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Public policy can, and should, play an important role in the movement towards a more sustainable built environment.

The efforts of the architect at the level of the design of a singular building are not enough to spread sustainable practices at a large scale. Local zoning ordinances, building codes, and other laws should be modified to ensure that not only individual buildings, but overall development, are occurring in a more sustainable way. Specifically, accessibility, material usage, and the relationship with nature are all issues of sustainability that can be addressed through guidelines and laws set up by a governing body.

The suggestion here is not that policy changes will change the world in a day, but rather that it can begin to have a widespread effect on the general public. An interesting and important dilemma with the relationship between policy and design is that there is a thin line between being too rigid and too loose. Issues with current policy may be that the rules are strict in the wrong places and leave little to no room for exception. A specific example of public policy being changed in an effort to make a more sustainable environment is the Miami21 project – led by the Office of the Mayor and Planning since 2005 - that was just recently passed in Miami. This project has been very controversial (it was only approved this month) and it is being presented as being as influential as Burnham’s Chicago, Haussmann’s Paris, and the planning of New York, which is an enormous task to live up to. Some of the goals of Miami21 are to promote “smart growth” by adjusting zoning regulation to allow for live, work and shopping spaces to be more integrated, by adjusting current transportation strategies to encouraging easier use of public transit, and to make residential neighborhoods more focused on the public and the street. This project seeks to remedy the issues found in the City of Miami – to encourage people to move to an urban center – however, it completely ignores the issues of the suburbia that surrounds it. Hopefully this will not be an example of good intentions with bad interpretations or of policy ignoring one problem completely in an attempt to solve another. Public policy as it relates to the built environment is an excellent opportunity to address issues at both the small, single building scale and the large, urban scale, but it must take as many variables as possible into consideration in order to ensure that it is effective and not too limiting or too open.