New designs of communities for energy efficiency and environmental performance is based on the innovation concept of location efficiency, as described by Peter Plastrik and Theodore Staton in this excerpt from Chapter 3 of their new book, "nuPOLIS: How Social Innovators are Transforming American Communities," which they are releasing on the nuPOLIS site.

Because Scott Bernstein envisions a community’s potential through the lens of location efficiency, the mayor of Fort Wayne, a city of 250,000 that has sprawled out into Indiana farmland, asked him in 2007 to recommend ways to revitalize the city’s core. During a tour of downtown, Bernstein, president of the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT), saw where a half-century earlier, before the rise of the automobile wiped out many mass-transit systems, trolley lines had moved much of the city’s population.  He saw the matrix of streets and store fronts, and a small strip of bars and music venues, which once contained much of the city’s vital energy.  In the city’s distant past, Bernstein could see its future: a more densely inhabited, bustling downtown connected by energy-efficient light rail to suburban communities.

“Where we choose to put investments in infrastructure makes all the difference to the economic and environmental sustainability of a community,” he says. The report that Bernstein’s organization, CNT, presented to then-Mayor Graham Richard called for the city to redesign itself around “compact, efficient use of land,” “walkable communities with amenities,” and “quality transit.” The recommendations, says Richard, “gave us permission to think very differently about place and space and how to improve the desirability of the community.”

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