Going for Zero

Forget the shiny renderings—our path to climate-ready cities starts with what already stands. We talked with architect and preservationist Carl Elefante, author of Going for Zero: Decarbonizing the Built Environment on the Path to Our Urban Future, to explore how City 3.0 can emerge by reusing buildings, redesigning streets, and resetting our standards of care. Carl breaks down Modern City 1.0 and 2.0, then lays out a hopeful, practical framework for what comes next: reconnecting with community, earth, and place while cutting carbon fast.
From Yemen’s wind-wise streets to a D.C. school’s revived induction system, the examples are concrete and transferable. We examine whole-life carbon accounting and why London’s reuse-first policy is a pivotal shift, forcing teams to compare demolition against reuse and reuse-plus-addition. The conversation contrasts durable, maintainable assemblies with fragile, all-glass facades—and explains why the greenest building is usually the one we already have.
If you care about sustainable architecture, urban design, adaptive reuse, missing-middle housing, passive strategies, and whole-life carbon, this conversation offers a clear map forward. Enjoy it, share it with a colleague, and tell us what your city should do next. Subscribe, leave a review, and pass this along to someone shaping the built environment today.

Show Notes:

• Further Reading: 
  • If the past teaches what does the future learn? Ancient Urban Regions and the Durable Future by John Murphy
  • Architecture From Prehistory to Climate Emergency by Barnabus Calder
  • Main Street: How a City’s Heart Connects Us All by Mindy Thopsom Fullilove
  • Triumph of the City by Ed Glaeser 
  • Sustainable Nation: Urban Design Patterns for the Future by Doug Farr
• To help support the show, pick up a copy of the book through our Bookshop page at https://bookshop.org/shop/bookedonplanning or get a copy through your local bookstore!
• To view the show transcripts, click on the episode at https://bookedonplanning.buzzsprout.com/

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Book Introduction
• 2:11 City 1.0, 2.0, And A 3.0 Vision
• 7:20 Energy Slaves And Passive Design
• 12:35 Who Shapes Habitation Beyond Architects
• 16:50 Reuse First And Whole Life Carbon
• 22:05 Permanence, Materials, And Facade Lessons
• 27:10 Plastics, Better Materials, And Costs
• 31:20 Financing, Insurance, And Long Horizons
• 35:45 Learning From History And Schools
• 40:05 Streets As Climate Infrastructure
• 42:00 From Development To Reintegration
• 46:00 Optimism, Systems Change, And Youth
• 49:00 Recommended Reading And Closing

Transcript

Stephanie Rouse: 0:12

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 author Carl Elefante on his book, Going for Zero: Decarbonizing the Built Environment on the Path to Our Urban Future. As a preservationist and an architect, I really enjoyed this book because Carl is really kind of leading the way in the field of the built environment in creating more sustainable buildings and preserving the buildings that we have, having coined the term the greenest building is the building that already exists.

Jennifer Hiatt: 1:07

So as a planner, I'm actually ashamed to admit, though I knew the saying the greenest building is the building that already exists, I was not as familiar with Carl's work previous to reading this book. So this was my first introduction into the way Carl thinks about the world. And I find it a very interesting and fascinating way of thinking about the 6,000 years of city history that we have as opposed to the last 200.

Stephanie Rouse: 1:31

Yeah, it was really interesting how he makes the point that we all think in the last 200 years of society and cities and built environment and think that that's the only way and in order to grow and design. But it's really a very small and probably not the right way to do so.

Jennifer Hiatt: 1:48

Yeah. And I like that he breaks those last 200 years into city 1.0, city 2.0, and then potentially city 3.0 as we're thinking about the modern city. But realistically, London's a modern city that's also ancient. So it's a different way to think about things.

Stephanie Rouse: 2:06

Yeah, they really lean into all of their historic buildings and have a better preservation ethos. I found it really funny as we're recording this episode. There's a building across the street from our office here being torn down to make way for uh a parking lot, but hopefully something better in the future.

Jennifer Hiatt: 2:25

Yeah, maybe Lincoln's not the best example of embracing the permanency of our buildings and we should try a little harder. So, listeners, I also wanted to take a point of privilege in this introduction to let you all know that we now have a bookshop.org affiliate page. And so if you would like to support the podcast and you already shop at bookshop.org to get your books, or you would like to start shopping at bookshop.org, you can check us out at bookshop.org slash shop slash booked on planning to support our podcast efforts.

Stephanie Rouse: 2:57

And we are building out all of our reading lists and we'll be adding in all of the author-recommended readings as well as all of the books that have been on our show over the last four years, which is kind of crazy to think that we've been recording for almost four years now.

