The Sustainable City---It’s Not Utopia, but It Could Be One Day!

ORLANDO, Fla. --- For more than twenty years, Orlando economist David Marks (top right photo)  has studied the evolution of towns and cities in the U.S. and Europe. As a president of Marketplace Advisors, Inc., and community development consultant, Marks uses what he has learned to help create sustainable town centers in new communities and urban redevelopment projects.

But Marks is thinking beyond town centers. He’s writing a book to teach planners and elected officials how to create better urban communities. And he wants to expand the definition of “sustainable.”

“Typically, we use the term ‘sustainable’ to refer to energy usage. But successful communities provide residents a lot more than efficient allocation of resources,” Marks said.

(Park Avenue, Winter Park, FL, middle left photo)

The sustainable community meets three fundamental challenges, Marks said.

“It helps bring young people to maturity. It helps integrate them into the society in which they will live as adults. And it helps orient them into the greater environment,” he explained.

It’s not coincidental that those same three challenges constitute the dominant goals of religion and family life, and should drive domestic policy, Marks said.

“Today we can analyze the attributes that constitute a sustainable urban environment,” Marks explained. “We can plan them and build them. We can create sustainable urban communities based on what we have found in historically sustainable urban centers,” he said.

Size, for example. “Sustainable communities in our society should encompass 100,000 to 150,000 people,” Marks said. “With that population, economics of scale permit valuable amenities that enrich the human experience, from healthcare centers to movie theaters, parks and recreational spaces,” he said.

Density is another target. “Population density is a major key to a successful, sustainable urban environment,” Marks said.

 

(Prague skyline middle right photo)

“Ideal density is great enough to accommodate social interaction without extensive use of personal automobiles,” Marks said. “That doesn’t mean we have to give up our cars, but in the best communities there are convenient alternatives to reach the supermarket or the theater---they have a pedestrian centered street layout, for example, and biking paths, a shuttle or a subway,” he said.

Marks has analyzed successful urban communities in dozens of places from Prague to Seattle to Winter Park, but only the parts. So far the whole package---the sustainable city---exists only on paper. Marks is writing a book on sustainable urban environments he expects to finish this year.

“Successful urban environments developed organically over generations and reflect a wide range of historical influences, from geography to culture to building technology to economic eras,” Marks said.

“Farm towns, fishing villages, desert communities and old world European cities all have common attributes that make them sustainable long past the era when stone walls held back invading armies or families lined the wharfs to welcome home the whale fleet,” Marks explained.

(Seattle, WA skyline lower left  photo)

“There is no utopia, but we cannot continue sprawl into the suburbs without severely hampering our essential social institutions---families, churches, schools---and destroying our environment,” Marks said.

“We can create better places to live and work that will better serve our needs to raise our children, integrate them into our society and orients us to the greater environment,” he said.

For more information, contact:  

David Marks, Marketplace Advisors, Inc., 407-599-0007, dmarks@cfl.rr.com;  

Larry Vershel or Beth Payan, LV Communications, 407-644-4142