Communities By Design
10 Fundamental Principles for Livable Communities

Design on a Human Scale
Compact, pedestrian-friendly communities allow residents to walk to shops, services, cultural resources, and jobs and can reduce traffic congestion and benefit people's health.

Provide Choices
People want variety in housing, shopping, recreation, transportation, and employment. Variety creates lively neighborhoods and accommodates residents in different stages of their lives.

Encourage Mixed-Use Development
Integrating different land uses and varied building types creates vibrant, pedestrian-friendly and diverse communities.

Preserve Urban Centers
Restoring, revitalizing, and infilling urban centers takes advantage of existing streets, services and buildings and avoids the need for new infrastructure. This helps to curb sprawl and promote stability for city neighborhoods.

Vary Transportation Options
Giving people the option of walking, biking and using public transit, in addition to driving, reduces traffic congestion, protects the environment and encourages physical activity.

Build Vibrant Public Spaces
Citizens need welcoming, well-defined public places to stimulate face-to-face interaction, collectively celebrate and mourn, encourage civic participation, admire public art, and gather for public events.

Create a Neighborhood Identity
A "sense of place" gives neighborhoods a unique character, enhances the walking environment, and creates pride in the community.

Protect Environmental Resources
A well-designed balance of nature and development preserves natural systems, protects waterways from pollution, reduces air pollution, and protects property values.

Conserve Landscapes
Open space, farms, and wildlife habitat are essential for environmental, recreational, and cultural reasons.

Design Matters
Design excellence is the foundation of successful and healthy communities.

AIA/Cote 10 Measures of Sustainable Design

Sustainable Design Intent & Innovation
Sustainable design is rooted in a mindset that understands humans as an integral part of nature and responsible for stewardship of natural systems. Sustainable design begins with a connection to personal values and embraces the ecological, economic, and social circumstances of a project. Architectural expression itself comes from this intent, responding to the specifics region, watershed, community, neighborhood, and site.

Regional/Community Design & Connectivity
Sustainable design recognizes the unique cultural and natural character of place, promotes regional and community identity, contributes to public space and community interaction, and seeks to reduce auto travel and parking requirements and promote alternative transit strategies.

Land Use & Site Ecology
Sustainable design reveals how natural systems can thrive in the presence of human development, relates to ecosystems at different scales, and creates, re-creates or preserves open space, permeable groundscape, and/or on-site ecosystems.

Bioclimatic Design
Sustainable design conserves resources and optimizes human comfort through connections with the flows of bioclimatic region, using place-based design to benefit from free energies—sun, wind, and water. In footprint, section, orientation, and massing, sustainable design responds to site, sun path, breezes, and seasonal and daily cycles.

Light & Air
Sustainable design creates a comfortable and healthy interior environment while providing abundant daylight and fresh air. Daylight, lighting design, natural ventilation, improved indoor air quality, and views, enhance the vital human link to nature.

Water Cycle
Recognizing water as an essential resource, sustainable design conserves water supplies, manages site water and drainage, and capitalizes on renewable site sources using water-conserving strategies, fixtures, appliances, and equipment.

Energy Flows & Energy Future
Rooted in passive strategies, sustainable design contributes to energy conservation by reducing or eliminating the need for lighting and mechanical heating and cooling. Smaller and more efficient building systems reduce pollution and improve building performance and comfort. Controls and technologies, lighting strategies, and on-site renewable energy should be employed with long-term impacts in mind.

Materials, Building Envelope & Construction
Using a life cycle lens, selection of materials and products can conserve resources, reduce the impacts of harvest/manufacture/transport, improve building performance, and secure human health and comfort. High-performance building envelopes improve comfort and reduce energy use and pollution. Sustainable design promotes recycling through the life of the building.

Long Life, Loose Fit
Sustainable design seeks to optimize ecological, social, and economic value over time. Materials, systems, and design solutions enhance versatility, durability, and adaptive reuse potential. Sustainable design begins with right-sizing and foresees future adaptations.

Collective Wisdom & Feedback Loops
Sustainable design recognizes that the most intelligent design strategies evolve over time through shared knowledge within a large community. Lessons learned from the integrated design process and from the site and building themselves over time should contribute to building performance, occupant satisfaction, and design of future projects.