Barbara Brown Wilson

Since the first known human settlements in Mesopotamia, building regulations have been enacted to protect the citizenry from potentially deleterious effects of the built environment. As crises arise and cultural practices change, regulatory institutions create new or amend old codes to reflect these societal shifts. The interests of the market, the state, and the collective will of citizens are rarely in healthy balance in a democratic society, but regulatory codes can serve to provide a voice for the public will in contrast to the louder and more seductive cries of market and government forces. Of the many institutions that impose regulations on a democratic community (the state, the market, the media, and others), our societal norms are the hardest to decipher. Stories allow us to climb in those crawl spaces, to see those partial perspectives that clear up the blind spots in our effort to “objectively” evaluate and contribute to community. These border spaces are where the regenerative change or balance in a community often occurs, and thus these stories are pivotal to an understanding of any healthy community and the ways in which it can be sustained, nourished, and improved.

A social movement, whose power then becomes harnessed and institutionalized in some sort of societal code, often marks or provokes these code-making paradigm shifts. Using social movements as a framework, this project considers codes and their relationships with social values to approach the question, “How does innovative change occur in the built environment?” Investigating a series of social movement case studies where the built environment was fundamentally altered as a result, and triangulating these cases with literature from science and technology studies and that of sustainable architecture, this project will test the boundaries of the relationship between regulation and social change. The case studies represent a spectrum of different societal concerns and related regulatory impulses—each one radically altering the way urban space was conceived. The public health movement’s institutionalization of urban infrastructure exemplifies the emerging relationship between urban and human change at the dawn of the industrial era; the American disabilities movement used rights-based protest to gain equal access to physical spaces in the revolutionary fever coming out of the 1960s; and the creation and wide reception of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification system redesigned the association between the most recent strain of the environmental movement and the building industry in the past decade. While these cases are admittedly myopic slices of temporal experience in American society, their comparison reveals a societal metanarrative produced through the evolution of codes for the built environment.

An Imbalanced Society: Theories of Civic Tension

“It appears increasingly likely that man is not going to make it. He has done too much that is self-destructive and too little to save himself. Although it is hardly consoling, there will be a certain justice in his extinction if it results from his thoughts and choices. But it would be an unpardonable irony if he were to destroy himself not because of what he thought, but because he thought what he thought made no difference.” (Barber, 1971, 13)

If the interactions of regulatory bodies are intended to maintain a balance that sustains healthy communities, we must look further into the nature of these institutions and their relationships with each other. For physicist Fritjof Capra, these subsystems are the “processes of communication, which generate shared meaning, and rules of behavior (the network’s culture), as well as a shared body of knowledge” (Capra, 2002, 91). But this is a bit too abstract. Geographer Richard Peet defines development as “improvement in a complex of linked natural, economic, social, cultural, and political conditions” (Peet, 1999, 1). Also turning to biology for his understanding of communities, Peet understands the functions of “the institutional subsystems of society” in accordance with those of any other organism (Peet, 14). Peet is disillusioned with democracy. Discussing the ways in which the subsystems of democracy exclude portions of its cellular citizenry from the balance process, Peet claims “the main problem with democracy is that it has never been achieved” (Peet, 197). Yet, Peet never explicitly describes these subsystems of democracy, or how they fail to properly regenerate.

