Can businesses prosper from the "new urbanism"?

After you pay the admission fee for most of Disney's magic kingdom-style amusement parks, what's the first thing that greets you? Forget the profit-generating rides, that tempt customers with their high-tech multimedia effects and hair-raising mechanics. Main Street USA, the thing that Disney chose over everything else, is simply a recreation of an American street.

We should think about that, says Owen Rose, president of the Montreal Urban Ecology Centre. " People pay phenomenal ticket prices to be able to walk on a giant pedestrian shopping street," says Rose, an architect who works with the Centre to promote what he calls "social ecology". "They do it because it's pleasurable."

Why are people paying to walk up and down on fake streets, when we have plenty of real ones? Environmentalists argue that it's because the real ones aren't particularly pleasurable places to be. They're not designed to be people-friendly. Now, they're enlisting the help of municipal leaders - including businesses - to change that.

Even architects, construction firms and town planners traditionally focused on environmentally-friendly buildings are now waking up to this fact and are looking beyond the buildings themselves and trying to work out how to limit whole neighbourhood's environmental impact - a trend labelled "new urbanism" by some of its supporters.

The US Green Building Council (GBC), for example, developed the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System, which is now widely used as a benchmark in the design of energy-saving buildings. LEED quickly evolved into a set of certifications covering buildings in a variety of areas, such as healthcare, schools, and residential structures. But now, in conjunction with the National Resources Defence Council and the Congress for the New Urbanism, the GBC is working on a certification scheme called Leed Neighbourhood Development (ND). The system, currently in the pilot phase, is expected to become available next year.

"One reason for the scheme was to counteract a criticism of [the] building LEED [system] that it didn't properly account for the impact of a building's location," says Jennifer Henry, who directs the programme at the GBC. An environmentally friendly building structure still indirectly generates a lot of carbon emissions if it is located miles from the people that need to reach it. "And a lot of development takes place in chunks. It doesn't happen one building at a time," she adds.

Many of the recommendations and best practices being considered by the GBC are far from rocket science. Look at the suburban sprawl encroaching on North America, where people live in low-density, expensive housing in remote " communities", where public transit is practically non-existent, and where residents have to drive miles for everything, and you'll see exactly what new urbanism isn't. Instead, we need walkable neighbourhoods, where people live in easy reach of everything, argues Ann Joyner, a partner at Toronto-based Dillon Consulting, which advises on sustainable urban and suburban planning.

"The ultimate goal would be to have a good mix - for every two people, there would be one job. But most sprawling areas don't have anything like that. The mix is generally one to four, or one to six," she says. "So one focus is on trying to build industrial parks and employment that are more niche-like so that you can fit them closer into residential areas."

The challenges are huge. Residents of suburban communities often oppose the idea, she says. They want a more measured transition between business corridors and residential areas. Businesses are also often opposed to change, warns Rose. "Most business owners want everyone to drive directly to their front door and park. We have to change their perception so that they can understand that their businesses will flourish even if they don't drive to the front door," he says. Instead, he advocates business support for alternative transport, such as public transit, bikes, or even foot.

Would it be profitable for businesses to eschew the big box model in favour of smaller stores, situated close to residential neighbourhoods? The GBC's Henry hopes so. "They are being built in both Canada and the US. They're still malls, but their oriented differently than strip malls or island malls with huge strips of parking around them," she says. There's a Home Depot - traditionally a chain that prefers big box developments - in the middle of Manhattan now, for example. "There's a chunk of younger people who remain in the cities longer. You also have ageing baby boomers who are interested in having a more walkable life. A lot of retirement communities are more walkable, active places," she continues.

Of course, many local businesses are already right on the downtown high street, but traditionally, the draw of low prices from larger stores in the suburbs has hit those businesses hard. Working with local communities to make neighbourhoods more pleasurable could help businesses to revitalise their surroundings, says Rose, drawing consumers back to more attractive neighbourhoods, away from the tumourous commercial developments that cling to the edges of many modern cities.

"The more the merchants collaborate in improving the urban environment they're in, the more they attract those customers," he says. "Merchant associations have a lot of power to lobby local governments for and against public transit." The problem is that many of those businesses today worry increased investment in public transport may encroach upon car access, which they still rely on for a lot of their customers and staff. For their own good, that attitude has to change, Owen warns.

Even driven individuals are making a difference. Michael E Arth, a staunch advocate of the "new urbanism" took his family to a delapidated neighbourhood in Florida and turned it around house by house, creating a walkable, pleasurable neighbourhood and dramatically lowering crime rates with the help of funding from local banks. His documentary on the subject is inspiring. If one person can do so much, one might argue that a collection of businesses should be able to go much further.

Even where businesses are located in industrial parks, things can be done to reduce the load on local roads, says Joyner. She mentions eco-business parks, where tens of companies on the same campus have begun collaborating to co-ordinate single deliveries of supplies to drastically reduce incoming vehicle traffic.

Rose is particularly interested in the LEED ND certification as a central tenet of sustainable neighbourhood development. "I've studied it a lot, and our office has implemented that as a template project in Montreal," he says. " What's interesting about it is that it's very conscious of the major green issues we already know about, but it's also conscious of community development, and how a mix of social interactions improves that community."

We have a long way to go if we want to change neighbourhoods that have fallen victim to road culture, but as Joyner says, such changes may be slow. The important steps now are to lay the foundations for change, she says. At least there is now a blueprint for them.