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Energy Efficient Buildings in Compact Communities: “The Carbon Efficient City”

Filed Under Brownbag, Great City TV, Policy, Sustainability 

We hope you are looking forward to your chance to meet A-P Hurd, author of “The Carbon Efficient City,” a roadmap to sustainability for the built environment. Speaking of the imperative to change human systems of energy generation and consumption, Founding Secretary of the Environmental Protection Agency William D. Ruckleshaus simply has said, simply, “It can be done and this book tells us how.”

So consider this your fair warning. You’ve got two weeks to get your hands on the book and read it. With so many knowledgeable and passionate built environment advocates in our midst, we’re looking forward to a lively exchange, great questions and we’re thrilled to welcome a friend of Great City to talk about opportunities for progress despite the need for economic stability, the scarcity of public funds and the realities of market economics.

The Puget Sound Business Journal recently interviewed A-P to ask her about her book:

Twenty years ago the idea that developers would one day lead the charge to create a more sustainable world was unthinkable to most people. Now developers like A-P Hurd, who works for Seattle-based Touchstone and teaches at the University of Washington, are promoting not just energy-efficient buildings but compact communities. To that end, she and her dad, Al Hurd, a business strategy consultant from Victoria, B.C., are out with a new book, “The Carbon Efficient City.”

WHAT WAS THE IMPETUS FOR THE BOOK?

In 2009 when I started working on the book, a lot of people were still thinking about energy efficiency in terms of buildings. One of my goals was to catalog the strategies around energy-efficient buildings and energy-efficient land use and infrastructure all in one place. As I started cataloging all these strategies, I started thinking about the obstacles to implementation. So I became really interested in looking at how we get the obstacles out of the way.

TELL US ABOUT WORKING ON SUCH A BIG PROJECT WITH YOUR FATHER.

It was wonderful. The outline for this book was 6,000 words. I knew that if I wrote really diligently over a period of about 10 days, I could probably turn that into a 50,000-word very rough draft that would need a lot of editing. My father had retired the previous summer. I said to him, “If I bang out this draft, will you help me edit it?” I don’t think we had any idea how much work would be involved in editing and researching and fact checking. His initial agreement to edit it became a long-term collaboration, and it has been really fun…

(Want to hear more from A-P before our Brown Bag Lunch? Continue Reading: via Questions for A-P Hurd, vice president, Touchstone Corp. – Puget Sound Business Journal)

 

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Nathan Daum

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Nate was born and raised at the intersection of Seattle’s Central District and Capitol Hill neighborhoods. He earned his BA in History from Western Washington University but it was a summer in New York City that sparked a passion for urban planning, livability, development and transportation issues. He volunteered with the Downtown Renaissance Network in Bellingham and Futurewise (back when it was still 1000 Friends of Washington) in Seattle. He has worked for Downtown Seattle’s Metropolitan Improvement District (MID), the Seattle Monorail Project and since 2004, as a consultant for housing and health care non-profits, mortgage and commercial real estate companies, hospitality and aviation brands as well as government and consumer technology businesses. He is a former member of the Uptown Alliance where he briefly served as the Co-Chair of the Transportation Committee (in reality, more of an understudy to D. John Coney). An employee of Great City Nate is also a former board member and one of the organizations earliest volunteers. He has also served on the executive committee of the Leschi Community Council. He is a cycle commuter, occasional bus rider and resident of Eastlake.


Comments

One Response to “Energy Efficient Buildings in Compact Communities: “The Carbon Efficient City””

  1. Chante on February 17th, 2013 7:02 pm

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