Scrolling through a list of New York City public buildings that are being propelled into the 21st century with energy audits and efficiency makeovers, I found the monumental art deco Brooklyn Central Library on Grand Army Plaza. As a high school student, I spent many Saturdays there combing through the stacks looking for materials on historical subjects and I vividly recall finding Civil War era documents that crumbled to dust as I turned the pages. Even as a teenager, I felt queasy about having the historical record simply vanish in my hands. Surely, there must be a better way to make this material available, even to the youngest researcher, without losing it by using it!

Our urban environments need to simultaneously become more sustainable and meet greater resource demands, but can we evolve from the city of today to the sustainable city of tomorrow when, as the Urban Land Institute estimates, 80% of our existing building stock will still be in use in 2030? The issue becomes even more pressing when factoring in that by 2050, 70–80% of the world's population will be living in cities.

Living City Block (LCB) is grounded in the premise that the traditional urban block will be the key to making cities sustainable from the inside out. In 2010, founder Llewelyn Wells, spun Living City Block out of Rocky Mountain Institute to remove the barriers to fostering resilient neighborhoods — inefficient use of resources, waste management, green infrastructure gaps, and tears in a community's fabric.