Jennifer Hiatt: 3:11

That is wild. And we have loved every episode we have recorded and shared with you guys. But particularly, let's get into this conversation with author Carl Elefante on his book, Going for Zero.

Stephanie Rouse: 3:24

Carl, thank you so much for joining us on Bookdown Planning to talk about your book, Going for Zero: Decarbonizing the Built Environment on the Path to Our Urban Future. You discuss in the book the idea of the modern city 1.0 and 2.0 differentiating between periods of building construction. What characterizes each of these periods? And do you have a vision for a modern city 3.0?

Carl Elefante: 3:46

Well, first, let me just say thank you so much for having me here today. It's a great honor to be here and uh great opportunity to talk about my book. Obviously, I wrote it so that people would read it and we could talk about it. So this is very much kind of the outcome that I was hoping would happen with writing the book. So I talked about Modern City 1.0 and 2.0 as kind of a reference to look at the history of the development of modern cities in a way that most architects and engineers and planners and so on could relate to and kind of get without having it be a really big heavy study into the history of architecture and planning. And basically it's kind of 80-year cycles, if you will, if you look at the Industrial Revolution and its impact on the built environment, kind of the first generation is oftentimes referred to as what happened in the kind of 19th century. We had electricity and we had elevators and we had subways and we had steel to make skyscrapers, and there was sort of this whole generation of new technologies and also new understanding of what we could do with our design of cities to things like having clean water systems so that people didn't get infectious disease. So, in a lot of ways, I look at that 19th century city as modern city 1.0. And here in the United States, we think of it in terms of the City Beautiful movement and you know the World Columbia Exposition and the notion of kind of you know Beaux Ar design of these, you know, beautiful parks in our cities and things like that. And of course, we've got this sort of European example of Hausman's Paris and a lot of development that happened all around the world in that sort of era of those people were making the modern city, the founders of the AIA in 1860, roughly, were thinking about, you know, really establishing the modern city. And they were reformists, they believed in cities. They literally sort of voted with their feet, they worked in cities, they thought that cities were really the future. And then what I characterize as modern city 2.0 is really what emerges in the early 20th century with thinkers like Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright. And they were what I characterize as urban rejectionists. They truly believed that cities were not the solution and that cities were the problem. And sort of Corbus's version of that was to bulldoze down Hausmann's Paris and put up apartment towers, which fortunately didn't actually happen the way that he planned it. You know, literally his plan for the bulldoze a second Arondis Mont in Paris. And of course, Frank Lloyd Wright sort of gave us Broadacre City, which was a real sort of vision of suburbia. And so here we are today, knowing all the wonderful things that sort of modern City 1.0 and 2.0 led to. Cities today are spectacular in many, many ways, but they're also really problematic in many ways. And we sort of know what they can't do as hell, and know that they have transigent problems that we're really having a struggle to try to do something about. And so the post-World War II era, that's 80 years old. I mean, literally this year is the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. So for 80 years, we've been trying this City Beautiful 2.0 model and it's sort of fully mature version. And we understand that there's things like the cities are more for cars than they are for people, also that cities are heavily carbon polluting. So the fact of the matter is we're really beginning to see modern city 3.0 talked about. And I like to look at the example of New York City and then also Paris. You know, both of them are really consider themselves true leaders in climate action and really kind of imagining the future. And I have to say, when I look at their plans, to me, it's literally visions of sugar plums. Really, this is the plan in New York City. We're gonna upzone two of the densest parts of the city around Penn Station or on Grand Central Station. We're gonna tear down 50-story buildings to build hundred-story buildings. And it's literally like 50-story glass skyscrapers to build 100-story glass skyscrapers, and that's gonna solve our problems? Really? Come on, let's get serious. And so, what I talk about in the book is that really what we need to get to is sort of beyond the last 80-year modern city, what's beyond modern? And I talk about it in terms of reconnecting with our outcomes, reconnecting with our sense of community, reconnecting with Earth, literally the being that we are all part of, Earth, and then also reconnecting with our notion of place. And I kind of get into each one of those in the book.

Stephanie Rouse: 8:27

Modern city 3.0, kind of where we need to move, is almost like reverting back to modern city 1.0 and getting back to that more targeted development, building out our cores without doing it in a dense matter, doing that kind of more missing middle housing that a lot of communities are looking into today, it seems like.

Carl Elefante: 9:56

Also, they all, in that thousand years or more, they all experienced profound disruption in one way or another. Earthquakes or whatever, Kubla Khan coming through with this board, you know. I mean, a lot of different things that really threatened the existence of cities. So there are many, many definitions just in that book, and let alone in the encyclopedia of 6,000 years of cities, there are many definitions of what sustainable city looks like. There's many definitions of what a resilient city looks like. And we're using only the last page of the encyclopedia. We're thinking that what we've done in the last 200 years has all the answers, and it just doesn't.

