Building codes are both an index of social values and a strategy to enforce those values. On these grounds an examination is made of the emergence of green building codes in North America as a category of building codes that is particularly important for sustainable development. The classical definition of sustainability proposes that multiple, competing frames of interpretation—economic development, environmental protection and social equity—can, in theory, be balanced. It is found, however, that in practice equity is generally ignored. Through historical and theoretical investigation, it is hypothesised that codes which are successful in incorporating equity as a criterion emerge from public talk and social learning, not abstract speculation. The paper concludes by articulating a change-oriented research design for an ongoing project to test this hypothesis.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Agyeman, J., Bullard, R.D. and Evans, B. ( 2003) Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal World . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
2.
Andoh, R.Y.G. and Declerck, C. ( 1997) Source control and distributed storage: a cost effective approach to urban drainage for the new millennium?Paper presented at the 8th Annual Conference on Urban Storm Drainage, Sydney.
3.
Barber, B.R. ( 1984) Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age . Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
4.
Beck, U. ( 1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
5.
Ben-Joseph, E. ( 2005) The Code of the City: Standards and the Hidden Language of Place Making. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
6.
Bijker, W.E. ( 1987) The social construction of bakelite: toward a theory of invention, in: W. Bijker, T. Pinch and T. P. Hughes (Eds) The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
7.
Brand, R. (2005) Synchronizing Science and Technology with Human Behaviour. London: Earthscan.
8.
Brulle, R.J. (2000) Agency, Democracy and Nature: The US Environmental Movement from a Critical Theory Perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
9.
Campbell, S. ( 1996) Green cities, growing cities, just cities?Urban planning and the contradictions of sustainable development, Journal of the American Planning Association, 62(3), pp. 466-482.
10.
Carmona, M., Marshall, S. and Stevens, Q. (2006) Design Codes: Their Use and Potential. Oxford: Elsevier.
11.
Chiradeja, P. and Ramakumar, R. ( 2004) An approach to quantify the technical benefits of distributed generation, IEEE Transactions on Energy Conversion, 19(4), pp. 764-773.
12.
Davis, H. ( 2006) The Culture of Building. New York: Oxford University Press.
13.
Dewey, J. ( 1927/1954) The Public and Its Problems. Athens,OH: Ohio University Press.
14.
Dooling, S. and Greve, A. (forthcoming) Urban ecology and ecological gentrification: complexity and consequences in human-dominated systems. In: Proceedings of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning Annual Conference, Milwaukee, WI.
15.
Downing, A.J. ( 1842) Cottage Residences. New York.
16.
Dryzek, J.S. ( 1997) The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Discourses. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
17.
Emerson, C. ( 2007) The Smartcode Solution to Sprawl. Washington, DC: Environmental Law Institute.
18.
Feenberg, A. ( 1991) Critical Theory of Technology. New York: Oxford University Press.
19.
Feenberg, A. ( 2002) Transforming Technology: A Critical Theory Revisited. New York: Oxford University Press.
20.
Fischer, F. ( 2000) Citizens, Experts and the Environment. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
21.
Fischer, F. ( 2003) Reframing Public Policy: Discursive Politics and Deliberative Practices. New York: Oxford University Press.
22.
Foucault, M. ( 1972/1976) The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Harper & Row.
23.
Foucault, M. ( 1975/1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, transl. by A. Sheridan. New York: Pantheon.
24.
Gieryn, T. ( 2002) What buildings do, Theory and Society , 31(1), pp. 35-74.
25.
Glassie, H. ( 1975) Folk Housing in Middle Virginia: A Structural Analysis of Historic Artifacts. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press.
26.
Gottlieb, R. ( 2005) Forcing the Spring. London: Island Press.
27.
Guy, S. and Farmer, G. ( 2001) Reinterpreting sustainable architecture: the place of technology, Journal of Architectural Education, 54(3), pp. 140-148.
28.
Guy, S. and Moore, S.A. ( 2005) Sustainable Architectures: Natures and Cultures in Europe and North America. London: Routledge /Spon.
29.
Hale, C. ( 2001) What is activist research?, Items and Issues: SSRC Newsletter, 2(1/2), pp. 13-15.
30.
Haraway, D. ( 1995) Situated knowledge: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective, in: A. Feenberg and A. Hannay (Eds) Technology and the Politics of Knowledge, pp. 175-194. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
31.
Hawken, P. ( 2007) Blessed Unrest. New York: Viking Penguin.
32.
Hersey, G. ( 1988) The Lost Meaning of Classical Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
33.
Hickman, L.A. ( 2001) Philosophical Tools for a Technological Culture: Putting Pragmatism to Work. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
34.
Hirt, S. ( 2007) The devil is in the definitions: contrasting American and German approaches to zoning, Journal of the American Planning Association, 73(4), pp. 436-450.
35.
Holden, M. ( 2008) Social learning in planning: Seattle’s sustainable development codebooks, Progress in Planning, 69, pp. 1-40.
36.
Huge, E. and Tuerk, S. ( 2004) Special issue: building codes, Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal, 35.
37.
