a place like that that's a much finer grain and much more sensitive to that kind of disruption. It could be really influential and not a positive way.

Kaarin Knudson: 24:40

So you know, thinking about the relationship of buildings to the street and we talk about this a lot in the book that organizing buildings so that ground floor uses if they're commercial or residential have a really positive relationship to the streets, to the pedestrian realm and to the right-of-way at every scale. That's a good thing. You never want if you can avoid it going forward into the future to put vehicles between parking area, between the face of a building and the public street and the pedestrian space, because you're just creating conflict but you're also not building out a resilient and strong place and it's also not going to be a project that has lasting economic value, because that storefront is always going to be 50 or 60 feet back from a street, which is going to mean that it's not as appealing for different types of uses.

Kaarin Knudson: 25:22

And there's always ways to manage vehicles and to manage parking when needed Parallel parking on street side, street parking, alley access parking lots of different strategies. And then, of course, reinforcing that transportation options are also really important, and people who, in most places, are riding their bikes, are spending more along corridors with bicycle infrastructure than drivers. They don't spend as much per stop, but they spend more overall, which is helpful for business owners to know.

Stephanie Rouse: 25:49

Speaking of bicycles, I was really happy to find. One of your highlight projects was our N Street Cycle Track.

Kaarin Knudson: 25:54

It is.

Stephanie Rouse: 25:56

I'm so glad that you mentioned it, so we made it in there. I was pretty excited.

Kaarin Knudson: 26:01

Yes, it was really fun to look all across the country at great projects that different cities and communities are working on, and there's a lot of different scales of city and that was something that was really important to me. It was really important to my co-author, nico Larco, that people who were looking at this book weren't immediately thinking the Sustainable Urban Design Handbook is only for giant sort of mega cities, right, it's only a handbook related to very dense, consolidated patterns of development. That's really not the case and there's lots of great examples of especially retrofits all around the country, including in Nebraska, and it was fun to be able to highlight some of those.

Stephanie Rouse: 26:36

So, with so many different examples from all across the country, there wasn't really like a highlight city or a couple cities that really stood out. Do you have any examples of cities that doing all of this research over so many years that you think these cities are really nailing it or they're really doing a great job with sustainable urban design that others can look to?

Kaarin Knudson: 26:55

There are, but mostly, I would say, what's important for your listeners to take away is that that city could literally be any city implementing a really fantastic retrofit of your bus rapid transit system or is implementing a really focused, multi-year, successful endeavor to create a high degree of pedestrian connectivity across neighborhood centers or through a downtown area or along a corridor. I think, in general, one of the things that I have learned through teaching and through practice is that sometimes it is hard for people to relate to cities with very different populations that immediately people think, oh this is an example, from Manhattan.

Kaarin Knudson: 27:46

So we're not New York and so therefore this is irrelevant. Or we're not Lincoln, and so therefore this is not a relevant project for us. I think what is actually more helpful and is a great opportunity for all communities is to realize that, looking at neighborhoods, those are very comparable across cities, even when the density is shifting. There are patterns and relationships of buildings to streets and also infrastructure to density. That is very relatable across different populations.

Kaarin Knudson: 28:12

So I'm always encouraging people, as they're traveling, to not just think about the city they're visiting, but the neighborhood that they're visiting in that city, because we have so much diversity within American neighborhoods, within American cities and there's, I think, a lot more connectedness between those really fantastic expressions of local personality than we might otherwise see and it also gets us past the immediate sort of like we're not like them. So we shouldn't look at that great example of that new bicycle facility or that really wonderful parks plan or that effort to address point source pollution and health within.

Jennifer Hiatt: 28:46

A community.

Jennifer Hiatt: 28:47

One of the aspects of the book that I really appreciated is that you include conditions and caveats for each section, because those really are the realities of development. I love talking with new planners. They're always like, well, why can't we do that? Well, there are the realities of development. I love talking with new planners. They're always like, well, why can't we do that? It's like well, there are the realities of development, so I can probably take a guess, but what are some of the main conditions and caveats that kept popping up as you were thinking through each of those?