Jennifer Hiatt: 10:38

To your point, the past is prologue. For thousands of years, we did rely on human slave labor to build those historic cities. But you make the point that now we rely on energy slaves for our modern comforts. So can you explain this idea?

Carl Elefante: 10:51

I think there's a little bit of a misnomer in your question, in that it wasn't just slave labor, it was human labor and animal labor. Much of it paid, you know, much of it people very glad to be a stonemason working on a gothic cathedral. You know, it's a good point.

Jennifer Hiatt: 11:06

Yeah.

Carl Elefante: 11:06

I mean, so what okay, well, it wasn't all just bad. You know, people were making other people do bad things to build cities, you know. Uh, there was a lot of uh good in it. But it was certainly human labor and animal labor. It was calories, was the energy that was being used to build. The term energy slaves is actually coined by Buckminster Fuller. And, you know, Bucky was kind of on a spectrum. I mean, he was he was somebody that was very much driven by his thoughts, but also sort of haunted by some of them. And energy slaves is one of the things that he was haunted by. He he saw the buildings that he was designing as being only viable because they had hundreds or thousands of energy slaves that made them work. And he was like, no, this is wrong. You know, how can we make buildings that use energy slaves last instead of using them first? And the ideas of passive design and operability, et cetera, were very much baked into many of his ideas. We kind of got a perspective of that when the oil embargo happened in the 70s, where we were in a period where energy, what's that? Architects and engineers never talked about energy. And then the oil embargo happened, energy prices went up four times in like a month. And all of a sudden, oh, energy, it costs a lot. What are we going to do about it? And the immediate reaction to that was architects and engineers thinking about energy last. How can I design buildings? How can I build buildings that need energy as a last resort instead of a first scenario? And we kind of lost that since the 70s. And there's still a lot of energy first sort of baked into what we're doing. And for architects, and I think this is true for planners as well, when you start to think about passive design and you start to think about operability, the ability to literally adjust to the seasons and adjust to the weather during a day by opening and closing a window, there's kind of urban versions of that, just things like are we thinking about the wind tunnels that we're bringing between buildings? Because we do. And in very hot climates, in places like in Yemen, at you know, Shabam and uh Sana'a, these thousand-year-old cities, they literally designed wind tunnels by relating their buildings to cool their cities. You know, so it's a concept that I talk about in the book as performance follows form, that the engineering that took place in modern city 2.0, you know, Mies Van Derot talked about the design freedom we had because we could get our energy slaves to solve all our problems for us in buildings. And Buckminster Fuller was like, no, no, no, no, let's not use energy slaves first, let's use them last. And so that notion of our basic form decisions, our first decisions about how we make our buildings and cities are the most important decisions on what will ultimately constitute the performance of buildings and cities. And realizing that those decisions come first, we have to be thinking about those decisions as performance decisions, not we'll just engineer out all the bad decisions we made by throwing a bunch of energy at it. And it's true on a planning level as well. And when you talked about Modern City 1.0 and 2.0, you know, the idea of Key Island effect. Do we have trees on our streets or do streets just belong to cars? Things like that.

Stephanie Rouse: 14:29

So you're kind of getting into this next question, talking about how architects have the ability to influence building performance. And you talked a little bit about planners as well. And in the book, you reference architects and others are really instrumental in shaping the built environment. Who are some of the other professions that really need to start acting to help make a positive impact?

Carl Elefante: 14:50

So the answer to this is almost infinite in that, you know, if you go to the auto industry, they'll talk about oh, one of it out of every four or five people in the country is sort of employed in the auto industry. Well, a hundred percent of the people in every country are employed in the human habitation industry. You know, we're we're all about making these places where we can all live together and work together. So that's the super wide angle lens answer to your question. That literally how we make food, how we ship things around the world, it all relates to the form of habitation that we have. But who among us are the ones that are really being asked to understand how to shape that human habitation? Planners, urban designers. And as you know from reading the book, I talk a lot about the idea of urban design versus planning, putting colors on a map versus literally designing a place and talking about a specific outcome, not just what we're hoping will be the outcome if you have the right colors in the right places on the map. So I think that that's a big part of it. Another kind of category are landscape architects and what we really now look at as sort of urban ecologists. There are also urban agriculturalists beginning to see cities as not separate from food production, but literally part of food production. And they're certainly determining the demand for food. They're certainly determining how efficiently we use food resources or how much of it we waste. Right now we have a really, really wasteful food use scenario in this country and in fact around the world. Um, and then the third category are the kind of movement specialists, traffic engineers and transit designers, et cetera. How we make the built environment understanding the land is not just land, it is the earth and it is creatures and it is life, and then it is our food sources, et cetera. And then the third, we have to move around. And those sort of three categories are all really, really important to this.

