Going for Zero

Forget the shiny renderings—our path to climate-ready cities starts with what already stands. We talked with architect and preservationist Carl Elefante, author of Going for Zero: Decarbonizing the Built Environment on the Path to Our Urban Future, to explore how City 3.0 can emerge by reusing buildings, redesigning streets, and resetting our standards of care. Carl breaks down Modern City 1.0 and 2.0, then lays out a hopeful, practical framework for what comes next: reconnecting with community, earth, and place while cutting carbon fast.
From Yemen’s wind-wise streets to a D.C. school’s revived induction system, the examples are concrete and transferable. We examine whole-life carbon accounting and why London’s reuse-first policy is a pivotal shift, forcing teams to compare demolition against reuse and reuse-plus-addition. The conversation contrasts durable, maintainable assemblies with fragile, all-glass facades—and explains why the greenest building is usually the one we already have.
If you care about sustainable architecture, urban design, adaptive reuse, missing-middle housing, passive strategies, and whole-life carbon, this conversation offers a clear map forward. Enjoy it, share it with a colleague, and tell us what your city should do next. Subscribe, leave a review, and pass this along to someone shaping the built environment today.

Show Notes:

• Further Reading: 
  • If the past teaches what does the future learn? Ancient Urban Regions and the Durable Future by John Murphy
  • Architecture From Prehistory to Climate Emergency by Barnabus Calder
  • Main Street: How a City’s Heart Connects Us All by Mindy Thopsom Fullilove
  • Triumph of the City by Ed Glaeser 
  • Sustainable Nation: Urban Design Patterns for the Future by Doug Farr
• To help support the show, pick up a copy of the book through our Bookshop page at https://bookshop.org/shop/bookedonplanning or get a copy through your local bookstore!
• To view the show transcripts, click on the episode at https://bookedonplanning.buzzsprout.com/

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Episode Transcript

Stephanie Rouse (00:12):
You're listening to the Booked on
Planning Podcast, a project ofthe Nebraska chapter of the
American Planning Association.
In each episode, we dive intohow cities function by talking
with authors on housing,transportation, and everything
in between.
Join us as we get booked onplanning.

(00:38):
Welcome back, Bookworms , toanother episode of Booked on
Planning.
In this episode, we talk withauthor Carl Elefante on his

book, Going for Zero: Decarbonizing the Built (00:44):
undefined
Environment on the Path to OurUrban Future.
As a preservationist and anarchitect, I really enjoyed this
book because Carl is reallykind of leading the way in the
field of the built environmentin creating more sustainable
buildings and preserving thebuildings that we have, having
coined the term the greenestbuilding is the building that

(01:06):
already exists.

Jennifer Hiatt (01:07):
So as a planner, I'm actually ashamed to admit,
though I knew the saying thegreenest building is the
building that already exists, Iwas not as familiar with Carl's
work previous to reading thisbook.
So this was my firstintroduction into the way Carl
thinks about the world.
And I find it a veryinteresting and fascinating way
of thinking about the 6,000years of city history that we

(01:29):
have as opposed to the last 200.

Stephanie Rouse (01:31):
Yeah, it was really interesting how he makes
the point that we all think inthe last 200 years of society
and cities and built environmentand think that that's the only
way and in order to grow anddesign.
But it's really a very smalland probably not the right way
to do so.

Jennifer Hiatt (01:48):
Yeah.
And I like that he breaks thoselast 200 years into city 1.0,
city 2.0, and then potentiallycity 3.0 as we're thinking about
the modern city.
But realistically, London's amodern city that's also ancient.
So it's a different way tothink about things.

Stephanie Rouse (02:06):
Yeah, they really lean into all of their
historic buildings and have abetter preservation ethos.
I found it really funny aswe're recording this episode.
There's a building across thestreet from our office here
being torn down to make way foruh a parking lot, but hopefully
something better in the future.

Jennifer Hiatt (02:25):
Yeah, maybe Lincoln's not the best example
of embracing the permanency ofour buildings and we should try
a little harder.
So, listeners, I also wanted totake a point of privilege in
this introduction to let you allknow that we now have a
bookshop.org affiliate page.
And so if you would like tosupport the podcast and you

(02:45):
already shop at bookshop.org toget your books, or you would
like to start shopping atbookshop.org, you can check us
out at bookshop.org slash shopslash booked on planning to
support our podcast efforts.

Stephanie Rouse (02:57):
And we are building out all of our reading
lists and we'll be adding in allof the author-recommended
readings as well as all of thebooks that have been on our show
over the last four years, whichis kind of crazy to think that
we've been recording for almostfour years now.

Jennifer Hiatt (03:11):
That is wild.
And we have loved every episodewe have recorded and shared
with you guys.
But particularly, let's getinto this conversation with
author Carl Elefante on hisbook, Going for Zero.

Stephanie Rouse (03:24):
Carl, thank you so much for joining us on
Bookdown Planning to talk aboutyour book, Going for Zero:
Decarbonizing the BuiltEnvironment on the Path to Our
Urban Future.
You discuss in the book theidea of the modern city 1.0 and
2.0 differentiating betweenperiods of building
construction.
What characterizes each ofthese periods?
And do you have a vision for amodern city 3.0?