Amartya Sen, in Development as Freedom, more clearly dissects the institutions that create the subsystems of democracy. Sen sees government, market and nonmarket organizations, civic and political entities, educational systems, and “opportunities for dialogue and debate” (including the media) as the driving institutions of society (Sen, 2000, 9). He sees freedom as the essence of democracy, and postulates that any society can be evaluated by its constituents’ access to “substantive freedoms,” or freedoms that, when withheld, prevent community members from making their own choices and inhibit their ability to maintain their part in the community’s balance (Sen, 18). Without access to these substantive freedoms (health, education, safety, etc.), the cellular makeup of a democratic community cannot sustain itself. And what of this democratic community? Have we become Max Weber’s vision of the society without a soul? Political scientist Alan Wolfe argues that until the United States acknowledges freedom as an interdependent condition of modern society, we will remain unable to achieve the health to which we aspire (Wolfe, 1989, 2). Society is constantly searching for ethical codes to dictate its behavior, but “modernity displaces moral discourse into new—one is tempted to say modern—forms” (Wolfe, 6). For Wolfe, the three institutions that traditionally guided society were the market, the state, and civil society. Modernization distances the citizen from the effect her actions have on civil society. The system of accountability is no longer functional. The market and the state were never meant to operate without the balancing of the regulatory force of civil society (Wolfe, 19).

The built environment is an enormous petri dish on which we can observe the manifestations of these regulatory tensions. Maintaining a balance of the market, state, and societal interests is no small feat, although planners attempt to successfully pull off this magic trick everyday. In Scott Campbell’s influential article “Green Cities, Growing Cities, Just Cities,” he graphs out the tensions at play in the creation of the built environment in a model he calls the planner’s triangle. Campbell’s triangle graphs out what he sees as the three main priorities in the built environment—equity, environmental protection, and economic development—and the three dynamics produced through their juxtapositions with one another: the development conflict, the resource conflict, and the property conflict. Yet, Campbell goes on to show how interrelated all of these concepts are with one another, asserting that inequity and the ensuing lack of political power are often central motivating forces in conflicts manifest as primarily economic or environmental issues. Social equity is at the heart of disputes over the built environment more often than is recognized. This fact is especially disconcerting when understood in context of Wolfe’s assertion that modernization makes the values of civil society irrelevant, if not nonexistent, in political decision making.

So how do we reinstitutionalize the values of civil society into the built environment and ensure that these freedoms are properly provided to community members? The more common discourses surrounding this issue discuss it in terms of economics—access to varying sorts of capital that allow the provision of these resources. Obviously, this is not enough if large portions of the country continue to feel unheard and even alienated by conventional building practices. Using the more abstract terminology of development and economy, we can become distracted from our original goal of social equity. Capra cites neurophenomenology, the combination of complexity theory and first-person experience, as an approach to understanding the role civic consciousness plays in the creation of healthy social systems (Capra, 45–48). If we tell stories about lived experiences, while also understanding their connection to the ever-evolving network of organisms that constitute society, we can more clearly begin to see how a shift in cultural cognition might occur. But in a country so diverse, how do we get a sense of our collective consciousness? When do our societal values gain enough force in modern times to overpower the market and the state?

Civil Society Speaks: Social Movements as an Expression of Societal Values

I swear to the Lord; I still can’t see; Why democracy means; Everyone but me. (Hughes, 1943)

There have been critical moments in society when the people rose up and spoke for what they believed was right, moments where their values became more important than the money they might make, or than keeping the status quo. Societal uprisings such as the civil rights movement and the public health movement have redesigned our modes of regulation—both conceptual and physical. Sociotechnological theorists use a hybrid of historical and sociocultural approaches to argue for the revisioning of regulation systems through moral codes of civil society. For instance, Andrew Feenberg uses powerful examples, such as the eradication of the mid-nineteenth-century proclivity for child labor through a change in regulation heavily influenced by the emerging moral imperatives against such practices, charting the triumphs of ethical concerns over those of the market (Feenberg, 1992, 2). Feenberg’s article argues for more democratic inclinations in all of our societal institutions that allow all processes of production to emerge from a larger societal perspective. But the task of engaging the people is an arduous one. Here is where we must ask the question, when has this been done before, and how?

 “Differences arise on the margins of the homogenized realm, either in the form of resistances or in the form of externalities. . . . What is different is, to begin with, what is excluded: the edges of the city, shanty towns, the spaces of forbidden games, of guerilla war, of war. Sooner or later, however, the existing center and the forces of homogenization must seek to absorb all such differences, and they will succeed if these retain a defensive posture and no counterattack is mounted from their side. In the latter event, centrality and normality will be tested to the limits of their power to integrate, to recuperate, or to destroy whatever has transgressed” (Lefebvre, 1991, 373).