Jennifer Hiatt: 16:49

A statement from the book that really struck me was that we live in a society that fixates on recycling bottles and cans, but we easily destroy viable buildings by hundreds of thousands every year. I had never really thought of it in that comparison. So, what do you think created that mentality and how do we start combating it?

Carl Elefante: 17:09

I think it's very, very baked into our modern city 2.0 biases and the kind of the urban rejection idea. I've been to very, very few places where the urban skepticism wasn't pretty palpable. Even Singapore, which is, I think, the city that I've been to, where you walk down the street with a microphone, people will say, this is an amazing city. Our city is so important. We're doing everything we can to sort of optimize how livable our city is, et cetera, et cetera. There's a lot of urban skepticism, very, very deeply baked into our ideas about how we live and where we live. Very parallel to that is this sort of old is bad, new is good part of that modern city 2.0, of that modern era bias. And it's very, very deep. In a lot of ways, our culture, and you can see this in a million different ways, our culture is so fascinated by the new and now. What is today's headlines? What is today's top 40 hit? Not last week's, but this week's. And when you apply that to cities, which are sort of the opposite proposition, which is they get better as they get older, they get better as they get time layered over them. Imagine Rome, if the oldest building was 100 years old. Would you get on a plane and go there? No. I'm in the Washington, D.C. area. Why do people come to here and be tourists? Because this is amazing. They want to come see buildings that are 250 years old that really represent something about our culture. Those buildings being 200, 250 years old, representing what they do about our culture, is what makes this city special. You need that time. It doesn't work without layers of time.

Jennifer Hiatt: 18:58

Yeah, I just spent 10 days in the Netherlands and Brussels taking in thousands of years of history. And I actually read your book on the plane as I was flying over. And so it was a very interesting concept to go from Lincoln, where I don't know, Stephanie, you're the historic preservation planner too, but 150, 200 years old, Max.

Stephanie Rouse: 19:24

Max building is, I think, 120 years old. We're not very old. We we demolish a lot here.

Jennifer Hiatt: 19:31

We do. Tabruge, who's protected every single thing they've ever built in their whole history of urban development. It was very fascinating.

Stephanie Rouse: 19:39

On this idea of a whole building life cycle and extending the life of these buildings, I mean, design today is very computerized. It's very easy to do these lifecycle analyses, but it's not very standard to look at every building and their predicted greenhouse gas pollution. Why is that the case?

Carl Elefante: 19:58

Well, I think it's a kind of developmental, you know, we're preteens at this, you know, we have to grow up and be adults about it. So you're right that the computerization of how not just buildings, but everything about cities are designed and built and operated is actually a hugely beneficial tool. It really gives us the ability to get at a very deep understanding of something that's pretty darned abstract. You know, it's like, okay, what is the carbon pollution of your building? What, why are you asking me that? You don't really expect me to answer that. Yes, I do expect you to answer that. Not that long ago, you know, I'll go back to the founders of the AIA in 1857. There weren't building codes. They were like, hey, we need a code. We need everybody to understand that this is our standard of care, that it's not okay for buildings to burn down and for people to die in those fires. You know, we need to have egress, we need to have fireproof buildings, etc. You know, that in and of itself was a big paradigm shift. Like, oh yeah, let's have building codes. Well, in the architectural world, architectural and engineering world, that's called standard of care. You know, if the building code says that you must do that, the standard of care is you must do that. Our standard of care needs to become and could easily become assessing whole life carbon as part of our design process. It could be mandated by code, and I think it's becoming mandated by code. And I'll just give you one really good example of that. London recently adopted what they call the reuse first policy. What it's based on is that to get a demolition permit for any building over one story tall, and that's most of the buildings in London, that's for sure. Uh, you have to show that your new building alternative is the least carbon-polluting alternative using a whole life carbon analysis. And you have to compare it with a reuse-only scenario, just use the building that you've got, uh, a reuse plus addition scenario, or a demolition and replacement scenario. And there's a kind of a routine that you go through to sort of show that. But it just gives you an example of, I think, what's coming, this idea that understanding the carbon footprint of our decisions is something that we have the capability of doing. And I'll just end it by saying, well, what's preventing it? Well, right now, the people that really need to do this work, the architects and the engineers and the planners that need to do this work, we're not really trained for it, and we're sure shooting, not compensated for it. And those two things have to change. And I think we're working on the training part, but we really have to work on the compensation part. We have to understand that, you know, we need the policies that mandate carbon accounting, but then we also need to understand that there's an economic cost benefit to it, that we're going to get the benefits. A great article in today's New York Times about Iowa City and their free bus system. And guess what? It's reducing traffic congestion and it's shortening the travel times, and it's also reducing air pollution. So, you know, suddenly something that sounds like, oh, it's just going to cost us money. We're going to have free transportation. Wow, what a burden, man, that's really going to, you know, make our city taxes go up. Suddenly, there's these other benefits from it that actually have monetary value that we don't capture. We don't, we don't find a way to capture that value. We have to figure out a way to capture the value of actually doing the carbon accounting that we need to do.

