Scaling Sustainable Infrastructure: District Design for the Triple Bottom Line

Multiple forms of infrastructure are required to make anywhere habitable by modern standards. These systems include black and gray water treatment, stormwater management, electricity generation, cooling/heating systems, and amenities. There are multiple methods to address all these systems, which are optimized at different scales. As urban populations rise, and resources become limited, cities are being pushed to grow in creative and sustainable ways. This requires consideration of the social, economic and environmental sustainability of the growth strategies chosen. To do this properly, strategies to address each required infrastructure system must be analyzed, considering their pros and cons with regards to each sustainability type, and the proper scale at which it should be implemented. This thesis utilizes literature review, professional interviews, and physical site visitations to do this type of analysis. From this, an example district retrofit strategy was created for Hassalo on 8th, one of the observed sites. Many infrastructure systems can be strategically combined to create highly efficient districts. In the United States, there are ownership, policy and social barriers preventing the implementation of these strategies. This thesis presents a qualitative analysis of each infrastructure strategy, but the data necessary to create a quantitative comparison is lacking. To overcome these, further research into methods employed in other countries still needs to be done