Kaarin Knudson: 29:11

Oh, that's a great question and thank you for highlighting that section in each one of the chapters. It's another piece of this research that we were just really hopeful would be helpful to people in accelerating their understanding of the full context and complexity of these decisions. Because, you're right, it is really early, when you're new to something and you're only seeing it from your area of expertise or your values, to just think, well, this is how it should be. Obviously, it should just be this way.

Kaarin Knudson: 29:36

And we just need to make it that way and then everything will work. And in most of our community planning decisions and most of our urban design decisions, the process to get to good outcomes is much more incremental. It's always holding a vision and a goal, but the process to get there in a way that is truly equitable and that also is feasible is a much more incremental process because you have to build understanding and find funding and have community will and political will, all of those things. Some of the caveats and considerations that often came up, some of them have to do with maintenance, because that is an area that is often within cities, just sort of ignored. Within the community. It mostly happens invisibly right.

Kaarin Knudson: 30:17

I've talked with people about this in our community as a mayor. We in Eugene, oregon, we have extraordinary forested landscape that our city is within and the Willamette River Valley and you know beautiful conifers and deciduous trees. So every fall we get this watercolor of maples and all sorts of trees changing color and then they lose their leaves and they are everywhere and those leaves create an enormous amount of challenge for our stormwater systems that are trying to drain also a lot of rain that shows up at the same time as those leaves are falling, and then pools in the streets if those drains are clogged. So there's a lot of work that our city does, that every city does. Dealing with this experience and others like it to just like maintain and keep things working and sometimes acknowledging that that maintenance concern is real is a key step in accomplishing a better design outcome, because you don't want it to just be ignored and that be a sort of veto circumstance later when the people implementing the project are like we can't manage that it's going to create all sorts of problems. So that's an important one for people to understand that. You know I was joking with some people several months ago that the invisible work of dealing with that leaf circumstance in our city it's like you know, everyone pushes their leaves out to the curb and then they're just gone magically One morning, like these piles of leaves that are as big as a car are just gone, and that type of work is happening all day, every day, in most communities and most cities. So maintenance is a big one.

Kaarin Knudson: 31:44

Other areas that people need to understand relates back to community will and political will, because I think when especially new to work and I think of this with my students and young professionals, who have often come to planning specifically to make a difference and to be a force for good and a force for positive change within communities.

Kaarin Knudson: 31:57

The incremental aspect of what I just mentioned can at first feel like defeat or feel like the work isn't actually happening.

Kaarin Knudson: 32:03

Part of some of those considerations and caveats that have to do with understanding that it takes time to build political will and community understanding as to why a project is important, I would say for our community.

Kaarin Knudson: 32:13

Locally, one of those areas is similar to the example that we shared from Lincoln retrofitting our streetscapes to include more protected bicycle facilities in key areas. Why? Because we know that people will not bike in high-stress areas where they're exposed to high-speed traffic, especially along one-way streets where you are not seeing the traffic that is driving behind you, that kids will not ride in those spaces, parents won't let them and it's only going to be a very small number of bicyclists that will ride in traffic or in unprotected circumstances. It takes work within a community to explain to a population that has been mostly driving for a couple of generations why it is that that infrastructure change is important and how it is that it supports even people who are not bicycling, because if people are riding their bikes, they're not driving cars, and so the congestion potential you know, in an area that is growing in our city is growing.

Kaarin Knudson: 33:02

You're actually designing infrastructure that is supportive of a lower intensity of transportation, sort of spatial demand right, so that's really positive. But I would say that it still takes work because, as those projects come forward, if people don't understand that you have to build the infrastructure before people can use the infrastructure, then it can feel a bit like an uphill battle because there's not understanding of the purpose. That work, I think, is happening all the time. And for people to understand that with each of these elements, that there are complexities with every one of them and there are trade-offs, I think that that will help people to be more effective professionals, more trusted in their work because they're sharing the full complexity of the problem, but also better in terms of partnering and drawing out community feedback that would be important to a project succeeding.

Stephanie Rouse: 33:45

I feel like that's so helpful because, as a new planner, all of those issues just kept cropping up and hitting me. So the maintenance piece of we can build this bike lane, but we're not going to because no one wants to maintain this bike lane, or we're not going to plow this in the winter, so we can't put a protected bike lane in the street because we can't maintain it for year round use. And so I think, being able to see those issues ahead of time, you're more prepared and you can kind of come up with some solutions versus just listening to the pushback.

