Transitioning to Sustainable Urban Development: a Niche-Based Approach

TRANSITIONING TO SUSTAINABLE URBAN DEVELOPMENT: A NICHE-BASED APPROACH BY ROBERT HARVEY BOYER DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Regional Planning in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2013 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Brian Deal, Chair and Director of Research Professor Faranak Miraftab Professor Robert Olshansky Professor Ramona Oswald Assistant Professor Gale Fulton Abstract Solving the ‘wicked’ and ‘persistent’ environmental problems of the twenty-first century will require changes in the social and technological structures that guide urban development. While modern planning offers a century’s worth of solutions to environmental problems at the local scale, many of these ‘first-order’ solutions exacerbate problems at larger scales (e.g. sprawl, auto dependency, climate change). Change of the ‘second-order’ is necessary to address problems such as climate change, energy scarcity, and the destruction of finite ecosystems. The Multi-Level Perspective of Socio-Technical Systems (MLP) claims that ‘second order’ structural change is resisted by socio-technical regimes—a tangle of mutually reinforcing rules, physical structures, and social networks. While regimes are critical for day-to-day functioning in a complex world, the regime structures that guide urban development in North America have resulted in human settlements that consume life-supporting resources faster than they can replenish, and result in diffuse social and environmental consequences that are difficult to ‘solve’ at the local scale. According to the MLP, regimes begin to transform under the exogenous pressure of socio- technical landscape forces (e.g. demographic shifts, national politics, armed conflict, resource scarcity) and with alternatives incubated in socio-technical niches, or networks of actors that play by different ‘rules of the game.’ This dissertation looks specifically to the relationship between local urban development regimes and ecovillages—grassroots niche projects ideologically committed to low-impact living. Ecovillages are a locally-rooted response to the inadequacies of government environmental policy in the twenty-first century. They exist in urban, suburban, and rural areas on six continents. They attempt to model alternative housing, transportation, energy production, food production, and social governance all on one site. In recent years, multiple ecovillages have earned media attention for partnering with local policy makers on climate change and other environmental initiatives. Some have helped craft new land use regulations that allow for a broader mix of uses and cooperative spaces. Others are less influential. Why are certain ecovillages influential and others less so – especially in terms of urban policy? Drawing from ii Smith (2007), I hypothesize that the most influential ecovillages share some but not all elements of the urban development regime. That is, they are ‘intermediately’ situated relative to the mainstream and the radical grassroots. This enables them to translate their innovative practices to mainstream actors. I test this relationship by disseminating a survey to ecovillages across the United States and Canada and scoring them on two scales: regime distance (independent variable) and regime influence (dependent variable). The survey results confirm Smith’s hypothesis. “Intermediacy” is a necessary but insufficient condition for ecovillage projects to influence mainstream planning policy. I elaborate on these results by conducting several ethnographic case studies that compare ‘influential’ ecovillages against their less influential counterparts. Taking up residence in ecovillages and conducting semi-structured interviews with ecovillage member-residents, I find that ‘intermediacy’ is a dynamic and liminal state. Influential ecovillages exist simultaneously inside and outside the urban development regime, but they do not start as intermediate. Rather, they “earn” this status by ‘settling in’ to the regime, accepting some regime rules, and demonstrating their feasibility to institutional actors in the mainstream. It is through these connections that the regime begins to ‘warm up’ to the niche experiments, and begins to adopt their practices as municipal code. The results of this dissertation offer planners a path toward a clearer understanding of systemic change for sustainable communities and support interpretive/pragmatic conceptions of planning, which frame planners as facilitators of communication amongst diverse entities rather than objective analysts or experts. Future research and practice might use the MLP and similar theories to frame innovative local and regional environmental policies as regime transition. iii Foreword In the spring of 2010, a friend invited me to dinner at her home in an “ecovillage” just outside Urbana, Illinois. The small community included a mix of students and retired couples working together to achieve energy, water, and food semi-sufficiency. They generated their own electricity using solar photovoltaic panels, they grew much of their own food, and harvested and filtered their drinking water on-site. The community residents drove less than most individuals in the region—they explained— because they met many of their needs in their ‘neighborhood’. What encouraged me most about this small initiative was that it achieved low-impact, presumably more sustainable living through neither space-age technology nor self-deprivation, but rather a combination of off-the-shelf tools, smart design, and simple changes in routine. Clever building design took advantage of free sunlight and nightly fluctuations in temperature to reduce the amount of energy necessary to achieve comfortable lighting and climate. Buildings conserved heat by storing it in the thermal mass of the floor and walls. Residents reduced their energy footprint by finding clever ways to live in smaller dwelling units, and share cars, kitchens, laundry machines, and open space. And no one was suffering. In fact—I thought to myself—I think I’d enjoy living here. It seemed as if a feasible model for sustainable urban development had arrived! Or had it? The small ecovillage project I visited was only possible because it existed outside city boundaries where it had the space and relative freedom to experiment with new buildings and infrastructure. And as it stood, the community was effectively frozen in place because even rural zoning regulations limited the cooperative experiment in a number of ways. Furthermore, the ecovillage was likely be ‘zoned out’ in the near future as the city grew and inevitably annexed the surrounding land. That this community was marginalized by municipal regulations rather than embraced by policy makers caught my attention. Having interned for months in a city planning office, I knew local policy makers were interested in “sustainability.” My planning co-workers were especially enthusiastic about energy-saving best practices and walkable communities. They rode their bikes to work, assigned me to iv research energy efficiency standards, and had recently added a sustainability element to the comprehensive plan. Wasn’t such an ecovillage experiment useful to policy makers interested in sustainability, both for its successes and shortcomings? Where did planners and policy makers draw the line between a ‘zoning violation’ and ‘useful experimentation?’ Wouldn’t it be fascinating to see if such a settlement could work in the city? More importantly, if achieving sustainability goals like lowering greenhouse gas emissions required major changes in society—as I believed then and now—where would major change come from if not from spaces that allowed for imagination, experimentation, and safe exposure to alternatives? And if such spaces existed, how could planners use them to understand and stimulate larger change? It was this enigma that propelled me to examine the relationship between ‘niche’ experiments and creating sustainable community. v Acknowledgements The dissertation that follows is the product of a four-year adventure. While I take full responsibility for all of its contents, it has been shaped by countless others. The last year has been a literal adventure made possible by a dissertation travel grant from the Graduate College at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign. This project began in 2009 with the financial and intellectual support of my advisor and dissertation chair Brian Deal. In the last four years, Brian has approached this dissertation with a balance of flexibility and guidance that has allowed me to explore theoretical frames and research contexts that are relatively new to the planning discipline. He has supported me through the highest highs and lowest lows, and has bought me hundreds of cups of coffee along the way. His mentorship and wisdom have been invaluable. I am grateful to the members of my dissertation committee. Gale Fulton, Faranak Miraftab, Rob Olshansky, and Ramona Oswald. Each has provided advice, honest critique, and encouragement in unique ways. Thanks also to Arnab Chakraborty, Ed Feser, and Ann Silvis for their early support. And to Andy Isserman for encouraging me to pursue an academic career in planning. I’ve benefitted from the open ears, honest feedback, and encouragement of some brilliant officemates and colleagues including Sofia Sianis, Mallory Rahe, Sang Lee, Dustin Allred, Troy Mix, and Chenxi Yu. I’m proud to have

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