News

Summer 2009 - New Launch: The Center for Resource Efficient Communities

This summer marks the start of a new research center at UC Berkeley that will study community-scale resource and energy efficiency. Launched with support from the California Energy Commission PIER Program, in its first year of operation CREC will conduct research on four specific research topics, and also produce a scoping study to define a research plan for future years.

Two of these research topics build on work previously conducted at CBE, including a study of comfort of pedestrians and bicyclists, and the development of a wireless monitoring system to study pedestrian behavior. Two additional topics will integrate research being conducted by other groups at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, including the assessment of the resource efficiency of pedestrian and transient-oriented developments, and the development of new approaches to the evaluation of “cool communities.”

Louise A. Mozingo, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning and Urban Design, will serve as Director of the center. Bill Eisenstein will be the Executive Director. As Assoc. Prof. Mozingo explains, “Our work is to take the qualitative and quantitative research that has been done, and to bring it into a coherent picture that can be brought to bear on planning and zoning in the state.” She points out that as CBE has conducted research to impact building standards, the work conducted at CREC will target planning standards, ultimately to meet greenhouse gas reductions required by AB32 and SB375. She also notes that affecting planning standards is a long process, “First you need robust data from verifiable sources, then you must connect with and convince people who set policy, finally you need to influence state and local jurisdictions.”

CBE Director Edward Arens was influential in establishing the new center, and looks forward to expanding the scope of UC Berkeley’s building science research to the urban scale. He explains that the center will focus on a range of scale between individual buildings and the city planning scale, looking in detail at sidewalks, bike lanes, and transit stops. This work can have important impacts in warm climates such as California’s Central Valley, where much of the state’s future development is expected. He says that, “Cars are an extension of the air conditioned environment in buildings, so to get people to use cars less, we have to quantify how to keep them comfortable outdoors.”

Read the article in the Center for the Built Environment's (CBE) Centerline Magazine