Recycling a Site Planning and Design Course into a Sustainable Site Planning and Design Course

One of the topics from our Fall 2008 paper titled Sustainable Construction -An Education and Research Perspective, was the integration of sustainable development methods into an existing site planning and development course.The goal of this paper is to further develop this idea of "recycling" an existing site planning and design course by establishing the following site development criteria; features that are redundant should be removed (e.g.oversized road widths), those that are compatible with our focus should be reused (e.g.locating planting islands in all areas of parking lots), and that accepted sustainable site methods should be woven into the course (e.g.use rainwater collection systems and reuse grey water for site irrigation).Sustainable development was first defined by Gro Harlem Brundtland; then-prime minister of Norway, in his 1987 report to the United Nations General Assembly titled Our Common Future, as "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." 1 Sustainability/climate change is the most critical emerging concern for design professionals according to 84% of the deans and chairs of NAAB Accredited architecture programs across the United States who responded to the 2009 Design Intelligence survey.Of respondents, 72% stated that the most significant change to their programs over the past five years has been more emphasis on sustainable design.In addition 38% of architecture schools surveyed currently integrate sustainability into their coursework, 2% offer sustainability courses as separate courses and 61% offer both integrated and separate sustainability courses. 2 To achieve the goal of integrating sustainable construction methods into a site planning & design course we will examine both the site planning course descriptions of architecture programs in U.S. colleges/universities that have been recognized for their sustainable curricula and the criteria of the most well known green development design guidelines: the US Green Building Council's LEED for New Construction -Sustainable Sites, and the Environmental Protection Agency's Low Impact Development program.14