What the University of Guelph can learn about sustainability
As part of Guelph Sustainability Week 2017, Cyndi Rottenberg-Walker, a partner at Urban Strategies Inc., delivered a presentation entitled Planning For Sustainability: Lessons from Princeton.
Rottenberg-Walker is part of the team that spearheaded the ongoing campus plan for Princeton University as well as the University of Guelph’s plan in 2011.
The focus of Rottenberg-Walker’s presentation showed the work that is currently happening on the campus of Princeton University and discussed what lessons other campus designers and landscape architects can learn from Princeton as a case study.
Rottenberg-Walker stated that the Princeton plan is “aspirational” and that, because of its small campus community, (Princeton only has 5,300 undergraduate students) and substantial funding, the campus plan should serve as a standard to reach for, but not copy directly.
In making Princeton a sustainable campus, two goals that Rottenberg-Walker wanted to reach were “carbon neutrality and water management.” Rottenberg-Walker said that many campuses claim to be carbon neutral by offsetting their carbon footprint in initiatives that occur off-campus, but the goal for the Princeton campus plan is to make the University truly carbon neutral while still allowing for the campus to expand.One of the main challenges Rottenberg-Walker outlined was the fact that, for Princeton to expand, it has to cross over the river that currently acts as the southern border of its campus.
“Leaping the lake is both interesting and an incredible challenge,” said Rottenberg-Walker, and that current plans are to have the main activity of the Princeton campus stay centralized and use the cross lake area as housing and an environmentally sustainable energy farm.
Rottenberg-Walker highlighted the importance of performative landscapes for university campuses, which are “not just beautiful, but they have a performative environmental function,” such as an artificial wetland to help filter stormwater runoff generated on campus.
In discussing the University of Guelph context, Rottenberg-Walker said the primary focus of making the campus more sustainable is to maximize the efficiency of the space and utilize the buildings that already exist.Some strategies that she mentioned in accomplishing this were making sure that classrooms can be rearranged to accommodate a variety of teaching strategies and looking at how space is currently being used instead of trying to expand the campus outward.
One of the main ways to make class rooms more sustainable, Rottenberg-Walker said, is to “optimize classroom design and scheduling” to make sure that classes are not left empty while students are struggling to look for open space.
In the case of both Princeton and Guelph, Rottenberg-Walker put importance on the role that transportation plays in making a campus sustainable, and how investments must be made into transportation infrastructure to motivate students to walk or bicycle to school rather than driving.
Photo courtesy of Rohit Hirway via CC BY SA 3.0.