These margins that geographer/theorist Henri Lefebvre discusses in the quote above can be powerful places for change. Civil rights organizer Robert Moses refers to these places of difference as “crawl spaces,” or seemingly insignificant, tiny nooks in the political, spatial, or social realms where transformation can occur (Moses, 2001, 92). Peet uses Donna Haraway’s concept of “situated knowledges” to capture this notion in development discourse (Peet, 175). He finds value in this concept of the partial perspective as a mode to truly see something objectively, or at least to break down the illusion of objectivity to allow for more relevant versions of reality to coexist. If, as Haraway claims, “objectivity is not about disengagement, but about mutual and usually unequal structuring, about taking risks in a world where ‘we’ are permanently mortal, that is not in final control,” then the knowledge seeker must always acknowledge these inequalities and seek out those “situated knowledges” that provide rare and sometimes richer insights into that which they are trying to understand (Haraway, 1995, 190).

If the stories of social movements allow us to climb in those crawl spaces, to see those partial perspectives that perpetuate regenerative change or balance in a community, they might unlock one door onto the mysteries of modern cultural change. But before we get to these stories of societal uprising, we must understand the nature of “codes” and their power to institutionalize societal values into the built environment.

Regulatory Systems and Social Values: A Review of the Literature

Coding systems are as deeply embedded in our culture as the building processes they regulate. Many cite Article 229 of the Code of Hammurabi (Mesopotamia, 2250–1780 BCE) as the first building code, stating that “if a builder builds a house for someone, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built falls in and kills its owner, then that builder shall be put to death” (Moore, 2005, 1). Theorists discussing this cultural scaffolding system argue that since the initiation of regulation, codes respond to shifts in a society’s ethical framework (see Feenberg, 1995; Winner, 1995).

Architect and theorist Francis Ventre claims that only three major successes for cultural values can be found within the architecture world: historic preservation, ecological design, and zoning (Ventre, 1990, 57). He reconnects architectural regulation to value systems in his article “Regulation: A Realization of Social Ethics,” asserting that “societies, usually acting through governments, preempt entire classes of design decisions, restricting and sometimes totally removing areas of design freedom, reserving those decisions to society as a whole, acting through regulatory institutions” (Ventre, 56). He challenges architects to consider social ethics’ relationship to architecture and to reshape our built environment in the expression of the public’s collective interest.

Yet some critics want to abolish regulation all together. William McDonough claims to have the keys to the “next industrial revolution,” and his proposed system involves the abolition of restrictive regulatory codes in exchange for inherently superior design (McDonough and Braungart, 1998, 85). Their term, eco-effectiveness, which “leads to human energy that is regenerative rather than depletive,” was coined by the architect/chemist partnership to express their reorganization of material production in a manner that removes the need for regulations with innovation-suppressing standards through superior design. McDonough’s system:

• removes the emission of hazardous materials into the environment;
• measures prosperity in terms of natural capital produced;
• evaluates efficiency in terms of employment rates; (4) eradicates building codes to liberate innovation; and (5) encourages diversity.

Based on the regenerative nature of the tree, this system was applied to a Swiss fabric manufacturer to create an award-winning new type of fabric that reuses the scraps from previous fabric production. McDonough’s value-driven system of production would not work in our current system, he argues, because regulation creates a system of mediocrity with low, obscure standards perpetuated by the market. For McDonough, certification systems lack specificity, fl exibility, and thus contextual application. However, these systems of coding are still the regulatory backbone of our culture’s building practices. McDonough never explicitly describes how this eco-effective ethic of superior design will be implemented, what would happen to the sorts of ills currently regulated for the protection of humankind, or what it might entail for the society that forces its industries to adopt it.

