Sonoma Mountain Village is a 200-acre zero carbon, zero waste development in Rohnert Park, California. Once completed, it will accommodate 1,892 homes and 825,000 square feet (76,645 m2) of office, retail and commercial space. A 1.14 megawatt solar PV array, the second largest private PV array in North America, has already been installed on site; it will power 1,000 homes. This development is an adaptive reuse of over 700,000 sq ft of existing technology park infrastructure that was abandoned during the dotcom crash in the late 1990s. SSG members were sub-contracted by Bioregional to help facilitate the development of Sonoma Mountain Village’s Sustainability Action Plan.

• Co-facilitating the Sustainability Action Planning process.

SSG worked with Bioregional and The Sonoma Mountain Village development team to design a 2-day charette involving a diverse group of stakeholders, including: the town mayor, local students, community members, the developer, and the design team. The purpose for the charette was to create a framework for the projects’ One Planet Community Sustainability Action Plan; a brand new process at the leading edge of sustainable community design in North America.

 

Careful planning and innovative facilitation strategies were needed to cover the broad range of content in the 10 OPL goals and achieve the desired outcomes. By engaging stakeholders in rotating small focus groups and feeding back key findings to the larger group, the process served to identify strategies and define roles and responsibilities necessary for delivering on the Sustainability Action Plan.

 

This work was part of making Sonoma Mountain Village the first endorsed One Planet Community in North America and is establishing a model for other North American sustainable development projects to follow.