Carl Elefante (03:46):
Well, first, let me just say thank you so much
for having me here today.
It's a great honor to be hereand uh great opportunity to talk
about my book.
Obviously, I wrote it so thatpeople would read it and we
could talk about it.
So this is very much kind ofthe outcome that I was hoping
would happen with writing thebook.
So I talked about Modern City1.0 and 2.0 as kind of a

(04:08):
reference to look at the historyof the development of modern
cities in a way that mostarchitects and engineers and
planners and so on could relateto and kind of get without
having it be a really big heavystudy into the history of
architecture and planning.
And basically it's kind of80-year cycles, if you will, if
you look at the IndustrialRevolution and its impact on the

(04:32):
built environment, kind of thefirst generation is oftentimes
referred to as what happened inthe kind of 19th century.
We had electricity and we hadelevators and we had subways and
we had steel to makeskyscrapers, and there was sort
of this whole generation of newtechnologies and also new
understanding of what we coulddo with our design of cities to

(04:55):
things like having clean watersystems so that people didn't
get infectious disease.
So, in a lot of ways, I look atthat 19th century city as
modern city 1.0.
And here in the United States,we think of it in terms of the
City Beautiful movement and youknow the World Columbia
Exposition and the notion ofkind of you know Beaux Ar design

(05:16):
of these, you know, beautifulparks in our cities and things
like that.
And of course, we've got thissort of European example of
Hausman's Paris and a lot ofdevelopment that happened all
around the world in that sort ofera of those people were making
the modern city, the foundersof the AIA in 1860, roughly,
were thinking about, you know,really establishing the modern

(05:39):
city.
And they were reformists, theybelieved in cities.
They literally sort of votedwith their feet, they worked in
cities, they thought that citieswere really the future.
And then what I characterize asmodern city 2.0 is really what
emerges in the early 20thcentury with thinkers like Le
Corbusier and Frank LloydWright.
And they were what Icharacterize as urban

(06:01):
rejectionists.
They truly believed that citieswere not the solution and that
cities were the problem.
And sort of Corbus's version ofthat was to bulldoze down
Hausmann's Paris and put upapartment towers, which
fortunately didn't actuallyhappen the way that he planned
it.
You know, literally his planfor the bulldoze a second

(06:22):
Arondis Mont in Paris.
And of course, Frank LloydWright sort of gave us Broadacre
City, which was a real sort ofvision of suburbia.
And so here we are today,knowing all the wonderful things
that sort of modern City 1.0and 2.0 led to.
Cities today are spectacular inmany, many ways, but they're
also really problematic in manyways.

(06:42):
And we sort of know what theycan't do as hell, and know that
they have transigent problemsthat we're really having a
struggle to try to do somethingabout.
And so the post-World War IIera, that's 80 years old.
I mean, literally this year isthe 80th anniversary of the end
of World War II.
So for 80 years, we've beentrying this City Beautiful 2.0

(07:04):
model and it's sort of fullymature version.
And we understand that there'sthings like the cities are more
for cars than they are forpeople, also that cities are
heavily carbon polluting.
So the fact of the matter iswe're really beginning to see
modern city 3.0 talked about.
And I like to look at theexample of New York City and
then also Paris.

(07:24):
You know, both of them arereally consider themselves true
leaders in climate action andreally kind of imagining the
future.
And I have to say, when I lookat their plans, to me, it's
literally visions of sugarplums.
Really, this is the plan in NewYork City.
We're gonna upzone two of thedensest parts of the city around
Penn Station or on GrandCentral Station.

(07:46):
We're gonna tear down 50-storybuildings to build hundred-story
buildings.
And it's literally like50-story glass skyscrapers to
build 100-story glassskyscrapers, and that's gonna
solve our problems?
Really?
Come on, let's get serious.
And so, what I talk about inthe book is that really what we
need to get to is sort of beyondthe last 80-year modern city,

(08:08):
what's beyond modern?
And I talk about it in terms ofreconnecting with our outcomes,
reconnecting with our sense ofcommunity, reconnecting with
Earth, literally the being thatwe are all part of, Earth, and
then also reconnecting with ournotion of place.
And I kind of get into each oneof those in the book.

Stephanie Rouse (08:27):
Modern city 3.0, kind of where we need to
move, is almost like revertingback to modern city 1.0 and
getting back to that moretargeted development, building
out our cores without doing itin a dense matter, doing that
kind of more missing middlehousing that a lot of
communities are looking intotoday, it seems like.

Carl Elefante (09:56):
Also, they all, in that thousand years or more,
they all experienced profounddisruption in one way or
another.
Earthquakes or whatever, KublaKhan coming through with this
board, you know.
I mean, a lot of differentthings that really threatened
the existence of cities.
So there are many, manydefinitions just in that book,
and let alone in theencyclopedia of 6,000 years of

(10:21):
cities, there are manydefinitions of what sustainable
city looks like.
There's many definitions ofwhat a resilient city looks
like.
And we're using only the lastpage of the encyclopedia.
We're thinking that what we'vedone in the last 200 years has
all the answers, and it justdoesn't.

Jennifer Hiatt (10:38):
To your point, the past is prologue.
For thousands of years, we didrely on human slave labor to
build those historic cities.
But you make the point that nowwe rely on energy slaves for
our modern comforts.
So can you explain this idea?

Carl Elefante (10:51):
I think there's a little bit of a misnomer in
your question, in that it wasn'tjust slave labor, it was human
labor and animal labor.
Much of it paid, you know, muchof it people very glad to be a
stonemason working on a gothiccathedral.
You know, it's a good point.