Alternatively, proposals exist for new sorts of society-driven coding systems. Michael Sorkin’s Local Code: The Constitution of a City at 42 Degrees N Latitude is an influential example of this sort of work. Written in a codelike format, Sorkin organizes this essay into a bill of rights, principles, and elements of design. Based in induction, Sorkin attempts to make a point about the reductive nature of codes through a focus on “the particular” (Sorkin, 1993, 11). Proclaiming broad statements like, “every Hab (meaning home) shall have a view of the moon,” Sorkin makes the point that regulation should not limit the nature of a community, but rather enhance it through a thoughtful, responsive, and locally based code (Sorkin, 30). This push for regulatory revision implies a large-scale dissatisfaction with the current system. 

Looking outside of the fi eld of architecture, we find more promising proposals for revisioning regulation. Environmental philosopher Andrew Light proposes a political restructuring of the community to encourage what he calls “urban ecological citizenship” (Light, 2003, 1). Light claims that cities are inherently more sustainable because of their potential for shared energy consumption,

transportation, etc.; he argues that, if organized in the proper manner, cities can be the ideal place to reconnect communities and empower them toward social action. Light’s system of urban ecological citizenship entails the organization of communities into poleis, or small, locally centered groups of citizenry that become empowered by the authority over their own area. In these poleis, not only do the city dwellers become more civically inclined to maintain their streetscapes through this newfound authority, but also they restore a sense of community and place to the area through their collective discussions concerning public good. This concept of participatory regulation is a way of institutionalizing social values into our systems of governance more holistically, instead of waiting for society to rise up against more powerful forces in response to great need. However, the mode in which these new patterns of societal regulation would be implemented and maintained is never made clear in his work—Light never leaves the philosophical realm to discuss grounded, pragmatic application.

Technological philosophers like Langdon Winner also see civic engagement as its own ethical imperative. In his article “Citizen Virtues in a Technological Order,” Winner asserts that “the lack of any coherent identity for the ‘public’ or of well-organized, legitimate channels for public participation contributes to two distinctive features of contemporary policy debates about technology: 1) futile rituals of expert advice and 2) interminable disagreements about which choices are morally justified” (Winner, 1995, 75). The gap between the technical and the political has grown so vast that our culture lacks methods of regulation that express concern for the common good.

Social Movements: Theories and/or Histories

“The crisis of democracy is, then, a crisis of faith that—however well rooted in the real erosion of democracy’s pluralistic prerequisites—has convinced the majority that it has nothing to fear from majoritarian tyranny and the minority that it has nothing to lose in making a revolution.” (Barber, 1971, 108)

When political shifts do represent societal values, these shifts have often been associated with social movements. Political scientist Andrew McFarland inextricably links political processes with social movements and the values they embody, noting the power that the environmental and Christian movements have had over the liberal consensus through calls for the refinement of government regulation (McFarland, 1998).

Similarly, Sidney Tarrow notes the exceptionally strong connection between American social movements and the institutions they are critiquing; tracing the parallel development of social movements with the political institutions they sought to affect in Early America (Tarrow, 1998). Tarrow cites the temperance movement as setting the path for many following American social movements with “a cyclical trajectory of activism and quietism, responding to favorable opportunities with greater activism and to the pressure of broader issues by lying low (e.g., we seldom hear of temperance activity during the Civil War years)” (Tarrow, 31). From these antebellum examples, Tarrow traces this increasing association between American social movements and the political groups they critique to modern quasi-institutionalized activist organizations (like Greenpeace) that fuse protests, lobbying, and educational activities to influence policy. The connections between social movements and the political processes they encounter are certainly instructive in the search for an understanding of how values are institutionalized in the United States. These moments of civil disobedience seem to be the only examples of participatory or civic regulation. In the interest of understanding how this sort of change has occurred, this project will now look to three pivotal case studies where social movements initiated new social codes in order to decipher some sort of pattern from these tales of resistance.