Stephanie Rouse: 23:48

I feel like another barrier too is the owners of all the buildings because the architects, the planners, the engineers, we're often working for building owners and they're the final decision makers. So we can make the case all day, but until they've bought in and understood the importance of designing and maintaining buildings in a more sustainable manner, it can be kind of an uphill battle.

Carl Elefante: 24:08

Yeah. And there's there's ways that the owners can be incentivized in this as well. So probably the one that you'll hear reference most often is insurance. You know, so there's a lot of really clear co-benefits related to health. We just talked about Iowa City and the air pollution being reduced by having uh, you know, free bus service. There's a lot of kind of other, both urban scale and building scale examples like that of both personal health benefits, individual health benefits, and then also public health benefits. That's reflected in the insurance industry. And it's becoming more reflected in the insurance industry. You're beginning to see just things like climate disruption risk affecting insurance rates on property, et cetera. And then also the financial industry, how we loan money to do building projects, which are big dollar, long-term, long payback endeavors. But the way that we look at them still is too short-term. You know, buildings really get their value not just over decades, but over centuries. And that's a very controversial thing to say in our society. But I talk about it in my book in terms of buildings, their superpower being their permanence. And I talk about buildings being permanent, not long-lasting, not part of the circular economy. They literally last lifetimes. And if you look at our building codes, you know, something that we talked a little bit about before, okay, well, our codes were made to make buildings be fireproof. And oh, now earthquake-proof, and oh, even bomb-proof. We have these requirements to make buildings very, very durable, made out of things like steel and concrete. You know, 60% of a building, 70% of the building are made out of these extremely durable, what are ultimately truly permanent materials that last forever. And yet there's nothing in our codes that talks about if you're going to invest 60 or 70% of your resources into permanent structures, how do we make them valuable over time? How do we make them flexible? How do we make them adaptable? How do we make them maintainable and then actually literally changeable? You know, really make it so that you can fully give them new life somewhere in their hundreds of years of life. And those in the preservation field, historic preservation field. We like get this. You know, we know that if we go into a 200-year-old masonry building, where the work's going to be is not going to be on the 200-year-old masonry. There's going to be a little bit of work on the 200 masonry. And my kind of favorite example of that is to compare the Empire State Building, which is a pre-World War II building, with typical 21st century glass tower like Freedom Tower that, you know, is built on the World Trade Center site. And the Empire State Building and Freedom Tower are both lead gold buildings, you know, so they're both good, cool green buildings. Great. And the Empire State Building was renovated, I think, starting in 2009 to become a lead gold building. And, you know, they had to work on their windows. They'd take the windows out. They're all the same size. They were able to take a window out and put a new window back in like the same day because all the windows were the same size, you know, so you didn't have to like wait six months while the window was being restored. They restored them on site, they put them back in, but the rest of the facade was stone, so they had to wash it and repoint it a little bit. It hardly took anything to make that wall be good for another 80 years. Freedom Tower, which is made out of all glass, in 80 years, if it lasts that long, they're going to tear the whole thing off, throw it in the trash. Literally, you can't recycle it. It's all steeled together into glass assemblies. It's going to all go in a landfill and it's all going to be replaced. So our idea of the 21st century building, this cool new 21st century building as compared to that iconic old, no good Empire State building, really, which one's better? You know, which is the better approach? And we've got so much of that baked into our ideas about how we're reusing buildings or or not, and what's permanent in our buildings and how to really work with what's permanent in our buildings. It's a very big paradigm shift that we really have to come to terms with.

Jennifer Hiatt: 28:43

This isn't in the building concept, it's more in the design concept. But I recently, well, recently in the last six years, moved into a 1952 home. So I've been trying to honor that home's character and its mid-century interests. And I've been buying secondhand furniture. And then I bought an IKEA chair to try and match. My IKEA chair was two years old and it broke, but I have a chair from 1945 that is still standing and will stand for 30 years. And I think what will be the 21st century, you know, we've got mid-century modern. What's our design standard? And and who will get to see it in 80 years?

