Developer “A” built a LEED^® Silver–certified mixed-use project in Cincinnati that cost him ten percent more to build than conventional construction. Across the street, developer “B” achieved a LEED Gold certification on his mixed-use project of the same size and incurred only an additional cost of three percent for the higher certification. What made the difference?

One item that made a significant difference was a much-touted procedure called integrated design: a strategy that interlinks and balances a project’s context, ecology, site planning, infrastructure, landscape, and building design into a form that in totality exceeds the performance of its individual components.

Integrated design has two dimensions. The first involves the design process itself, which requires collaboration between multiple disciplines and stakeholders, especially during the initial stages of planning. Rather than working in isolation, designers are challenged to consider new strategies, systems, and products that better support a sustainable outcome and lead to a “better fit,” in the community and in its natural systems.

The second dimension is about interrelationships: how natural systems, infrastructure, and building design affect one another so that high levels of performance in one system can be leveraged to reduce the costs or improve the performance of others. This is called whole systems thinking. Achieving and exploiting as many of these linkages as possible is the goal of integrated design, but it is not possible without a shift in process.
Initial forays into green building have led many to believe that it is exorbitantly expensive. Checklists and certification programs prompted designers and developers to stack one energy-saving or water quality element on top of another, each at an incrementally higher cost. Often, these costs broke the back of the project, forcing it to retreat to more conventional practices. More recently, numerous projects have shown that through planning in a more integrated manner, synergies can be identified and exploited to leverage both economic and environmental paybacks.

Integrated design reduces the cost of being green. And with most states and cities moving ahead to require not only that their own buildings are built green but also many others, the ability to meet sustainable benchmarks without sacrificing the bottom line may become vital.

How does all of this relate to large-scale land development? The principles are fundamentally the same. If we think in a more holistic, integrated manner about our sites’ natural systems, community context, urban form, and water/mobility/energy infrastructures, we should be able to achieve a higher level of sustainability at a lower cost.

The Process
Historically, planning for large projects has been linear, starting with land acquisition, market analysis, engineering, and political constraints, and followed by conceptual planning, project refinement, and detailed drawings and construction. At each step of this process, plans are compared with market and financial parameters and appropriate adjustments are made.

The problem with this approach is that there is no tracking or exploitation of the interrelationships among systems, either built or natural. Nature is not ­linear—it is cyclical and interconnected. Any impact on land form, soils, sunlight, hydrology, flora, or fauna ripples through the others, often with ­unforeseen consequences. Cutting-edge ­projects today are incorporating high-performance development practices, such as low-impact stormwater design, green streets, reduced water landscape systems, and energy conservation and generation, allowing savings and environmental benefits from each system.

Getting Started
So how does this process work? A few key steps follow.

Integrated design starts with shifting the project team’s mind-set. The team must open up to a slightly different view of the world, one where interconnection and cause/effect are part of every decision. If this adjustment does not occur, the team frequently will abandon high-performance practices in the face of schedule constraints, budgetary constraints, or others’ contrary attitudes. The mindset shift must occur at the top as well; otherwise the team will not be empowered to make tough decisions.

Another early requirement is that all the needed team members are on hand from the beginning. Traditionally, ecologists are used only to get the wetland permit, the landscape architect comes on at the end to “shrub things up,” and the traffic engineer gets the roadway plan approved. Integrated design requires that all disciplines sit around the table from beginning to end, interacting, debating, and eventually discovering the breakthroughs that every project has sleeping within.

As Sandra Mendler points out in The Guidebook to Sustainable Design, “The project delivery process itself must change from a serial collection of discrete tasks performed with little interaction [among] players to a collaborative and self-conscious effort to integrate design strategies [among] all disciplines and all players in the project delivery process.     . . .[I]ntegrated design demands a more inclusive team working much more closely together than is traditionally the case.”

Members of a large project’s integrated design team must include not only the usual suspects (developer, planner, engineer, and marketer), but also guest builders, contractors, and purchasing agents so that costing can be accurate. Energy simulators, costing experts, and sustainability modeling engineers can help capture the latest in modeling and integrated thinking. Although this all seems expensive at first, the savings in the end will more than compensate.

Understand Community ­Relationships
In the development industry, many of us have been trained to avoid engaging the surrounding community until absolutely necessary. But integrated design means connecting upfront with the larger social and community context of a project in order to achieve the so-called “triple bottom line” of social, economic, and physical sustainability.