Jennifer Hiatt (11:06):
Yeah.

Carl Elefante (11:06):
I mean, so what okay, well, it wasn't all just
bad.
You know, people were makingother people do bad things to
build cities, you know.
Uh, there was a lot of uh goodin it.
But it was certainly humanlabor and animal labor.
It was calories, was the energythat was being used to build.
The term energy slaves isactually coined by Buckminster
Fuller.
And, you know, Bucky was kindof on a spectrum.

(11:29):
I mean, he was he was somebodythat was very much driven by his
thoughts, but also sort ofhaunted by some of them.
And energy slaves is one of thethings that he was haunted by.
He he saw the buildings that hewas designing as being only
viable because they had hundredsor thousands of energy slaves
that made them work.
And he was like, no, this iswrong.
You know, how can we makebuildings that use energy slaves

(11:52):
last instead of using themfirst?
And the ideas of passive designand operability, et cetera,
were very much baked into manyof his ideas.
We kind of got a perspective ofthat when the oil embargo
happened in the 70s, where wewere in a period where energy,
what's that?
Architects and engineers nevertalked about energy.

(12:15):
And then the oil embargohappened, energy prices went up
four times in like a month.
And all of a sudden, oh,energy, it costs a lot.
What are we going to do aboutit?
And the immediate reaction tothat was architects and
engineers thinking about energylast.
How can I design buildings?
How can I build buildings thatneed energy as a last resort

(12:36):
instead of a first scenario?
And we kind of lost that sincethe 70s.
And there's still a lot ofenergy first sort of baked into
what we're doing.
And for architects, and I thinkthis is true for planners as
well, when you start to thinkabout passive design and you
start to think aboutoperability, the ability to

(12:56):
literally adjust to the seasonsand adjust to the weather during
a day by opening and closing awindow, there's kind of urban
versions of that, just thingslike are we thinking about the
wind tunnels that we're bringingbetween buildings?
Because we do.
And in very hot climates, inplaces like in Yemen, at you
know, Shabam and uh Sana'a,these thousand-year-old cities,

(13:19):
they literally designed windtunnels by relating their
buildings to cool their cities.
You know, so it's a conceptthat I talk about in the book as
performance follows form, thatthe engineering that took place
in modern city 2.0, you know,Mies Van Derot talked about the
design freedom we had because wecould get our energy slaves to

(13:41):
solve all our problems for us inbuildings.
And Buckminster Fuller waslike, no, no, no, no, let's not
use energy slaves first, let'suse them last.
And so that notion of our basicform decisions, our first
decisions about how we make ourbuildings and cities are the
most important decisions on whatwill ultimately constitute the

(14:02):
performance of buildings andcities.
And realizing that thosedecisions come first, we have to
be thinking about thosedecisions as performance
decisions, not we'll justengineer out all the bad
decisions we made by throwing abunch of energy at it.
And it's true on a planninglevel as well.
And when you talked aboutModern City 1.0 and 2.0, you
know, the idea of Key Islandeffect.

(14:24):
Do we have trees on our streetsor do streets just belong to
cars?
Things like that.

Stephanie Rouse (14:29):
So you're kind of getting into this next
question, talking about howarchitects have the ability to
influence building performance.
And you talked a little bitabout planners as well.
And in the book, you referencearchitects and others are really
instrumental in shaping thebuilt environment.
Who are some of the otherprofessions that really need to
start acting to help make apositive impact?

Carl Elefante (14:50):
So the answer to this is almost infinite in that,
you know, if you go to the autoindustry, they'll talk about
oh, one of it out of every fouror five people in the country is
sort of employed in the autoindustry.
Well, a hundred percent of thepeople in every country are
employed in the human habitationindustry.
You know, we're we're all aboutmaking these places where we
can all live together and worktogether.

(15:12):
So that's the super wide anglelens answer to your question.
That literally how we makefood, how we ship things around
the world, it all relates to theform of habitation that we
have.
But who among us are the onesthat are really being asked to
understand how to shape thathuman habitation?
Planners, urban designers.
And as you know from readingthe book, I talk a lot about the

(15:35):
idea of urban design versusplanning, putting colors on a
map versus literally designing aplace and talking about a
specific outcome, not just whatwe're hoping will be the outcome
if you have the right colors inthe right places on the map.
So I think that that's a bigpart of it.
Another kind of category arelandscape architects and what we

(15:56):
really now look at as sort ofurban ecologists.
There are also urbanagriculturalists beginning to
see cities as not separate fromfood production, but literally
part of food production.
And they're certainlydetermining the demand for food.
They're certainly determininghow efficiently we use food
resources or how much of it wewaste.

(16:18):
Right now we have a really,really wasteful food use
scenario in this country and infact around the world.
Um, and then the third categoryare the kind of movement
specialists, traffic engineersand transit designers, et
cetera.
How we make the builtenvironment understanding the
land is not just land, it is theearth and it is creatures and

(16:40):
it is life, and then it is ourfood sources, et cetera.
And then the third, we have tomove around.
And those sort of threecategories are all really,
really important to this.

Jennifer Hiatt (16:49):
A statement from the book that really struck me
was that we live in a societythat fixates on recycling
bottles and cans, but we easilydestroy viable buildings by
hundreds of thousands everyyear.
I had never really thought ofit in that comparison.
So, what do you think createdthat mentality and how do we
start combating it?