Carl Elefante: 29:25

There are times that I feel like I'm just being grumpy, you know, it just, you know, like this circular economy thing, I get it. You know, when you look at life cycle, there's product life cycle. Okay, then there's assembly life cycle, and then there's whole building life cycle. And if you look at them at those three different scales, it's a very different world. The product life cycle one, hey, got a glass bottle? Guess what? You can make another glass bottle out of it. And in the architectural world, that's true with stone. It's true with metals. You know, actually, stone is a permanent. Material. I misspoke on that. So someone like just leave it alone. But metals, metals are truly recyclable. And the most interesting decarbonization story in our world today is steel. You know, that steel, wow, the definition of heavy industry. But we're to a point now in buildings that more than 90% of the steel in buildings is recycled. More than 95% of the steel in reinforcing steel for concrete is recycled. So there's a kind of a true recycled economy at that basic material level with those products. When you look at whole building life cycles, that's when you start to understand like, hey, two-thirds of your building is made out of permanent materials. Why are you tearing them down? And here in Washington, we have height limits. So there's not the temptation to tear down a 10-story building to put up a 30-story building. 10-story buildings, what you got? Sorry, you know, that's what you get. But I actually think for a city, it's a great thing to just simply have a city that gets density by using its land well, you know, rather than five properties using all the economy, you know, and putting hundred-story buildings up. But anyway, that's a whole other topic. But those buildings are being renovated down to the concrete frames. But the concrete frames are two-thirds of the carbon footprint of those buildings. So, okay, let's keep what's permanent. And it's interesting, the facades that get kept are oftentimes the facades that are made out of the permanent materials, like the new AIA headquarters. You know, the AIA headquarters just been renovated. And it was, you know, this brutalist concrete building built in the 70s. It actually opened like a couple of months before the oil embargo. So it was this building of like energy. Hey, who cares about energy? And all of a sudden, like they barely get the lights turned on. It's like, oh my God, the energy costs are four times higher. Now what? You know, and they had to start to retrofit thinking about energy in that building. But in the renovation that they just did, they kept all the concrete, including that ugly brutalist facade. They're like, you know what? We can we can work with that. And they actually did a really interesting version of adding glass sun shades that are actually solar collectors to shade the building, which has its main facade is south and west. So it's you know just horrible from the sun standpoint. But they did a really clever job and they kept all the permanent materials.

Jennifer Hiatt: 32:37

And switching back to the building codes, and I think this was kind of one of the points that you were starting to make. We legally can't build a building without using plastic. And now every time I plug something into an outlet, I think about that. So why has the market not stepped in to provide greener building materials at this point?

Carl Elefante: 32:57

Let me just start by saying that there are uses for plastics that are like miracle uses. And you you gave the example of electric devices. I don't know how we would have the electrical systems that we have without plastic. It's like the perfect material for that. But siding, we're gonna make the siding from our houses out of plastic. When it burns, the firefighters have to wear gas masks because it makes a toxic smoke when it burns. You know, so like, okay, we'll just kill all the firemen when our houses burn down. No, I mean, why are we using plastics for things like that? There's way better alternatives made out of ready, wood, bamboo. How about earth? We can make things like brick. The 6,000-year-long encyclopedia of buildings and cities shows us how to build with the earth and plant resources that we have to make buildings that last for literally thousands of years. Let's go to Yemen and look at Shabam, a thousand-year-old city made out of unfired adobe. You show me your glass tower that's been here for a thousand years, and we can start talking about which one we like better. We like the thousand-year-old wood building, the thousand-year-old unfired clay building, the thousand-year-old stone building, or the thousand-year-old glass building. You will never show me a thousand-year-old glass building, but our technology does not last that way.

Stephanie Rouse: 34:30

I think one of the main hurdles, especially for you know single-family homeowners who are trying to invest or build new buildings, is the costs of doing a more durable material that's going to last 100 years. We think in terms of a single mortgage cycle versus life cycles of buildings. How can we get past this way of thinking?

Carl Elefante: 34:50

Well, I mentioned before about the insurance and the financial industries, and that we're really fighting them instead of having them help us with these aspects of the challenges that we face. Hey, come on, financial guys, get with it. Help us out here. You know, so I live in a hundred-year-old wooden house that no one thought would last 100 years. If you paint it every 10 years and you get the leaves out of the gutters, I mean, it you know, it takes a little bit of maintenance work to take care of it, but there's a long history of the traditional buildings that didn't require giant carbon footprints to make those materials to really show the longevity value of them, that our economic system doesn't capture that value is counterproductive. I mean, it's not only, gee, it doesn't make sense, it actually hurts. And it's just not okay for those to be our systems. I mean, if we're gonna solve the problem and have our own version of a sustainable and resilient future that is gonna last a thousand years, we have to change those systems to aid it. If we're fighting those systems, we will not get there. We're fighting it right now. Look at what's going on with the economy in our country. We're trying to pretend that an economic system that rewards New York for building hundred-story towers for billionaires to visit two weeks a year is a good real estate economy. It's not a good real estate economy. It doesn't take care of the people in the city. The things that we know are making it harder for us to really achieve what we need to achieve, to have a sustainable and resilient future. We have to change those things. Not okay for them just to stay the same.

