Washington, DC mixed-use district
Planning a 1.5-million-square-foot development as one connected urban infrastructure system.
The challenge
At district scale, infrastructure is often planned one discipline at a time, with energy, water, waste and transportation developed by separate teams. This limits opportunities to recover resources, share capacity and coordinate demand across the development. For a project of this scale, early infrastructure decisions would shape operating costs, resource use and resilience for decades. The development therefore needed a common direction that could coordinate multiple technical disciplines and stakeholders while remaining practical to phase, finance and deliver.
The system approach
URBS developed a pre-concept infrastructure masterplan that coordinated energy, water, waste and mobility around shared resource flows and implementation priorities. The energy strategy uses an ambient thermal network to exchange heating and cooling between buildings while incorporating heat recovery, geothermal storage and on-site generation. The water strategy captures and reuses greywater, rainwater and thermal energy. Waste is treated as a recoverable resource through centralized collection and processing, while the mobility strategy prioritizes active travel, public transportation and electric mobility. URBS integrated these systems into one district-level direction, coordinated the relevant technical and delivery partners, and identified potential financing pathways to support phased implementation.