On September 24, a dedicated group of community members, landscape architects, engineers, renewable energy experts and community league representatives volunteered to give up a beautiful, sunny Saturday to sit inside the Bonnie Doon Community League Hall and take part in the very first The Way We Green design charrette.
The City of Edmonton’s Office of Environment worked with ISL Engineering and the Edmonton Federation of Community Leagues to host the day-long charrette which was offered to build visions of sustainability at a neighbourhood level and identify gaps in capacity or barriers to implementing The Way We Green.
To be honest this was my very first experience with a design charrette of any kind so I didn’t have any preconceptions about what would happen, I just hoped that it would generate a conversation, a buzz, and a vision. As we planned this project I learned that there are two distinct types of design charrette: visioning and implementation. The Bonnie Doon charrette was chosen to be a visioning exercise to test selected strategic actions from The Way We Green, Edmonton’s environmental strategic plan. Visioning charrettes are by definition, “speculative explorations of a possible future not directly tied to a government-regulated development or redevelopment proposal. A visioning charrette produces explicit depictions of what a community would look like if it were built in conformance with the sustainability principles spelled out in the design brief.”[1] That means that while the results of the Bonnie Doon charrette won’t have any effect on the neighbourhood itself, they do provide valuable information and learning as we work to implement The Way We Green.
Each of the five working groups at the charrette was assigned the task of building an image of a sustainable mature neighbourhood. New transportation realities were considered as well as market-style walkable areas, greater capacity for renewable energy, green rooftop options, densification options and greater infusions of culture and aesthetics. Each group seemed to add a different flavour to their discussion depending on the expertise at the table; each offering a different vision of sustainable neighbourhood.
After seven hours of deliberation, the vision documents created by the groups were collected as well as the individual feedback forms. As people thanked the team for being involved in the process I breathed a sigh of relief that the day seemed to be a success on many levels. This thought was punctuated by a comment shared by one participant who, as he was leaving, stated that he learned so much more than expected about the community and neighbourhood context related to sustainability and felt it was a great opportunity. In all, a solid achievement on a sunny Saturday in September!
[1] Condon,P (2007) Design Charrettes for Sustainable Communities.
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I checked out the photo and it is a great group of folk. I would love to see the vision documents. Nice work.
Great article; I would very much be interested in participating in one of these charrettes.
Great to hear it was a success. We are meeting with 22 communities here in southern Alberta to identify their investment readiness for renewable energy so this was very timely! I see a few familiar faces as well, so that is encouraging. I’m definitely glad I’m connecting with the same dedicated individuals.
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