Resource Centric Design: A Holistic Approach

By: William A. Aultman, 2009

U.S. Population per square mile

In the current economic circumstances, planners and designers are

charged with the difficult task of doing more with less. By not preventing the same mistakes and misconceptions made by the Modernist movement of the second quarter of the 20th century, the design community has, over the past couple of decades, reduced planning and design to a formulaic and often homogeneous approach in the urban and suburban fabric. Their method: create a standardized design process that results in a standardized appearance and function that ultimately relates to a uniform and familiar significance. Objects and landscapes are normalized via the propagation of a secure perspective. The environment is something to be consumed.

We, as a nation, are privileged to have a large, mostly temperate

land mass; a diverse and relatively small population base; and a rich and plentiful resource base. However, our inability to address the implementation of an integrated design ethic at the regional level, has, in large part, contributed to planning and design that does not address energy conservation and resource consumption at the macro level. Sustainability is mere language, if there is no large-scale view, in real-time, of the energy flows that drive all of earths systems. Resource modeling at the regional scale is paramount to understanding how basic, yet diverse, concepts like carrying capacity, soil stability

and traffic volumes relate to events and objects at the end-user level: healthy communities, sound construction and thoughtful resource conservation.

The resulting concept is a region-specific system of detailed design

decisions that are rooted in a firm understanding of the natural processes that support all living things, as well as the artificial processes that mediate the natural environment for human use. The following images attempt to illustrate a simple environmental motive: water and petroleum conservation as related to the decentralization of conventional agriculture in favor of a localized food system.

Total farmland as a percentage of total land

Acres of corn harvested

Kilograms of the agrochemical Atrazine applied per acre

Percentage of farms owed by a family or individual

Mean percipitation

This series of maps illustrates a simple spatial concept that relates

to a multitude of complex implementation strategies. The goal of this particular example of a Resource Centric Design strategy is the decentralization of conventional agriculture in favor of sustainable, or even surpassable, local food systems. In essence the maps here, produced from various but respected data sources, speak to the inefficient resource consumption and potential chemical abuses of an Industrial Agricultural System and it's dependence on fossil fuels and unsustainable water management practices. This perspective of an integrated agricultural system could lead to the formation of a planning and design ethic that could holistically protect sensitive watersheds, activate local economies and reduce petroleum consumption significantly when applied at the regional level.
Source: ESRI, USGS, National Agricultural Survey 2007