Sustainable Buildings - or Sustainable Cities?

China's rapidly growing cities offer a unique opportunity to create highly sustainable communities. Architects and their clients, typically real estate developers, are highly focused on strategies that are effective at reducing energy and water usage at the scale of the individual building or within a master plan of multiple related buildings. However, a closer look at energy consumption reveals that transportation uses more energy worldwide than residential and commercial buildings combined. In light of this, it is appropriate that China is making massive investments in transportation infrastructure like heavy rail rapid transit and grade separated expressways, but the end result of these investments to date has been to enable people to live further from where they work and shop rather than closer - while simultaneously not creating walkable communities. Using positive and negative examples from Asia and the rest of the world, this article will investigate the specific urban design policies such as height limits, setbacks, land use restrictions, parking ratios, and parcel size which might change to enable the creation of truly sustainable communities for China's 21st century.