Carl Elefante (17:09):
I think it's very, very baked into our modern
city 2.0 biases and the kind ofthe urban rejection idea.
I've been to very, very fewplaces where the urban
skepticism wasn't prettypalpable.
Even Singapore, which is, Ithink, the city that I've been
to, where you walk down thestreet with a microphone, people

(17:31):
will say, this is an amazingcity.
Our city is so important.
We're doing everything we canto sort of optimize how livable
our city is, et cetera, etcetera.
There's a lot of urbanskepticism, very, very deeply
baked into our ideas about howwe live and where we live.
Very parallel to that is thissort of old is bad, new is good

(17:52):
part of that modern city 2.0, ofthat modern era bias.
And it's very, very deep.
In a lot of ways, our culture,and you can see this in a
million different ways, ourculture is so fascinated by the
new and now.
What is today's headlines?
What is today's top 40 hit?

(18:13):
Not last week's, but thisweek's.
And when you apply that tocities, which are sort of the
opposite proposition, which isthey get better as they get
older, they get better as theyget time layered over them.
Imagine Rome, if the oldestbuilding was 100 years old.
Would you get on a plane and gothere?
No.
I'm in the Washington, D.C.

(18:35):
area.
Why do people come to here andbe tourists?
Because this is amazing.
They want to come see buildingsthat are 250 years old that
really represent something aboutour culture.
Those buildings being 200, 250years old, representing what
they do about our culture, iswhat makes this city special.
You need that time.
It doesn't work without layersof time.

Jennifer Hiatt (18:58):
Yeah, I just spent 10 days in the Netherlands
and Brussels taking inthousands of years of history.
And I actually read your bookon the plane as I was flying
over.
And so it was a veryinteresting concept to go from
Lincoln, where I don't know,Stephanie, you're the historic

(19:20):
preservation planner too, but150, 200 years old, Max.

Stephanie Rouse (19:24):
Max building is, I think, 120 years old.
We're not very old.
We we demolish a lot here.

Jennifer Hiatt (19:31):
We do.
Tabruge, who's protected everysingle thing they've ever built
in their whole history of urbandevelopment.
It was very fascinating.

Stephanie Rouse (19:39):
On this idea of a whole building life cycle and
extending the life of thesebuildings, I mean, design today
is very computerized.
It's very easy to do theselifecycle analyses, but it's not
very standard to look at everybuilding and their predicted
greenhouse gas pollution.
Why is that the case?

Carl Elefante (19:58):
Well, I think it's a kind of developmental,
you know, we're preteens atthis, you know, we have to grow
up and be adults about it.
So you're right that thecomputerization of how not just
buildings, but everything aboutcities are designed and built
and operated is actually ahugely beneficial tool.

(20:20):
It really gives us the abilityto get at a very deep
understanding of somethingthat's pretty darned abstract.
You know, it's like, okay, whatis the carbon pollution of your
building?
What, why are you asking methat?
You don't really expect me toanswer that.
Yes, I do expect you to answerthat.
Not that long ago, you know,I'll go back to the founders of

(20:42):
the AIA in 1857.
There weren't building codes.
They were like, hey, we need acode.
We need everybody to understandthat this is our standard of
care, that it's not okay forbuildings to burn down and for
people to die in those fires.
You know, we need to haveegress, we need to have
fireproof buildings, etc.
You know, that in and of itselfwas a big paradigm shift.

(21:05):
Like, oh yeah, let's havebuilding codes.
Well, in the architecturalworld, architectural and
engineering world, that's calledstandard of care.
You know, if the building codesays that you must do that, the
standard of care is you must dothat.
Our standard of care needs tobecome and could easily become
assessing whole life carbon aspart of our design process.

(21:27):
It could be mandated by code,and I think it's becoming
mandated by code.
And I'll just give you onereally good example of that.
London recently adopted whatthey call the reuse first
policy.
What it's based on is that toget a demolition permit for any
building over one story tall,and that's most of the buildings

(21:48):
in London, that's for sure.
Uh, you have to show that yournew building alternative is the
least carbon-pollutingalternative using a whole life
carbon analysis.
And you have to compare it witha reuse-only scenario, just use
the building that you've got,uh, a reuse plus addition

(22:09):
scenario, or a demolition andreplacement scenario.
And there's a kind of a routinethat you go through to sort of
show that.
But it just gives you anexample of, I think, what's
coming, this idea thatunderstanding the carbon
footprint of our decisions issomething that we have the
capability of doing.
And I'll just end it by saying,well, what's preventing it?

(22:30):
Well, right now, the peoplethat really need to do this
work, the architects and theengineers and the planners that
need to do this work, we're notreally trained for it, and we're
sure shooting, not compensatedfor it.
And those two things have tochange.
And I think we're working onthe training part, but we really
have to work on thecompensation part.
We have to understand that, youknow, we need the policies that

(22:54):
mandate carbon accounting, butthen we also need to understand
that there's an economic costbenefit to it, that we're going
to get the benefits.
A great article in today's NewYork Times about Iowa City and
their free bus system.
And guess what?
It's reducing trafficcongestion and it's shortening

(23:15):
the travel times, and it's alsoreducing air pollution.
So, you know, suddenlysomething that sounds like, oh,
it's just going to cost usmoney.
We're going to have freetransportation.
Wow, what a burden, man, that'sreally going to, you know, make
our city taxes go up.
Suddenly, there's these otherbenefits from it that actually
have monetary value that wedon't capture.