Resistant Geographies: Battles Between Space and Its Citizenry

“You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.” (Chesterton, 1917, 20)

Before recounting successful tales of the institutionalization of social movements in the realm of the built environment, I must mention an important caveat. Social movements have not always led to spatial and political emancipation. For example, although tiny victories within the spatially related aspects of the student protests of the 1960s can be noted, the major physically oriented outcome of those activities was the implementation of physical barriers to prevent large-scale assembly in the main congregational areas of most campuses in the United States.

Most university campuses across the country have a relic of this phenomenon—a public space originally created for larger-scale congregation that was redesigned in the mid- to late 1960s to prevent massive student assembly. Frank Erwin commissioned the relandscaping of the University of Texas at Austin’s West Mall during this period to include large planters and a fountain, while also limiting space for demonstrations (figures 1 and 2). In The Right to the City, Don Mitchell tells the story of the uprisings in UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza in the fall of 1964 that precipitated this widespread change in spatial control. After months of student protests against university regulations limiting their freedom of speech, the university’s academic senate voted to allow political speech and advocacy on campus, while maintaining the university’s rights to regulate the time, place, and manner of the speech (Mitchell, 2003). Yet, this small local victory for UC Berkeley students’ place on campus arguably brought on the preemptive physical restriction of public spaces on other campuses across the United States.

Stories of Past Social Movements: The Public Health, the Environmental, and the Disability Rights Movements

When looking at the history of architectural regulation and its intersection with social movements, one must first acknowledge that any case study is highly context-specific. These case studies were chosen to represent pivotal moments in varying periods of the American industrial age when broad cognitive shifts perpetuated widespread spatial reorganization. And, although the recent institutionalization of LEED certification into the building industry is the most pure marriage between a social movement and relevant building codes, it only represents one very specific form of this association. However, when paired with more deeply embedded systems such as the public health movement’s influence on U.S. urban infrastructure, and the more recent yet still influential disability rights movement, a pattern begins to emerge.

The public health movement The extensive water, wastewater, and solid waste disposal systems we now assume to be germane to our existence were not always accepted as essential to American cities. The expensive problem of public infrastructure had to reach a critical mass before institutionalization was possible. Beginning with the deeply rooted fear of disease, the problems of health precipitated by the massive waves of immigration in the late 1700s, and the growing European concern for sanitation, codes of public health emerged clearly from growing societal concerns instead of market- or state-related value systems. Physician and public health scholar George Rosen traces the roots of public health to the French and American revolutions of the late eighteenth century (Rosen, 1958, 131). He argues that the Industrial Revolution, in tandem with these major political revolutions, created more open systems of political discourse—change was happening so rapidly that even those in power were receptive to proposals for radical structural revision. Architect and technological historian Steven Moore cites the succession of citywide fires and the typhus, yellow fever, and smallpox epidemics plaguing communities across the globe for the paradigm shift (Moore, 2005, 51). Historian Martin Melosi argues that Nuisance Law had been slowly developing around these issues for a century previously, and in response to these legal codifications, the first forms of such infrastructure began to develop with these coding systems. Nonetheless, it was not until Edwin Chadwick turned the issue of public health into a movement that the concept really became institutionalized.

In 1842 Chadwick completed his “Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain” and revealed that the unsanitary conditions of the poor, instead of the will of God, were the cause of their health concerns. The report was widely disseminated and lead to the incorporation of the Sanitary Act of 1848 in England, although Melosi argues that the “true consummation of the work of the sanitary movement was the Public Health Act of 1875” (Melosi, 49). These legislative acts are then tied to the development of several professions meant to inform this issue in the United States. Instead of radical demonstrations, it was the fear of widespread sickness that rallied the masses behind such a cause, once professionals in the field properly informed the middle- and upper-class citizenry of the ways in which they might also be affected.

