WorldChanging brings us this feature, including an exclusive recap of the charrette written by Jenny Aguilar.

On December 5, our allies at Urban Re:Vision joined forces with the City of Dallas, Texas to host a planning session for an incredibly ambitious green building project. The day-long charrette brought together city officials, urban planners, master architects and green building experts in anticipation of a truly visionary project: the creation of a sustainable city block in downtown Dallas.

The charrette helped prepare guidelines for an international design competition called Building Blocks Dallas, which will kick off in January. The process began in August, when experts convened in San Francisco to determine the unified conceptual framework, a document that would guide the creation of a sustainable city block project in any community. The session in Dallas focused exclusively on translating that universal framework to Dallas itself, with the goal of creating a set of detailed data so complete that any contestant around the world would be able to create a vision for a sustainable block relevant to Dallas, regardless of whether he or she had ever set foot in Texas.

The winning city block design will actually be built, on what is currently an unused parking lot spanning two blocks across the street from Dallas City Hall. According to Urban Re:Vision, one of the two blocks will be transformed into public green space; the other will be devoted to the new sustainable city block.

The lead developer for the project will be the Central Dallas Community Development Corporation (CDC), a local community development organization. The CDC will be responsible for bringing in the developers and contractors that will turn the design vision into a living, functioning location. The non-profit developer is an arm of the Central Dallas Ministries, a faith-based community development organization whose mission is to build affordable housing, develop communities, and establish economic opportunities for the people of Dallas County.

But the big-picture goal of the contest isn’t limited to sustainable development in Dallas alone, says Ian Bryan, media relations director at Urban Re:Vision. “The reason we’re doing it is to create a model [for sustainable development] that’s so well thought out that any city could replicate it in their own community.”

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Dwell blog writer Aaron Britt brings us this feature on the recent Re:Vision Dallas design charrette.

On Friday of last week I attended the Re:Vision Dallas design charrette, one that hopes to remake a blighted city block of downtown Dallas into a haven of sustainable design and a catalyst for urban revitalization.

Having procured a 2.5-acre city block just next to Dallas’ IM Pei–designed City Hall that currently hosts a surface parking lot, Re:Vision Dallas invited dozens of architects, engineers, designers, and city planners to City Hall to discuss the design brief. Before opening it up to a competition amongst the wider design community, the Re:Vision team sought the group’s advice and critical eyes. Though most came from and worked in Texas, many for the City of Dallas itself, participants traveled from as far away as Montana and hailed from all corners of the globe. Eric Cory Freed and Brent Brown were amongst the leaders of the day’s events.

[ Read entire article ]

By Jesse Fox

Could the first fully sustainable city block in America rise out of a nondescript parking lot in downtown Dallas, Texas?

After a full year of design competitions aimed at stimulating discussion about the nature of sustainability in cities, San Francisco-based Urban Re:Vision is about to transform theory into reality in Dallas. The land is available, the city is on board and there appear to be no serious obstacles to the development of a city block that would radically redefine sustainability in the urban context.

The site today.

Over the past year, Urban Re:Vision held a series of design competitions, which addressed issues from transportation and materials to energy and economy in the city block. Here are some of the results of the Re:Construct competition, announced in September at West Coast Green.

[ Read entire article ]

Examiner.com: Dallas to build first sustainable square block in the United States

It is not surprising that Texas leads the nation in wind power generation, for on their way of fixing energy security Texans indeed have their eye on the future. And that does not only concern renewable energy. Looking to transform downtown Dallas into a community where people can both work and live, the City of Dallas now has decided to build what will be the first sustainable inner-city square block in the United States.

“Sustainability thinks strategically about how you use space and how you use structures and that goes beyond the green”, Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert said exemplifying with the Trinity River project. “A lot of times we’ll think of it as being enormous benefits for recreation, transportation, or flood control, those elements. But the biggest part is the idea that a space in our city that has been historically a divide could all of a sudden bring people together”

[ Read full Examiner.com article ]

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Pegasus news: Dallas plans to create first fully sustainable, urban square block in the U.S.

On Friday, a “Design Charrette” convened at Dallas City Hall to examine the framework and community impact of what will become the first fully sustainable, urban square block in the United States.

Attended by community design and urban planning experts from across the nation, the outcome included a series of recommendations which will structure an international design competition to create the actual block. That competition, which kicks off in January 2009, will invite architects and planners from around the world to translate the needs of the Dallas community into structural designs for the future city block. The Central Dallas Community Development Corporation (CDC) will be the lead developer on the project.

[ Read entire Pegasus news article ]

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