(23:37):
We don't, we don't find a wayto capture that value.
We have to figure out a way tocapture the value of actually
doing the carbon accounting thatwe need to do.

Stephanie Rouse (23:48):
I feel like another barrier too is the
owners of all the buildingsbecause the architects, the
planners, the engineers, we'reoften working for building
owners and they're the finaldecision makers.
So we can make the case allday, but until they've bought in
and understood the importanceof designing and maintaining
buildings in a more sustainablemanner, it can be kind of an
uphill battle.

Carl Elefante (24:08):
Yeah.
And there's there's ways thatthe owners can be incentivized
in this as well.
So probably the one that you'llhear reference most often is
insurance.
You know, so there's a lot ofreally clear co-benefits related
to health.
We just talked about Iowa Cityand the air pollution being
reduced by having uh, you know,free bus service.

(24:31):
There's a lot of kind of other,both urban scale and building
scale examples like that of bothpersonal health benefits,
individual health benefits, andthen also public health
benefits.
That's reflected in theinsurance industry.
And it's becoming morereflected in the insurance
industry.
You're beginning to see justthings like climate disruption

(24:52):
risk affecting insurance rateson property, et cetera.
And then also the financialindustry, how we loan money to
do building projects, which arebig dollar, long-term, long
payback endeavors.
But the way that we look atthem still is too short-term.

(25:14):
You know, buildings really gettheir value not just over
decades, but over centuries.
And that's a very controversialthing to say in our society.
But I talk about it in my bookin terms of buildings, their
superpower being theirpermanence.
And I talk about buildingsbeing permanent, not
long-lasting, not part of thecircular economy.

(25:34):
They literally last lifetimes.
And if you look at our buildingcodes, you know, something that
we talked a little bit aboutbefore, okay, well, our codes
were made to make buildings befireproof.
And oh, now earthquake-proof,and oh, even bomb-proof.
We have these requirements tomake buildings very, very

(25:56):
durable, made out of things likesteel and concrete.
You know, 60% of a building,70% of the building are made out
of these extremely durable,what are ultimately truly
permanent materials that lastforever.
And yet there's nothing in ourcodes that talks about if you're
going to invest 60 or 70% ofyour resources into permanent

(26:20):
structures, how do we make themvaluable over time?
How do we make them flexible?
How do we make them adaptable?
How do we make themmaintainable and then actually
literally changeable?
You know, really make it sothat you can fully give them new
life somewhere in theirhundreds of years of life.
And those in the preservationfield, historic preservation

(26:43):
field.
We like get this.
You know, we know that if we gointo a 200-year-old masonry
building, where the work's goingto be is not going to be on the
200-year-old masonry.
There's going to be a littlebit of work on the 200 masonry.
And my kind of favorite exampleof that is to compare the
Empire State Building, which isa pre-World War II building,

(27:04):
with typical 21st century glasstower like Freedom Tower that,
you know, is built on the WorldTrade Center site.
And the Empire State Buildingand Freedom Tower are both lead
gold buildings, you know, sothey're both good, cool green
buildings.
Great.
And the Empire State Buildingwas renovated, I think, starting
in 2009 to become a lead goldbuilding.

(27:25):
And, you know, they had to workon their windows.
They'd take the windows out.
They're all the same size.
They were able to take a windowout and put a new window back
in like the same day because allthe windows were the same size,
you know, so you didn't have tolike wait six months while the
window was being restored.
They restored them on site,they put them back in, but the
rest of the facade was stone, sothey had to wash it and repoint

(27:47):
it a little bit.
It hardly took anything to makethat wall be good for another
80 years.
Freedom Tower, which is madeout of all glass, in 80 years,
if it lasts that long, they'regoing to tear the whole thing
off, throw it in the trash.
Literally, you can't recycleit.
It's all steeled together intoglass assemblies.
It's going to all go in alandfill and it's all going to

(28:09):
be replaced.
So our idea of the 21st centurybuilding, this cool new 21st
century building as compared tothat iconic old, no good Empire
State building, really, whichone's better?
You know, which is the betterapproach?
And we've got so much of thatbaked into our ideas about how

(28:29):
we're reusing buildings or ornot, and what's permanent in our
buildings and how to reallywork with what's permanent in
our buildings.
It's a very big paradigm shiftthat we really have to come to
terms with.

Jennifer Hiatt (28:43):
This isn't in the building concept, it's more
in the design concept.
But I recently, well, recentlyin the last six years, moved
into a 1952 home.
So I've been trying to honorthat home's character and its
mid-century interests.
And I've been buying secondhandfurniture.
And then I bought an IKEA chairto try and match.

(29:05):
My IKEA chair was two years oldand it broke, but I have a
chair from 1945 that is stillstanding and will stand for 30
years.
And I think what will be the21st century, you know, we've
got mid-century modern.
What's our design standard?
And and who will get to see itin 80 years?

Carl Elefante (29:25):
There are times that I feel like I'm just being
grumpy, you know, it just, youknow, like this circular economy
thing, I get it.
You know, when you look at lifecycle, there's product life
cycle.
Okay, then there's assemblylife cycle, and then there's
whole building life cycle.
And if you look at them atthose three different scales,
it's a very different world.