The most important collective epiphany to motivate actual reform came decades after Chadwick’s report, when Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch discovered the connection between fi lth and disease in the mid-1880s. Germ theory dispelled the old misconception that class ordained disease and liberated the poor from being relegated to indecent living quarters. Other players were influential as well. Dr. John Griscom, a New York City inspector, transported Chadwick’s theories to the United States through a report entitled “The Sanitary Condition in 1842.” Lemuel Shattuck conducted the first comprehensive urban census in 1845, further connecting disease to contagion in Boston (Melosi, 63). The Civil War did serve to disseminate these ideas further, while also diverting attention from the pure cause of public health reform. The first comprehensive U.S. public health code was ratifi ed by New York City in 1866, many years after public health began taking precedence as a societal value in American society (Melosi, 21). A year later, the American Society of Civil Engineers incorporated and the institutionalization of public infrastructure began. Ground was unearthed, pipes laid, and health improved at a grand scale (figure 3).

Additionally, a Tenement House Commission estimated in 1894 that three-fifths of New York City’s population lived in unsuitable housing (Hall, 1988, 35). In the interest of controlling/ improving both the poverty-stricken masses and the space these masses shared with those in power, the field of city planning emerged. Reform efforts existed as early in American history as the Civil War’s United States Sanitary Commission, the first secretary-general of which was Frederick Law Olmsted, who later became a major figure in city planning (Boyer, 1983, 19). Nonetheless, legislation did not consecrate such spatial sensibilities until the New York State Tenement Law of 1901, which served as the model for subsequent states. This law moved the supervisory duties of tenement conditions from the Public Health Department to the Building Department, a symbolic change signifying the spatial shift taken by those considering these sorts of social issues to separate the previously amalgamated fields of planning and public health (Boyer, 1983, 30). The first National Conference on City Planning was held in Washington in 1909, where Germany exposed American civic leaders to the possibilities of mapping land use and building height into city zones, a tool that would forever change the face of the American city (Hall, 1988, 58). Innovative change came in fits and starts; guided by key thinkers and practitioners, the trajectory of the public health movement slowly left the realm of discourse to materialize into the sanitation systems we now consider to be hegemonic.

The Disability Rights MovementAcknowledging that people with disabilities were oppressed in a myriad of ways that denied them inalienable rights, the disability rights movement coalesced in order to make the issues public and regain these citizens’ inviolable privileges as human beings. Historian Douglas Baynton argues that Americans have inherently discriminated against people with disabilities since the country’s inception. Not only were people with disabilities treated unfairly, but labeling groups as “disabled” was also used as a tactic to discriminate against other minorities. Rights were held from women and African Americans under the guise of their perceived disabilities (Baynton, 2001, 37). Disabled people were kept out of public schools, out of the job markets, and in some cases even out of public spaces in general.

As early as 1907, war veterans were arguing for their rights in the political realm. These men incurred disabilities while fighting for the United States, and thus arguing for their worth as citizens was natural based on their allegiance to their country (Scotch, 2001, 376). However, the public health movement brought with it the rise of asylums and other forms of oppressive institutionalization for those born with disabilities. Because of the condition’s close relationship to the other tenets of the civil rights movement, some successes can be recognized within the civil rights legislation of the 1960s—certainly the foundation for later legislation was laid in this period of political progress. However, the first real victory for the movement was the federal Architectural Barriers Act (ABA) of 1968 (Longmore and Umansky, 2001, 10). ABA requires that buildings built with federal funds be accessible to persons with disabilities, but this only dealt with facility accessibility, not necessarily programmatic accessibility (Cannon, 1989, 10). Often, there was no way to regulate these buildings or provide their designers with assistance to ensure proper application of the act’s requirements. Thus, in 1973, the legislature passed the Rehabilitation Act to fill in much of the ABA’s gaps, including the creation of an Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board to ensure proper application of the myriad of laws regulating and equalizing space for the disabled.

