James Taylor Chair, Landscape Architecture, Faculty of Agricultural Sciences, University of British Columbia. 

Under Professor Condon's direction, the Chair has focused on the implementation of green infrastructure principles for sustainable community development. A primary activity related to this focus is the demonstration of what sustainable communities and environments look like and why, in very explicit terms, they are more economically, socially and environmentally effective.

These efforts involved the initiation of a number of charrettes -- or intense three to four day explorations -- to illustrate how to make our communities more sustainable. The early charrettes had the specific goal of demonstrating what our community would be like if they were designed and built to conform to emerging local, provincial, and federal policies for sustainable development. In 1995, designers came from across north America to produce a vision for a sustainable community in the City of Surrey. This first charrette focused on a 400-acre greenfield site slated for new development. The charrette results attracted a great deal of media, public and government attention. The second charrette was held in the Brentwood section of the City of Burnaby in 1997 and illustrated a sustainable vision for a more densely developed urban community on a site that was formerly a degraded auto-oriented strip commercial area. The results of both charrettes have been subsequently published and are available from the James Taylor Chair.

The James Taylor Chair has also worked on a number of important related issues. The creation of "Alternative Development Standards for Sustainable Communities" led to a more detailed analysis of sustainable design prototypes that emerged in the charrettes and pointed to the fact that significant const savings will result if these more sustainable patterns of development are realized. This study also lead to specific recommendations with respect to the need for "green infrastructure." Most recently, the Chair has produced a set of guidelines for sustainable site and community design, entitled "Sustainable Urban Design: Site Design Manual for BC Communities .This guidebook examines proposed and emerging sustainable development in and around British Columbia and extrapolates the principles that underline these proposals -- principles that are important to the development of any sustainable community.