(29:45):
The product life cycle one,hey, got a glass bottle?
Guess what?
You can make another glassbottle out of it.
And in the architectural world,that's true with stone.
It's true with metals.
You know, actually, stone is apermanent.
Material.
I misspoke on that.
So someone like just leave italone.
But metals, metals are trulyrecyclable.

(30:06):
And the most interestingdecarbonization story in our
world today is steel.
You know, that steel, wow, thedefinition of heavy industry.
But we're to a point now inbuildings that more than 90% of
the steel in buildings isrecycled.
More than 95% of the steel inreinforcing steel for concrete

(30:26):
is recycled.
So there's a kind of a truerecycled economy at that basic
material level with thoseproducts.
When you look at whole buildinglife cycles, that's when you
start to understand like, hey,two-thirds of your building is
made out of permanent materials.
Why are you tearing them down?
And here in Washington, we haveheight limits.

(30:48):
So there's not the temptationto tear down a 10-story building
to put up a 30-story building.
10-story buildings, what yougot?
Sorry, you know, that's whatyou get.
But I actually think for acity, it's a great thing to just
simply have a city that getsdensity by using its land well,

(31:08):
you know, rather than fiveproperties using all the
economy, you know, and puttinghundred-story buildings up.
But anyway, that's a wholeother topic.
But those buildings are beingrenovated down to the concrete
frames.
But the concrete frames aretwo-thirds of the carbon
footprint of those buildings.
So, okay, let's keep what'spermanent.

(31:30):
And it's interesting, thefacades that get kept are
oftentimes the facades that aremade out of the permanent
materials, like the new AIAheadquarters.
You know, the AIA headquartersjust been renovated.
And it was, you know, thisbrutalist concrete building
built in the 70s.
It actually opened like acouple of months before the oil

(31:51):
embargo.
So it was this building of likeenergy.
Hey, who cares about energy?
And all of a sudden, like theybarely get the lights turned on.
It's like, oh my God, theenergy costs are four times
higher.
Now what?
You know, and they had to startto retrofit thinking about
energy in that building.
But in the renovation that theyjust did, they kept all the
concrete, including that uglybrutalist facade.

(32:14):
They're like, you know what?
We can we can work with that.
And they actually did a reallyinteresting version of adding
glass sun shades that areactually solar collectors to
shade the building, which hasits main facade is south and
west.
So it's you know just horriblefrom the sun standpoint.
But they did a really cleverjob and they kept all the

(32:35):
permanent materials.

Jennifer Hiatt (32:37):
And switching back to the building codes, and
I think this was kind of one ofthe points that you were
starting to make.
We legally can't build abuilding without using plastic.
And now every time I plugsomething into an outlet, I
think about that.
So why has the market notstepped in to provide greener
building materials at thispoint?

Carl Elefante (32:57):
Let me just start by saying that there are uses
for plastics that are likemiracle uses.
And you you gave the example ofelectric devices.
I don't know how we would havethe electrical systems that we
have without plastic.
It's like the perfect materialfor that.
But siding, we're gonna makethe siding from our houses out

(33:18):
of plastic.
When it burns, the firefightershave to wear gas masks because
it makes a toxic smoke when itburns.
You know, so like, okay, we'lljust kill all the firemen when
our houses burn down.
No, I mean, why are we usingplastics for things like that?
There's way better alternativesmade out of ready, wood,

(33:40):
bamboo.
How about earth?
We can make things like brick.
The 6,000-year-longencyclopedia of buildings and
cities shows us how to buildwith the earth and plant
resources that we have to makebuildings that last for
literally thousands of years.

(34:00):
Let's go to Yemen and look atShabam, a thousand-year-old city
made out of unfired adobe.
You show me your glass towerthat's been here for a thousand
years, and we can start talkingabout which one we like better.
We like the thousand-year-oldwood building, the
thousand-year-old unfired claybuilding, the thousand-year-old

(34:21):
stone building, or thethousand-year-old glass
building.
You will never show me athousand-year-old glass
building, but our technologydoes not last that way.

Stephanie Rouse (34:30):
I think one of the main hurdles, especially for
you know single-familyhomeowners who are trying to
invest or build new buildings,is the costs of doing a more
durable material that's going tolast 100 years.
We think in terms of a singlemortgage cycle versus life
cycles of buildings.
How can we get past this way ofthinking?

Carl Elefante (34:50):
Well, I mentioned before about the insurance and
the financial industries, andthat we're really fighting them
instead of having them help uswith these aspects of the
challenges that we face.
Hey, come on, financial guys,get with it.
Help us out here.
You know, so I live in ahundred-year-old wooden house
that no one thought would last100 years.

(35:12):
If you paint it every 10 yearsand you get the leaves out of
the gutters, I mean, it youknow, it takes a little bit of
maintenance work to take care ofit, but there's a long history
of the traditional buildingsthat didn't require giant carbon
footprints to make thosematerials to really show the
longevity value of them, thatour economic system doesn't

(35:35):
capture that value iscounterproductive.
I mean, it's not only, gee, itdoesn't make sense, it actually
hurts.
And it's just not okay forthose to be our systems.
I mean, if we're gonna solvethe problem and have our own
version of a sustainable andresilient future that is gonna
last a thousand years, we haveto change those systems to aid

(35:58):
it.
If we're fighting thosesystems, we will not get there.
We're fighting it right now.
Look at what's going on withthe economy in our country.
We're trying to pretend that aneconomic system that rewards
New York for buildinghundred-story towers for
billionaires to visit two weeksa year is a good real estate

(36:19):
economy.
It's not a good real estateeconomy.
It doesn't take care of thepeople in the city.
The things that we know aremaking it harder for us to
really achieve what we need toachieve, to have a sustainable
and resilient future.
We have to change those things.
Not okay for them just to staythe same.