Kaarin Knudson: 34:12

I think that that's helpful for for profession, as I mentioned, like carrying a lot of care for your community into your work and understanding that also that the concerns that different community members have or different stakeholder groups might have that are different from even your perception of a project.

Kaarin Knudson: 34:29

That's really useful information because it helps to also paint a clearer picture of where your community actually is and the work that has to be done to feel like it's a shared success. I think that in most cases, understanding that some of those caveats are real and some of those considerations have to be taken into account but might not come up early on because they're a little more contentious, right, and might be an indication of like, oh no, this isn't going to be just 100% supported, that's fine. Know that something might not be 100% supported and then do the work to reach out to people who have concerns and who knows, maybe eventually something will be 100% supported. But most important is that there are enough people within the community who understand the work to feel like, yes, this is a trade-off, but I get it and this trade-off is important because I care about our community being more sustainable, more livable, more affordable, more equitable and we have to upgrade the operating system, so I get it. We have to do that work.

Jennifer Hiatt: 35:25

It's always surprising to me how, 10 years later, people don't even remember that there were a few people who spoke out against the project. They just love the park or whatever Almost ever right, isn't it?

Kaarin Knudson: 35:34

Humans, we are so interesting in this way.

Kaarin Knudson: 35:36

I think it also again puts really a focus on the expertise of our planning professionals and our design teams to really communicate clearly all of the potential benefits and that's another thing that we hope the Sustainable Urban Design Handbook helps with is that people could see that there are other benefits to this action that I wasn't even thinking about because I was mostly concerned, you know, about the water resources, but actually there are all of these other positive impacts related to pollution, related to active, you know, transportation, related to ecology and habitat building, energy use, right.

Kaarin Knudson: 36:08

All sorts of things that weren't necessarily the first thing that was being thought of from a particular perspective.

Kaarin Knudson: 36:14

And again, we hope that this resource can be helpful in that way, because I think every community with projects happening today and into the future needs to see all of the ways in which those investments, those public investments, are returning benefits and values to the community. And it's true that after a new mixed-use residential building is built and the ground floor has a great local coffee shop and another small business and another small business around the corner and a hundred households living in that building, rarely is that seen as a failure. Right, that's a, really and is now contributing to the tax base like providing all sorts of positive benefits for people and the community, and oftentimes there is concern that the change is going to lead to something negative, but in so many cases, looking at our cities and knowing that we need them to be more sustainable and more affordable and more equitable, a lot of the change is going to be very positive because we need to be moving the needle on those issues.

Jennifer Hiatt: 37:10

So this is already a dense and informative book. So it's really hard to imagine that there was any information you wanted to leave behind that got left on the cutting room floor. But sustainable urban design is also a massive topic, so were there topics you weren't able to fit into the book that you wanted to, but just didn't quite make the cut?

Kaarin Knudson: 37:27

Oh, great question. So the book is about 450 pages. There is a I mentioned to people, there's a really fantastic glossary at the back of the book. That was also really important to us to include. Again, a lot of the work that this handbook is trying to do is to better orient people to all of the work that they'll do across their careers and in their communities. It was hard to eventually draw a line and say that's all that's going into this first edition. That's the edge of the work and the research that we can fit into this book and it's a very accessible 450 pages of work. Each chapter is broken down into 10 pages or less, so it's very accessible for people to come into this resource.

Kaarin Knudson: 38:11

I felt very strongly about incorporating an element related to on-site energy production and also district energy production. Every one of these elements is based on a body of research and best practices and those two areas. As we're moving through this research and writing this book in real time, there's a lot of research still being done and it was not as straightforward in most cases as to how to incorporate those elements into the structure that we had set up for the book.

Kaarin Knudson: 38:38

So they are, of course, really important for communities that are thinking about reducing emissions and thinking about renewable energy options. That's going to be very positive in most cases if you're trying to measure outcomes. But that's not incorporated into this edition of the book and there are others. Hopefully there'll be more work into the future that helps to capture that information too.

