Cole: Take green-building ideas to a larger scale

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On Friday, the annual BetterBricks Awards will be handed out in Portland, highlighting innovative trends in green building and the people driving those trends.

Sustainable Business Oregon caught up with a former award winner, Naomi Cole, who was recognized as an emerging leader in 2008, to see what she's working on now.

Cole, who in 2008 was on the sustainable design team at ZGF Architects, is now leading the charge on EcoDistrict development at the Portland Sustainability Institute. We asked her about the evolution of her career and the challenges of neighborhood-scale planning for sustainability.

SBO: Did you set out to build a career around sustainability and building? If so, what inspired you to head in that direction?

Naomi Cole: I had architectural ambitions at a surprisingly young age. In 8th grade I spent a year working with a Portland architect, and in high school I had an internship with a small local firm. But even in high school I began to question the rapid change in Portland and the way that buildings seemed to go up and come down so effortlessly, and without much consideration for their material consumption or overall environmental impact. I started to wonder if my design interests were conflicting with my sense of social and environmental responsibility. But when I was 16, I heard a local American Institute of Architects lecture by William McDonough, who totally changed the way I looked at buildings and development. Suddenly, I saw architecture and urban design as one of the most effective solutions to the social and environmental challenges facing modern cities. I decided not to hop off my chosen career path but to pursue it even more strongly. I chose the University of Pennsylvania for its excellent architecture program, and once there, I realized that architecture alone wasn’t enough and decided to create an integrated degree with a double major in architecture and environmental studies and a minor in urban studies.

SBO: What career milestone are you most proud of in your work so far?

Cole: Leaving my cushy architecture job in the midst of a recession because it was no longer the right fit. I spent three years at ZGF Architects as part of the sustainable design team. It was a great mix of project work with a broader commitment to sustainability through resource development and firm-wide education. I had pretty amazing independence and flexibility for someone fresh out of school, but I started to question the client-driven nature of professional design firms. I became more interested in sustainability programs and policy that I thought might have more potential to push the innovative edge. Around this time, I heard murmurs about a new organization — now the Portland Sustainability Institute — being formed to lead a cross-sector sustainability agenda and high impact projects. I didn’t know much about it, but I had a feeling that it would be a good fit for me. So I took what most people told me was a crazy leap, and quit my job in January of 2009, at almost the peak of the recession, when architects were getting laid off left and right. I planned to do some consulting through my dad's sustainability company, Konstrukt, and had a few projects lined up with him, which provided a good transition. At the same time I was tracking PoSI's development and started volunteering on EcoDistricts work, then got a consulting contract, and then slowly worked up to a full time employee. I've been full time at PoSI for over a year now. I had no idea what would happen when I left ZGF and I feel incredibly lucky that it worked out like this.

SBO: What are the largest challenges you are wrestling with regarding EcoDistricts?

Cole: There are a lot of implementation challenges and much of our work through the EcoDistricts Initiative aims to address them.

The biggest challenge is bringing together the interests, and hopefully the investments, of multiple stakeholders and decision makers into a shared set of priorities. We're currently immersed in an engagement process in five pilot districts, to help figure out the potential neighborhood governance structure for district sustainability. We hope that the success of these pilots in collaborative governance, and the mechanisms for sharing investments, priorities, and goals across different stakeholders will offer new models for doing business and living in our communities.

Of course, finance is also a major challenge. There are very few financing mechanisms for district-scale investment. We're looking at models like Business Improvement Districts, Local Improvement Districts, and Parking Benefit Districts to test new ways to create pots of money for a neighborhood governance group to invest in their own community.

There are also very few assessment tools to help a city or neighborhood determine the best project priorities. We are developing a series of assessment tools that take a more rigorous approach to setting project priorities, so that investments will have the best outcome and benefit for the neighborhood and city as well as the environment and economic bottom line.

And finally, there aren’t many precedents for this type of work in existing neighborhoods. Most examples of green district development are entirely new neighborhoods, built on brownfields or greenfields, where it’s much easier to meet ambitious performance goals. It’s a totally different set of challenges in existing neighborhoods, which is the focus of our work.

SBO: What role does architecture and green building play in the larger idea of EcoDistricts?

The inspiration for EcoDistricts comes largely from Portland's architecture and green building community, who put the city on the map as a leader in sustainable development. More recently there’s been the sense that buildings are limited in their potential to meet major environmental challenges, and that the next opportunity for positive environmental change was at a larger scale — neighborhoods with connected buildings and shared resources. In PoSI's EcoDistrict work we focus on three major components of a sustainable neighborhood: human behavior, infrastructure, and green buildings. We imagine that EcoDistricts will be the places to grow the next generation of green buildings. The Oregon Sustainability Center is a great example, because it's on Portland State's campus (one of the pilot EcoDistricts) and will be a catalyst for the PSU EcoDistrict. We're trying to bring district-scale thinking to the project, by asking if there's an economy of scale to expanding the building's energy and water systems to serve adjacent properties and meet goals for more than just the building's footprint.

SBO: If you couldn’t live and work in Portland, where would you go, and why?

Philadelphia. I lived there while in college and miss it greatly. Had I not been from Portland, I would have stayed after graduation. Philly feels like more of a real city, whereas Portland can feel too precious sometimes. Unlike its neighbors, New York and Washington, D.C., Philly has a different sense of possibility. It feels like a city on the verge – where young, energetic, and inspired people can really affect change. I guess it's similar to Portland in that sense, but unusual for an east coast city. Like Portland, Philadelphia is also a city of neighborhoods and very walkable. It has a much more human scale than other big cities. But unlike Portland, Philadelphia does not have the sustainability expertise and leadership in the private or public sectors. It's changed a lot since I left five years ago, and there are many interesting projects underway, especially in the areas of stormwater and urban agriculture. But I still feel guilty sometimes that I returned to Portland, where green building is almost status quo, and left Philadelphia, which needs additional sustainability expertise. I still feel very loyal to Philly and would love the chance to bring EcoDistricts there one day.

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