The word sustainability suggests long-term viability. If a community is not prepared to nurture and sustain a new addition, its innovations and low-impact practices may deteriorate. If the regional and community context are to be seriously considered, the site selection or ­location is relevant.

A site next to a transit corridor will generate less pollution; a project adjacent to a wildlife corridor may provide the means to preserve it in perpetuity; locating housing close to jobs will reduce ­vehicle miles traveled. An integrated design process understands and optimizes its relationships to its surroundings.

Develop a Market Context
For sustainable projects to succeed, they must respond to real-time market dynamics and opportunities. An integrated process acknowledges the importance of the marketplace and is realistic about the extent to which increased costs can be absorbed by higher pricing. Also, buyers and tenants may have priorities that could result in a strengthened economic upside if they are included in the products and master plan. This would be one of the benefits of bringing in at the beginning a market analyst and consumer research expert as part of the team.

Tie into Regional Systems
The integrated planning team establishes an understanding of the natural systems that surround a project and are influenced by it. Opportunities to link into or preserve subregional green infrastructure networks, natural lands, wildlife corridors, drainage systems, and subsurface water networks should be identified and exploited.

The regional transportation system may provide prospects for transit in the future, or joint public/private partnerships for accelerated multimodal development. Although water quality is highly regulated, permit requirements should be seen as minimal thresholds for protecting or enhancing downstream waterways.

Interrelate Site Systems
An integrated planning team includes biologists, hydrologists, geologists, landscape architects, and ecologists, who can inventory and discover the interconnections among the natural systems of a site. On a project in Rancho Mission Viejo in Orange County, California, development was to be restricted to side slopes in order to preserve a major adjacent creek corridor. However, soil specialists, who were included in the planning process, discovered that porous soils under the proposed development area fed the creek corridor its water and kept it healthy. Development was thus moved to less porous areas.

Establish Environmental Targets
Without goals, no mechanism exists for measuring success. Whether the goals are a 50 percent increase in water conservation, a 30 percent reduction in off-site vehicle trips, a post-development wildlife corridor system superior to what existed before development, or a net-zero energy-consuming community, goals energize the process and provide tangible targets.

Create a Preliminary ­Sustainability Program
The sustainability program addresses key components such as energy, water, mobility, indoor environmental quality, green infrastructure, education, and urban form. The integrated planning team works together to achieve high-performance solutions for each component, keeping in mind that those solutions that align with market preferences, reduce costs, and/or achieve maximum environmental benefits have priority.

Optimize Interrelationships
The crux of integrated planning is in the identification of interrelationships between natural and human-made systems. Specific cause and effect interconnections that can be leveraged to increase benefits and reduce costs are known as “solution multipliers,” and often involve more than one step to be maximized. For instance, daylight drainage swales that improve storm water quality will not be optimized unless the size of underground storm drains is reduced. A local shuttle/transit system concurrently requires a reduction in travel lanes in order to provide more green space, improve stormwater quality, or reduce heat gain.

Refine with a Cost/Benefit Analysis
Few projects can afford to do it all. Integrated methodologies can help developers get more bang for their buck, but at some point tough decisions need to be made, and they should not be made arbitrarily or based on only the highest initial cost.

A cost/benefit analysis step helps identify those elements that achieve the highest environmental benefit—the actual improvement a sustainable practice makes over a conventional practice in a project, measured in energy and water usage, natural systems impact, green house gas emissions, vehicle miles traveled, waste generated, and other appropriate metrics—at the lowest monetary cost.

The methodology for taking this step with large projects is relatively new and uses computer software programs to compute and chart cost/benefit ratios on each high-performance proposal. The cost component includes both “first costs” and longer-term “lifecycle costs.” Environmental benefit can be calculated by a good sustainability engineer. Such an analysis allows a numerical ratio of cost to benefit to be established for each component, which leads to informed decisions.

Finalize Sustainability Program and Implement
The team can now decide which high-performance components best achieve its initial targets within cost and market parameters. Guidelines are created, and builders, contractors, and the sales force go through an educational program in order to share the vision. During construction, monitoring and testing make certain that targets are being achieved.

The end users also are part of the process. In an ideal scenario, they have been asked at the outset what is most important to their quality of life. With a sustainability program in effect, they can now be informed about how to operate—over the long term—the high-performance machine that is their community. In the final analysis, an integrated systems planning approach is the surest way to go green without breaking the bank. A developer using an integrated process will achieve a higher standard of sustainable design, save money, enhance the quality of consumers’ lives, and—last but certainly not least—enjoy a high return on investment. SLDT