What is Green Urbanism?

The term Green Urbanism keeps showing up unexpectedly in newspaper
articles,
conference session titles, blog posts, and casual conversation.  While
there is an innate, intuitive sense of the meaning, green urbanism may
also
seem as elusive as it is evocative.  Having given this topic a fair
amount
of thought over the past several years, I, and my colleague and
collaborator Ted
Bardacke, arrived at the following working definition:

green urbanism: the
practice of creating communities mutually beneficial to humans and the
environment

This practice builds on the seminal efforts of Olmsted, Ian Mcharg, Jane
Jacobs, Anne Spirn, Michael Sorkin, and many others, often taking many
shapes
and directions.  But the questions are strikingly similar.

How do you design a neighborhood or a city like an ecosystem? What is
the right benchmark for sustainability? How do you integrate the many
components of urbanism to generate the synergies essential to creating a
sustainable place?

Our ability to answer these questions and to rise to the subtle but deep
challenge posed by bringing together the words "green" and
"urban" is a function of how we see our place in the world. By
understanding that people are part and parcel of nature, and have never
been
external to the ecological flows of the natural world, we can become
reconnected to nature, shift how we perceive our relationship to the
environment, and reevaluate what we want – and what we need – from that
most
wondrous of human inventions, the city.