Green Neighborhoods

Planning and design guidelines for air, water, and urban forest quality.

Green Neighborhoods: Planning and Design Guidelines for Air, Water, and Urban Forest Quality builds on results and lessons learned from "Comparing the Values of Urban Forests in New Community Development" — a project to compare different neighborhood development patterns against measures of land use, transportation, cost and environmental impact. Three alternative neighborhood plans were created for a demonstration site (about 311 acres of valley floor land in the mid-Willamette River basin near Corvallis, Oregon) then measured and compared. Each of the three alternatives represents a common neighborhood development pattern nation-wide. A conventional low density "Status Quo"(SQ) plan represents many subdivision developments. A denser "Neighbor-hood Village" (NV) plan represents a more compact and mixed use new urbanist pattern, and finally a lower environmental impact "Open Space"plan (OS) represents similar density and land use mixes to the Neighbor-hood Village plan with greater open space, urban forest, and stormwater features. Each alternative preserves different amounts of open space and pursues different approaches to infrastructure, urban forests, and stormwater management. Representative land use cases derived from field-measured examples and data (the Elements of Neighborhood database by CHI) are assigned to appropriate areas of the three alternatives (Kellett, 1997 and 1998, and Girling and Kellett, 1999, describe this process in detail). Based on these case assignments, each plan is inventoried for summary data such as Landuse area; dwellings; densities; building coverage; paving coverage; forest, tree; and turf cover; and so on. From these inventories, other measures of land use, environmental impact (such as impervious surfaces, areas of landscape, forest preservation, stormwater runoff, and water quality), and cost are created and compared. CITY green (by American Forests) was used to estimate stormwater peak flows for both two-year and ten-year storm events. SUNOM (by the Center for Watershed Protection) was used to estimate annual water pollution loads associated with stormwater runoff. Land, infrastructure, and urban forest costs used to compare alternatives are based on specifications and costs (1999 Dollars) common in the Corvallis area.

NUCFAC recommended award: ORUF-98-001

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