But the issue of disability rights was still seen as a medical concern instead of a problem of rights. In response, New York activist Larry Allison and others began a group called the 504 Democratic Club in 1980, with the intention of engaging presidential candidates through political discourse about disabled people’s rights. This group would hold disability forums where discussions of the problems and their pervasive nature would lead to jargon the political candidate could use as a platform in his race. At the height of the group’s success, they won Jimmy Carter as a major political ally just before his presidential election (Allison, 2001).

Other associations developed across the country, each with a slightly different agenda. For instance, the Association for Retarded Citizens organized to fight for deinstitutionalization and public education, and many of the leaders of organizations such as this one were finally appointed to the new presidential advisory board, the National Council on Disability. In contrast, more militant groups such as ADAPT (American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit) took a more radical approach to the issues. In the 1980s, frustrated with the lack of accessibility of public transport, the group slid out of their wheelchairs to block buses in an act of civil disobedience that served to redesign the traditional city bus (Longmore and Umansky, 11).

So many groups emerged to participate in this movement that the critical mass of voters supporting these ideals gained power. By 1990, the movement gained enough momentum to pass major legislation under the conservative government of President George H. W. Bush. The Americans with Disabilities Act “prohibits discrimination in private employment, public accommodation, and telecommunications,” and was considered a watershed political action at its inception (Scotch, 384). The landscape of many cities has been drastically affected by this legislation, as programs to develop and maintain design standards such as curb ramps and sidewalks are now required in most public spaces (figure 4). Nonetheless, poor enforcement and limiting judicial decisions lessened its impacts. The movement still advocates for disability rights through both political lobbying and civic education to perpetuate the movement’s resistance to forces of normative prejudice.

The environmental movement(s) The environmental movement’s history can be thought of as many movements coalesced through time, beginning with the interest in land conservation (mostly for sport) and growing to include notions of environmental justice as the movement fused with tenets of the public health movement. Political scientists W. Douglas Costain and James P. Lester note the transitions in eco-political discourse from an elite democracy to a participatory one, and from a national to a local focus of government. They divide the movement into four periods: “the conservation-efficiency movement,” stretching from 1890–1920; “the conservation-preservation movement, from 1920 to 1960; “the environmental movement” from 1960–1980; and finally, “the contemporary period of participatory environmentalism,” observing the movement’s evolution from an environmental science focus in the late 1800s to one of environmental ethics in the 1990s (Costain and Lester, 1998, 185).

The first movement was significant for its scientific proclivity, finding strong ties to the public health movement, as both were responding to industrialism and the emerging revelations in germ theory previously mentioned. The second movement developed out of desires for leisure by the rich—instead of fights over the industries and agriculture, this movement was characterized by elites such as Rockefeller fighting to preserve the land around his massive hotel. Conservation was privatized and localized. Additionally, the New Deal found places for environmentalism in job creation legislation and other less likely modes of ecological protection.

The third wave of the movement was the fi rst time that public values, instead of purely elite expert culture, lead the cause. This iteration fused the prior two movements from a grassroots perspective that was characterized by its breadth. Its expansive support caught the interests of entrepreneurial politicians, which affected the true power of the legislation enacted—as so many supposed supporters were only really interested in the political clout associated with the cause.

Major political successes were the adoption of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, a federal statute establishing the fi rst national policy for the environment, and the Council on Environmental Quality, and Agenda 21 in 1992, a global action plan set forth by the United Nations. But broad political actions do not always remedy the environmental problems they are meant to address, and often serve to placate activists more than protect the environment. Robert Brulle argues that the breadth of this version of the environmental movement was in some ways its downfall. The hundreds of groups forming to fight specific environmental battles found themselves battling against one another in order to gain political clout for their tiny version of environmental protection instead of joining forces for the larger cause (Brulle, 2000). These ineffective binaries have lead current revisionists to adopt the now popular phrase “think globally, act locally.”