Jennifer Hiatt (36:37):
So, how can design professionals today move
beyond this modernism andthinking like you were just
talking about, we kind of know,and relearn the historic design
principles that could help meettoday's climate goals?
We don't really see that inschool much, I don't think, at
this point.
So, how can we move forward?

Carl Elefante (36:54):
Yeah, so we don't see it much in school.
And to the degree thatarchitecture does spend time on
what's not just in this month'sarchitecture magazine, we tend
to look at it in terms ofstylistic development.
And we're not really looking atit like what materials are
those buildings made out of?
What were the material flows?

(37:17):
What were like literally whatwe now have as global supply
chains?
What were the supply chainsthat allowed cities to develop
and thrive, et cetera?
And so not just looking at the6,000-year encyclopedia of
buildings and cities, but to bemore curious about what they
really represent.
What are the stories of thesustainability and resilience

(37:40):
that are there?
And part of it is the materialsthat they're made out of, part
of it is how they were designedfor their climates, for their
weather, et cetera, that idea ofpassive design and operability.
The other thing is we need todo is to not just study those
things, but to learn from themand then figure out a way to use

(38:01):
those things and adapt to them.
I'll just give you a greatstory of a project that's by
architects here in Washington, aguy named Rick Snyder of
iStudio.
They were doing a schooledition.
Washington built a lot ofschools in the late 19th
century.
And they were doing an additionto this school, and they
noticed that the classrooms allhad these shafts in them built

(38:22):
into the walls.
They're like, why are thereshafts here?
And they were, oh, well, theymust go down to the basement to
like the furnace.
Like, no, they didn't go downto the basement.
They went up to the attic.
Why did they have shafts in theclassrooms?
Go up to the attic.
They went up to the attic andthey looked around and they
noticed that there was a cupolaand that that tower actually

(38:43):
would had louvers and windows init.
And actually, it was a vent sothat the shafts were drawing air
through the classrooms up intothe hot attic.
And the hot air escaping out ofthe top of the attic through
the cupola was actually creatingan air circulation system,
what's called an inducedventilation system in the

(39:04):
classrooms.
And they emulated it in theirnew edition.
In fact, they sort of improvedit, engineering it a little bit
more and using, you know, a kindof a south-facing solar
orientation on the solar chimneyso that it would sort of
superheat the air and createmore of an airflow and so on.
So that's just an example oflearning something from a

(39:26):
historic building, from abuilding tradition, and then
adapting it to a modernchallenge and not only adapting
it, but improving it.
And we could just do that allday, every day, you know.
So let's let's do that.
And there's a city scale aswell that that really applies

(39:48):
to.
And I'll just reference againthe idea of really thinking
about designing for climate andthat cities have huge amounts of
public space in them.
We call them streets.
Well, that huge amount ofpublic space can be used for
other things as well as movingtransportation vehicles.
And it can be stormwatermanagement, it can be green

(40:11):
things that lower the heatisland, that make oxygen, you
know, that take CO2 out of theair, that make it a pleasant
place for us arboreal creaturesto feel at home.

Stephanie Rouse (40:24):
Yeah, we just finished talking with the author
of Beyond Complete Streets.
So a lot of the concepts of wehave so much public
right-of-way, we're only usingit for cars.
There's so many other thingsthat we could be using this
right-of-way for that wouldreally benefit communities.

Carl Elefante (40:37):
It's a great topic.

Stephanie Rouse (40:39):
So another path forward that you identified in
the book is moving from thisidea of development to
reintegration, requiring aradically altered approach to
engaging social communities.
What does this look like?

Carl Elefante (40:51):
Well, there's kind of two dimensions to this.
The first is just recognizingthat, particularly in places
like the United States,throughout Europe, literally,
there are cities all around theworld that since the end of
World War II in the last 80years, we have built so much.
It's staggering how much we'vebuilt.
And I'll just give you onelittle statistic on the United

(41:14):
States just to give you a senseof how much we've built.
So in 1950, the average familysize was 3.9 people.
The average house size was 900square feet.
In 2024, the average house sizewas 2.3 people.
So we're more than a personless.
We're about a person and a halfless per family.

(41:36):
The average house size was2,400 square feet, so almost
three times bigger.
So we have a family that'salmost half the size, and houses
that are three times like, dowe really need to build a lot
more?
We've built so much.
How well are we using the spacethat we've built?
And when you think of it interms of cities, there is not a

(42:00):
city that I know of in theUnited States of America and
probably around the world thatare modern era cities that
haven't sprawled out beyond allreason.
And, you know, back in theearly modern era, you know, the
kind of landscape world ofdesigning with nature and, you
know, Ian McCarg's design withnature, and the idea of defining

(42:21):
the natural suitability ofland, you know, like where
should we be building?
Where should we be avoidingaquifer recharge areas or slopes
that are unstable orfloodplains that we shouldn't
build in?
We've pretty much ignored allof those factors and we've just
sprawled out like crazy.
So there's hardly a place thatI know of that we couldn't

(42:43):
actually densify and shrink andjust simply use our land better
and give nature a little bitmore of a chance, you know, to
actually thrive in relationshipto our cities.
There's that side of it.
But the other side of it isliterally the people side and
you know, recognizing the wayJane Jacobs did that the people

(43:04):
that live in a neighborhood, thepeople that live in the city
have a better idea about whatthe problems are and what the
solutions are they need thanRobert Moses sitting up in the
50th story of a tower somewherethinking that he's got all the
great ideas.
Just really trusting in thepeople that live there, trusting

(43:24):
in the diversity of the peoplethat are experiencing the
neighborhoods and places thatwe're intervening in, and
engaging them in a real way inreally planning the future of
those places.

