Page 58 - Green Builder Magazine Sept-Oct 2017

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SMART CITIES

Only by Design

‘Smart Communities thinking’ helps you on multiple levels.
BY TERRY BEAUBOIS

This is the second in a series of articles about the increasing interest
in—and necessity for—smart homes, villages, cities and communities
globally, and how they relate to green building in the U.S.

ITH MY BACKGROUND in architecture, NASA, a
smart house project, researching small towns in
Montana, and now teaching the Smart Villages
module in a Smart Communities class at Stanford,
WI have become fully aware that multi-disciplinary
knowledge and collaboration are the best way forward in building
smart, sustainable communities. I’ve also discovered that green
builders can take a leading role.
Looking at communities through a “smart” lens helps us
understand the reality of the world around us. In my experience,
most people do not want to be in an isolated house, isolated town or
an isolated city. Smart communities need to be connected regionally
and globally. The Internet allows us to do this, but we should have IT TAKES A VILLAGE TO BUILD SMART COMMUNITIES
the ability to “opt in” to the aspects of the Internet we want, and Any building or community today involves a wide variety of
stay safe and secure from what we don’t. organizations and disciplines—developers, governments, architects,
academia, contractors, subcontractors, materials and product
HOW CAN “SMART COMMUNITIES THINKING” HELP YOU? manufacturers, consumers, financing and real estate. Stakeholders
If you are a designer, builder or a homeowner, you know your local that make up the building industry make their own decisions about
area and its requirements. If you’re a big builder with a number how much or how little they want to be involved in the options
of different regional markets, then you’re taking each of those available to them for building smarter, more sustainable, greener
local markets into consideration. It is our goal to learn from local buildings in the 21st century.
requirements and to “think globally, act locally.” There will never Homeowners and builders are faced with an overwhelming set of
be a “one size fits all” solution, but there will be common elements. choices and decisions to make. How can we make these decisions in an
These elements not only need to provide their inhabitants with environment prioritizing sustainable, “green” features and advancing,
smart community benefits, they need members of the building competing Internet of Things options? This is where knowledge,
industry to be knowledgeable about them, and to participate in the experience and communication of what is working and what is not,
planning and creation of smart communities. plays a vital role. This can best be done by collecting information
This is not always easy. Local government reviews, approvals and from a variety of sources and combining that information into an
regulatory requirements determine what one can, can’t and must do. organized “dashboard” format of searchable information and making
The local weather determines how the buildings should be designed. that information available at the highest level to each individual.
The local market determines what price ranges are reasonable for The ultimate goal: to connect the power of people with the power
the finished products. of information.
So how does smart community design factor into our individual
approaches to a building industry that is extremely complex and GOVERNMENTS CAN LEAD THE WAY
vast? One goal is increasing the choices that homeowners and You may or may not be surprised to learn that, in my experience, one
builders have, while also providing the information about how to of the projects that is most advanced in exploring the development
evaluate what is right for any particular project. and implementation of digital dashboards to collect and make smart
communities data available is in India.

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