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Module GD: Growth Through Green Development

 
This module presents an introduction to the many facets and perspectives of green development. The goal of this module is to increase awareness of green development strategies, techniques and tools that can be used when planning sites, neighborhoods, communities and regions.

The units start with looking at an overview of green development practices and then examine practices and tools from a regional level down to the site level. After completing these units, planners will be enabled to introduce green development into their communities and start cooperative green development efforts across the region. Register online now!

GD.1: Foundations of Green Development
This unit provides an overview of green development practices. It introduces green development from the regional, community, and site perspective. The unit explores reasons why green development is important and the ways planners can start thinking about changing development practices to be more environmentally-friendly and economically sustainable.
 
GD.2: Green Infrastructure
This unit provides an overview of planning principles that planners can use to incorporate natural features in the development of their regions and communities. It discusses the economic and quality-of-life benefits derived from the environment, the impacts of not protecting natural features, and general ecological principles that can help guide the incorporation of green infrastructure.
 
GD.3: Design the Community on a Human Scale
One way to reach sustainability is to think about communities from the human perspective, at human scale. Designing at the human scale leads to a community that is pedestrian-oriented and scaled toward human interaction.  This unit explores ways to shape or reshape a community so that it is not so strongly dependent upon automobiles. But how do we achieve this? This unit discusses transitions from conventional community configurations to human scale configurations as well as designs of new communities that encourage human interaction.
 
GD.4: Green Site Development
Previously this module discussed many green development and sustainability issues on a community or regional level. Ultimately the techniques to address these issues must be implemented on a site level. This unit focuses on how green development can be implemented through site design and development practices. This unit introduces tools that planners can use to make sites more environmentally sustainable and socially interactive.
 
GD.5: Are you ready for green development?
Now that we’ve discussed green development from multiple perspectives, the next step is deciding if you are ready for green development and if not, what you can do to get there. This unit is designed to help a planning commission make decisions about how a community can become green development ready by walking through the process of evaluating and updating planning and regulatory documents.

 

 

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