Jennifer Hiatt (43:37):
Ultimately, Going for Zero is a hopeful
book.
And I was wondering whatcontinues to give you a sense of
optimism that we will be ableto meet the future needs and
fight against climate changeafter this whole conversation of
we are not doing it yet.

Carl Elefante (43:52):
Yeah.
So so one of the things thatyou realize as you study
history, and and again, all ofmy study is not about what did
the kings and queens do.
It's it's all about buildingsector, it's all about cities.
I mean, I understand the worldthrough buildings and cities.
But when you look at thehistorical record, you realize
that every generation faced whatthey truly considered were

(44:14):
existential threats.
And hey, Kupla Khan comingthrough with the horde, that's
an existential threat, man.
They they killed everybody intown.
You know, I mean, you know,there were some very big
challenges, but every generationalso found a way to solve their
problems and to move on and tonot just survive it, but to
thrive.
I mean, Shakespeare never livedin an air-conditioned building,

(44:38):
but he somehow or another gotto write all those plays.
I mean, you know, life didn'tjust exist, it didn't just make
it through the day.
Everything that we admire abouthuman accomplishment was
accomplished in thoseconditions.
We're going to do the samething.
It's our human instinct to doit.
Let's just get busy, let's helpeach other, and let's correct

(45:00):
the things that need to becorrected.
Like, why are we fighting thefinancial system?
Why are we fighting a lot ofthe planning and zoning systems
and things like that?
Let's change those systems.
They're just words on paper.
Write different words on thepaper.
And let's make those things sothat they're helping us instead
of barriers to the progress thatwe need.

(45:20):
So we'll do it.
And when I go to architectureschools, sorry, college
professors, for what I'm aboutto say, the students get it more
than the faculty.
The students get it.
The next generation is chompingat the bit to get at this and
really solve these problems.
Let's help them instead ofthrowing barriers in front of

(45:41):
them.

Stephanie Rouse (45:42):
And as this is booked on planning, what books
would you recommend our readerscheck out?

Carl Elefante (45:48):
Well, I already mentioned Barnabas Calder's book
about architecture fromprehistory to climate change,
which is appreciating thehistory of architecture not just
as stylistic evolution, butreally understanding it as
energy and materials, et cetera.
So just that's a great book.
Just change your mindset aboutwhat you're seeing when you look

(46:09):
back.
There's three urban books thatI think are just super
important.
One is Ed Glazier's Triumph ofthe City.
I think it's so importantbecause it just reminds us why
did people make cities?
Because it allowed us to haveexchange and cooperation, which
is really all that people reallyhave.
That's it.
Those are the only tools thatwe have in the toolbox to get

(46:32):
together and to cooperate witheach other.
That's what human progress isbased on.
The second book is MindyThompson Full of Loves, Main
Street, and she's authored a lotof books.
She's a psychiatrist whounderstands psychiatry.
She understands human pathologyissues and what you need to do.
And she's a psychiatrist whounderstands human potential and

(46:57):
how the built environmentimpacts it.
And it's both sort of the bad,like wow, if you live in a bad
place, it really affects you.
But then it's also the goodthat, like Jane Jacobs, go and
talk to those people.
They understand how the builtenvironment is impacting their
lives.
Trust in that.

(47:19):
So it's just really a greatunderstanding of how we can
bring our urban and designexpertise together with the
actual people that are beingaffected by bad conditions in
the urban environment, improvethings.
And then last but not least isDoug Farr's Sustainable Nation.
Doug has written a couple ofbooks, and Sustainable Nation is

(47:40):
really taking the ideas ofclimate action and green
building and sustainability andresilience and looking at it as
a global proposition and saying,can't we get to all of us
working together for asustainable and resilient urban
future?
So I think that I wouldrecommend all three of those
books.

Stephanie Rouse (48:01):
I think those are all three new
recommendations to add to ourgrowing list of
author-recommended readings.

Carl Elefante (48:07):
Well, great.
I'm glad I was able to help.

Stephanie Rouse (48:10):
Well, Carl, thank you so much for joining us
on the show to talk about yourbook, Going for Zero:
Decarbonizing the BuiltEnvironment on the Path to Our
Urban Future.

Carl Elefante (48:19):
A real pleasure to be with you.
Thank you so much, Jennifer andStephanie.

Jennifer Hiatt (48:24):
We hope you enjoyed this conversation with
author Carl Alafante on hisbook, Going for Zero:
Decarbonizing the BuiltEnvironment on the Path to Our
Urban Future.
You can get your own copythrough the publisher at Island
Press for a short time.
You all may be know IslandPress is merging with another
publisher by supporting yourlocal bookstore or, of course,
supporting us at bookshop.org.

(48:45):
Remember to subscribe to theshow wherever you listen to
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Thank you for listening, andwe'll talk to you next time on
Bookshop Planning.