Jennifer Hiatt: 36:37

So, how can design professionals today move beyond this modernism and thinking like you were just talking about, we kind of know, and relearn the historic design principles that could help meet today's climate goals? We don't really see that in school much, I don't think, at this point. So, how can we move forward?

Carl Elefante: 36:54

Yeah, so we don't see it much in school. And to the degree that architecture does spend time on what's not just in this month's architecture magazine, we tend to look at it in terms of stylistic development. And we're not really looking at it like what materials are those buildings made out of? What were the material flows? What were like literally what we now have as global supply chains? What were the supply chains that allowed cities to develop and thrive, et cetera? And so not just looking at the 6,000-year encyclopedia of buildings and cities, but to be more curious about what they really represent. What are the stories of the sustainability and resilience that are there? And part of it is the materials that they're made out of, part of it is how they were designed for their climates, for their weather, et cetera, that idea of passive design and operability. The other thing is we need to do is to not just study those things, but to learn from them and then figure out a way to use those things and adapt to them. I'll just give you a great story of a project that's by architects here in Washington, a guy named Rick Snyder of iStudio. They were doing a school edition. Washington built a lot of schools in the late 19th century. And they were doing an addition to this school, and they noticed that the classrooms all had these shafts in them built into the walls. They're like, why are there shafts here? And they were, oh, well, they must go down to the basement to like the furnace. Like, no, they didn't go down to the basement. They went up to the attic. Why did they have shafts in the classrooms? Go up to the attic. They went up to the attic and they looked around and they noticed that there was a cupola and that that tower actually would had louvers and windows in it. And actually, it was a vent so that the shafts were drawing air through the classrooms up into the hot attic. And the hot air escaping out of the top of the attic through the cupola was actually creating an air circulation system, what's called an induced ventilation system in the classrooms. And they emulated it in their new edition. In fact, they sort of improved it, engineering it a little bit more and using, you know, a kind of a south-facing solar orientation on the solar chimney so that it would sort of superheat the air and create more of an airflow and so on. So that's just an example of learning something from a historic building, from a building tradition, and then adapting it to a modern challenge and not only adapting it, but improving it. And we could just do that all day, every day, you know. So let's let's do that. And there's a city scale as well that that really applies to. And I'll just reference again the idea of really thinking about designing for climate and that cities have huge amounts of public space in them. We call them streets. Well, that huge amount of public space can be used for other things as well as moving transportation vehicles. And it can be stormwater management, it can be green things that lower the heat island, that make oxygen, you know, that take CO2 out of the air, that make it a pleasant place for us arboreal creatures to feel at home.

Stephanie Rouse: 40:24

Yeah, we just finished talking with the author of Beyond Complete Streets. So a lot of the concepts of we have so much public right-of-way, we're only using it for cars. There's so many other things that we could be using this right-of-way for that would really benefit communities.

Carl Elefante: 40:37

It's a great topic.

Stephanie Rouse: 40:39

So another path forward that you identified in the book is moving from this idea of development to reintegration, requiring a radically altered approach to engaging social communities. What does this look like?

Carl Elefante: 40:51

Well, there's kind of two dimensions to this. The first is just recognizing that, particularly in places like the United States, throughout Europe, literally, there are cities all around the world that since the end of World War II in the last 80 years, we have built so much. It's staggering how much we've built. And I'll just give you one little statistic on the United States just to give you a sense of how much we've built. So in 1950, the average family size was 3.9 people. The average house size was 900 square feet. In 2024, the average house size was 2.3 people. So we're more than a person less. We're about a person and a half less per family. The average house size was 2,400 square feet, so almost three times bigger. So we have a family that's almost half the size, and houses that are three times like, do we really need to build a lot more? We've built so much. How well are we using the space that we've built? And when you think of it in terms of cities, there is not a city that I know of in the United States of America and probably around the world that are modern era cities that haven't sprawled out beyond all reason. And, you know, back in the early modern era, you know, the kind of landscape world of designing with nature and, you know, Ian McCarg's design with nature, and the idea of defining the natural suitability of land, you know, like where should we be building? Where should we be avoiding aquifer recharge areas or slopes that are unstable or floodplains that we shouldn't build in? We've pretty much ignored all of those factors and we've just sprawled out like crazy. So there's hardly a place that I know of that we couldn't actually densify and shrink and just simply use our land better and give nature a little bit more of a chance, you know, to actually thrive in relationship to our cities. There's that side of it. But the other side of it is literally the people side and you know, recognizing the way Jane Jacobs did that the people that live in a neighborhood, the people that live in the city have a better idea about what the problems are and what the solutions are they need than Robert Moses sitting up in the 50th story of a tower somewhere thinking that he's got all the great ideas. Just really trusting in the people that live there, trusting in the diversity of the people that are experiencing the neighborhoods and places that we're intervening in, and engaging them in a real way in really planning the future of those places.