Imrie, R. ( 1996) Disability and the City: International Perspectives. New York: St Martin’s Press.
38.
Johnson, J. ( 1988) Mixing humans and non-humans together: the sociology of a door-closer, Social Problems, 35(3), pp. 298-310.
39.
Kamberelis, G. and Dimitriadis, G. ( 2005) On Qualitative Inquiry: Approaches to Language and Literacy Research. New York: Teachers College Press.
40.
Kemmis, S. and McTaggart, R. ( 2000) Participatory action research, in: N. K. Denzin and Y. S. Lincoln (Eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research, 2nd edn., pp. 567-606. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
41.
Knox, P. ( 2005) Creating ordinary places: slow cities in a fast world , Journal of Urban Design, 10(1), pp. 1-11.
42.
Latour, B. (1987) Science in Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
43.
Lincoln, Y. and Guba, I. (1985) Naturalistic Inquiry. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
44.
McCracken, G. (1988) The Long Interview. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
45.
Melosi, M. (2000) The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
46.
Minteer, B.A. ( 2002) Deweyan democracy and environmental ethics, in: B. A. Minteer and B. Pepperman Taylor (Eds) Democracy and the Claims of Nature: Critical Perspectives for a New Century, pp. 33-48. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
47.
Misa, T.J. ( 2003) Modern architecture and building technology: literature review. Cities working group, Tensions of Europe network.
48.
Moore, P. ( 2003) Sustained by science, Architecture, 92(9), p. 112.
49.
Moore, S.A. ( 2007) Alternative Routes to the Sustainable City: Austin, Curitiba and Frankfurt. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
50.
Moore, S.A. and Engstrom, N. ( 2005) The social construction of ‘green’ building codes: competing models by industry, government and NGOs, in: S. Guy and S. A. Moore (Eds) Sustainable Architectures: Natures and Cultures in Europe and North America, pp. 51-70. London: Routledge/Spon.
51.
Moore, S.A. and Karvonen, A. ( 2008) Sustainable architecture in context: STS and design thinking , Science Studies, 21(1).
52.
New York Times (1916) New plan for building heights and restricted areas will stabilize values, home and business conditions, 30 July, Section: Real Estate Automobiles, p. 26.
53.
NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) (n.d.) Website (http://www.nist.gov/index.html (last updated 2008); accessed 3 May 2009).
54.
Norberg-Schulz, C. ( 1979) Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture. New York: Rizzoli.
55.
Oden, M. (n.d.) Equity: the forgotten E in sustainable development, in: S. Moore (Ed.) Pragmatic sustainability , unpublished manuscript.
56.
Oliver, P. ( 1987) Dwellings: The Houses across the World. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
57.
Perez-Gomez, A. ( 1983) Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
58.
Poder (n.d.) History ( http://www.poder-texas.org/history.html; accessed 15 April 2006).
59.
Portney, K.E. ( 2003) Taking Sustainable Cities Seriously: Economic Development, the Environment, and Quality of Life in American Cities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
60.
Pyatok, M. ( 2002) The narrow base of the new urbanists, Progressive Planning, Spring.
61.
Rapoport, A. ( 1969) House Form and Culture. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
62.
Rohracher, H. ( 1999) Sustainable construction of buildings: a socio-technical perspective. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the International Summer Academy on Technology Studies: Technology Studies and Sustainability, Inter-university Research Centre for Technology, Work and Culture, Graz, July.
63.
Rorty, R. ( 1994) Foucault and epistemology, in: B. Smart (Ed.) Michel Foucault: Critical Assessments, pp. 259-265. New York: Routledge.
64.
Scott, J.C. ( 1998) Seeing Like a State. New Haven, CT : Yale University Press.
65.
Shah, R.C. and Kesan, J.C. ( 2007) How architecture regulates, Journal of Architecture and Planning Research, 24(4), pp. 350-359.
66.
Short, M. ( 2007) Assessing the impact of proposals for tall buildings on the built heritage: England’s regional cities in the 21st century, Progress in Planning, 68, pp. 97-199.
67.
Sorkin, M. ( 1992) Variations on a Theme Park: Scenes from the New American City and the End of Public Space. New York: Hill and Wang.
68.
Talen, E. ( 1999) The codes project. National Science Foundation (http://codesproject.asu.edu/; accessed 2 May 2009).
69.
Talen, E. ( 2006) Smartcode justice, Places, 18(1), pp. 30-35.
70.
UDA (Urban Design Associates), Gindroz, R., Robinson, R. et al. (2004 ) The Architectural Pattern Book: A Tool for Building Great Neighborhoods. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
71.
US Department of Energy (2003) Buildings energy databook. Department of Energy, Washington, DC.
72.
WCED (World Council on Economic Development) (1987) Our Common Future. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
73.
Weber, M. (1958) The City, transl. and ed. by D. Martindale and G. Neuwirth.Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
74.
Winner, L. ( 1977) Autonomous Technology: Technics Out-of-control as a Theme in Political Thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
75.
Winner, L. ( 1999) Do artifacts have politics?, in: D. MacKenzie and J. Wajcman (Eds) The Social Shaping of Technology, pp. 28-41. Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press.
