We’re liveblogging from AIA Seattle’s Designing for Livability: Sustainable Cities conference today. Part 1 is here.
The “ecodistricts” presentation is continuing with Johanna Brickman of ZGF Architects, on an ecodistrict plan for the Lloyd District in Portland. Well served by light rail already, situated around the convention center, this is a much more interesting area to work with, because it’s more representative of the infill possibility we have all over Seattle – there’s a lot already built, with surface parking ‘holes’ (and even small buildings) to be filled in with higher density. Current buildings can be upgraded for better performance in several aspects. There a lot of great ideas here for improvements – these ecodistrict plans can help municipalities determine what kind of requirements to put on construction and what infrastructure is necessary to make a district more self-sufficient.
In the last presentation on the Olympic Village project, Jeff Olson of VIA-Architecture pointed out that sewer systems tend to be hot – most wastewater is industrial, shower, laundry, etc. and contains a lot of energy. In that development, heat pumps are being used to recover a lot of that waste heat – this isn’t that new of an idea, but I hadn’t heard of it being used in a new development before. In the Lloyd District, because wastewater is combined with stormwater, regular street runoff neutralizes a lot of that heat, and separating the two systems would be necessary first – the ecodistrict plan outlines what work would need to be done and the potential benefits.
Brickman also brings up that it’s nearly impossible right now to set up public-private partnerships (at least in Portland) to use private infrastructure to help with things like meeting wastewater management goals, or even with using hot wastewater as a heat source. We can use regulation and incentives, (for example, the state of Washington’s Commute Trip Reduction program to require certain plans to reduce driving alone) but it’s apparently not possible for a building to partner with a municipality to, say, filter stormwater or harvest heat from wastewater, outside of the outputs of their own building.
There are a ton of people from various municipalities here – I’ve seen Tacoma, SDOT, Mountlake Terrace, and others. Hopefully they’re soaking up ideas.
There hasn’t been much yet today about transportation, but a breakout session this afternoon will discuss TOD around Swift and RapidRide, with representatives from Metro and Community Transit, so I’ll have more then.
The waste sewer heat idea isn’t new — somewhere I have a builder’s guide from before WWII showing how to construct a heat exchanger to preheat domestic hot water using a lead coil wrapped around the iron sewer drain.
(It also had an early alternative to anti-scald shower valves — the hot and cold lines to the shower both ran into a large mixing chamber inside the wall, whose volume moderated temperature swings so brief drops in cold water pressure didn’t change the shower output temperature enough to cause burns.)