Jennifer Hiatt: 43:37

Ultimately, Going for Zero is a hopeful book. And I was wondering what continues to give you a sense of optimism that we will be able to meet the future needs and fight against climate change after this whole conversation of we are not doing it yet.

Carl Elefante: 43:52

Yeah. So so one of the things that you realize as you study history, and and again, all of my study is not about what did the kings and queens do. It's it's all about building sector, it's all about cities. I mean, I understand the world through buildings and cities. But when you look at the historical record, you realize that every generation faced what they truly considered were existential threats. And hey, Kupla Khan coming through with the horde, that's an existential threat, man. They they killed everybody in town. You know, I mean, you know, there were some very big challenges, but every generation also found a way to solve their problems and to move on and to not just survive it, but to thrive. I mean, Shakespeare never lived in an air-conditioned building, but he somehow or another got to write all those plays. I mean, you know, life didn't just exist, it didn't just make it through the day. Everything that we admire about human accomplishment was accomplished in those conditions. We're going to do the same thing. It's our human instinct to do it. Let's just get busy, let's help each other, and let's correct the things that need to be corrected. Like, why are we fighting the financial system? Why are we fighting a lot of the planning and zoning systems and things like that? Let's change those systems. They're just words on paper. Write different words on the paper. And let's make those things so that they're helping us instead of barriers to the progress that we need. So we'll do it. And when I go to architecture schools, sorry, college professors, for what I'm about to say, the students get it more than the faculty. The students get it. The next generation is chomping at the bit to get at this and really solve these problems. Let's help them instead of throwing barriers in front of them.

Stephanie Rouse: 45:42

And as this is booked on planning, what books would you recommend our readers check out?

Carl Elefante: 45:48

Well, I already mentioned Barnabas Calder's book about architecture from prehistory to climate change, which is appreciating the history of architecture not just as stylistic evolution, but really understanding it as energy and materials, et cetera. So just that's a great book. Just change your mindset about what you're seeing when you look back. There's three urban books that I think are just super important. One is Ed Glazier's Triumph of the City. I think it's so important because it just reminds us why did people make cities? Because it allowed us to have exchange and cooperation, which is really all that people really have. That's it. Those are the only tools that we have in the toolbox to get together and to cooperate with each other. That's what human progress is based on. The second book is Mindy Thompson Full of Loves, Main Street, and she's authored a lot of books. She's a psychiatrist who understands psychiatry. She understands human pathology issues and what you need to do. And she's a psychiatrist who understands human potential and how the built environment impacts it. And it's both sort of the bad, like wow, if you live in a bad place, it really affects you. But then it's also the good that, like Jane Jacobs, go and talk to those people. They understand how the built environment is impacting their lives. Trust in that. So it's just really a great understanding of how we can bring our urban and design expertise together with the actual people that are being affected by bad conditions in the urban environment, improve things. And then last but not least is Doug Farr's Sustainable Nation. Doug has written a couple of books, and Sustainable Nation is really taking the ideas of climate action and green building and sustainability and resilience and looking at it as a global proposition and saying, can't we get to all of us working together for a sustainable and resilient urban future? So I think that I would recommend all three of those books.

Stephanie Rouse: 48:01

I think those are all three new recommendations to add to our growing list of author-recommended readings.

Carl Elefante: 48:07

Well, great. I'm glad I was able to help.

Stephanie Rouse: 48:10

Well, Carl, thank you so much for joining us on the show to talk about your book, Going for Zero: Decarbonizing the Built Environment on the Path to Our Urban Future.

Carl Elefante: 48:19

A real pleasure to be with you. Thank you so much, Jennifer and Stephanie.

Jennifer Hiatt: 48:24

We hope you enjoyed this conversation with author Carl Alafante on his book, Going for Zero: Decarbonizing the Built Environment on the Path to Our Urban Future. You can get your own copy through the publisher at Island Press for a short time. You all may be know Island Press is merging with another publisher by supporting your local bookstore or, of course, supporting us at bookshop.org. 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 Bookshop Planning.