We use a variety of tools to communicate with the public on this, and government officials and private sector officials as well, and this also relates to, directly to the academy and their research. One of the tools we use is called Sphere; it is a graphical user interface on the front of a bunch of quantitative analyses and qualitative analyses that demonstrate, in terms of the full spectrum of things, the cause-and-effect relationship to urban development—whether it's at the building scale or the community scale. What's better and what's worse if your criterion is sustainability? We look at the natural resources, what's being consumed, and the environmental consequences. We look at the consequence of the decision at the social and economic sides, similar to a variety of other tools. This is all informed by our research and the research of other institutions who join with us on what are global best practices. We're constantly working against this notion of what is best practice rather than what is absolutely right because nobody seems to actually know what's absolutely right, so we have to move these things forward. We’re constantly learning.

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