Stephanie Rouse: 38:59

Hopefully there'll be more work into the future. That helps to capture that information too Well, in addition to getting a copy of your book, which we always recommend all of our listeners check out our author's books, especially yours, is such a beautiful book too. It's very colorful, with each section being its own color. It's really easy to navigate. So, in addition to it being a very good resource, I think it could be a great coffee table book too.

Kaarin Knudson: 39:18

I've gotten a few snapshots from people different firms and professionals and colleagues, but also community members who said I just got your book and it's going to sit on our coffee table in our office. That's wonderful. It was very important to me, very important to both of us, that it be visually appealing and that the way in which the book is presented graphically, with so many diagrams and so many photographs, that that would also be another way that this is not an overwhelming area of work, right that urban design does not have to be overwhelming or complicated in terms of how you first engage it. It could also be beautiful and interesting and cleanly integrated, and our hope was that the way that this book is put together it would help people to feel that way.

Stephanie Rouse: 40:01

I love that. So what other books would you recommend our readers check out?

Kaarin Knudson: 40:06

Oh my goodness. Well, right now I will say that I'm working on designing a new housing course at the University of Oregon that I will teach this spring, and so I've been thinking a lot about housing as it relates to sustainable urban design. I've also been doing a lot of work recently locally and organizing across in the state of Oregon and also in cities, related to housing and homelessness and understanding those issues. When I talk with my planning students and see the profiles of interest that people coming into the profession have, I won't surprise either of you to hear that housing and homelessness and climate and equity are at the top of concerns of people coming into the profession because they see the need to work on how our systems in our cities are upgrading to meet those concerns.

Kaarin Knudson: 40:47

I recently had the good fortune to organize an event with Greg Colburn, who's one of the two authors.

Kaarin Knudson: 40:53

He and Clay Aldern wrote the book Homelessness is a Housing Problem and if you have not read that book as a planner, I would highly encourage you to do it all listeners of Booked on Planning because it is very helpful at understanding the structural patterns like that is even in the subhead of the book that drive high levels of homelessness, you know, at a city scale or at a metro scale and using, you know, county data as well to understand that.

Kaarin Knudson: 41:20

So Homelessness is a Housing Problem is a very readable book. I would put it in the same category of readability as, like the Color of Law, in that you can pick up this book and Robert Starozzi's book. You can pick up the Color of Law and read that pretty quickly, and I think Homelessness is a Housing Problem is similar. I think the book that we have written, the Sustainable Urban Design Handbook, is unique among books related to sustainability and urban design, because our goal with this book was not to present a design manifesto for how all cities should be or how all communities should be, and it's not written from a particular angle related to sustainability. It's trying to be comprehensive and capture opportunities related to all communities.

Kaarin Knudson: 42:00

So you know, in that way, in terms of comparing this book to others, there are a lot of great books out there related to sustainable urban design and patterns of development and different field guides and histories of development and essays. Metropolis is a great book, but this is different in terms of how we hope that this handbook can help people to feel like they've got a reference and also a companion in their work to try and address these integrated issues that are all across cities and at different scales.

Stephanie Rouse: 42:28

Yeah, we have homelessness as a housing problem on our list to hopefully get those authors on the show later this year.

Kaarin Knudson: 42:35

Oh, that would be wonderful. Greg Colburn is at the University of Washington and he's just a delightful person, brilliant researcher, and he has some roots in the Midwest at the University of Minnesota also, so that could be another connection.

Stephanie Rouse: 42:46

Good, yeah, well, Kaarin, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today to talk about your book, the Sustainable Urban Design Handbook.

Kaarin Knudson: 43:03

Thank you so much for having me.

Jennifer Hiatt: 43:04

Thank you for the opportunity to talk about this work and I hope that it is helpful to everyone who's working on our cities and communities and into the future. It's great to talk with you all. We hope you enjoyed this conversation with Kaarin Knudson about her book, the Sustainable Urban Design Handbook. You can get your own copy through the publisher at Rutledge or click the link in the show notes below to take you directly to our affiliate page. Remember to subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts, and please rate, review and share the show. Thank you for listening and we'll talk to you next time on Booked, on Planning you.