Political theorists argue that we have either moved into a “postenvironmentalism” characterized by a philosophical and environmental ethic that supports pollution prevention instead of abatement, or a phase of “participatory democracy” reminiscent of Light’s civic environmentalism. This postenvironmentalism could be associated with William McDonough’s eco-effective approach to sustainable design. However, participatory democracy has also caught the interests of citizens in communities around the country. Either version of the movement could take precedence over the others, but these factions should find ways to work in tandem to strengthen the project of the environmental movement.

The most influential outcome of these strands of environmentalism in the built environment is the rise of certification systems meant to encourage “green design.” Most are green building rating systems, such as LEED, that were created as “market driven stateg[ies] to accelerate the adoption of green building practices” (Gowri, 2004, 57). In 1990, the British Research Establishment developed LEED’s predecessor, BREEAM (Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method). But by 2000 the U.S. Green Building Council’s (USGBC) second version of LEED achieved widespread popularity and began to dominate the building industry. Originally created to regulate new commercial construction, LEED has expanded its system to account for existing buildings, commercial interiors, and even residential structures. All the green building rating systems revolve around five main categories—site, water, energy, materials, and indoor environment—making some aspects of design prerequisites for certification (Gowri, 2004, 58). Postoccupancy performance is part of the LEED certification process, and there are roughly four thousand buildings working with the USGBC currently to achieve a LEED rating (figure 5). But many argue that this system has become too abstracted. Growing out of localized green building programs, LEED has become an international industry, asking buildings all over the world to conform to the same basic stipulations. These certification systems are best used as a basic ecological checklist, while one would imagine that to be truly responsive to the Earth, a more site-specific, performative evaluation system might better address the needs of each locale.

Lessons from the Margins: Finding Patterns in Stories of Change

“The future of justice, if it has a future, lies with and not against the majority. The revolution will be made democratically or not at all. America is beyond the ministrations of Superman. Its fate, for good or ill, rests with the common men.” (Barber, 1971, 125)

The modes in which societal values balance the market and the state are varied and complex. Institutionalization of public concerns must come at once in physical, political, and cultural forms to equalize these predominant and opposing forces. The strongest forms of institutionalization, such as LEED’s infl uence in the environmental movement, come when societal change fuses with market and/or government forces to truly drive innovation. Yet, these previously radical innovations, once institutionalized, must be constantly revisited and localized in order to ensure their effi cacy in addressing the pertinent issues in practice. And, as the public health movement illustrated, the most important tool a polis can use to make this sort of system of accountability is its citizenry. The fusion of expert and local knowledge can lead to new ways of thinking that bring about positive change. People know more about the needs of their community than any regulation-producing expert, and can often better inform the place-making process in its local dimensions. Societal transformation is a slow and arduous process, but when enough political force is put behind certain ideals, ethical standards can supersede the interests of the market and the state.

Politicians may not be as interested in the cause as they are in their own reelections. As a result, citizens must claim their power to affect positive change. And furthermore, this power, so rooted in the American citizenry, hinges on its capacity to mobilize, unite, and identify common goals. The disability rights movement has done a wonderful job of coalescing through networks of organizations working together on collective concerns. By doing so, they have literally redesigned the way space is produced and connected across the country. It is critical that emerging change-agents consider the power of joining forces as opposed to partitioning themselves from one another. Also critical is the importance of remaining active and receptive to new ideas, even as initial victories come to pass. Society must remain vigilant in the declaration and preservation of its principles—we are our greatest allies.

BARBARA BROWN WILSON is a Ph.D. student in the Community and Regional Planning Program at the University of Texas at Austin. Equipped with a background in architectural history, Barbara is investigating the relationship between social equity and the built environment and its institutional manifestations, using the emerging SEED (social/economic/environmental/design) Network as the analytical focal point for her doctoral research. As the fi rst Luce Fellow associated with the Center for Sustainable Development at UT, she is working to foster relationships among the School of Architecture’s service initiatives, local communities, and the budding Austin Community Design Center, while also engaging in the social architecture movement through her active participation in SEED.

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