Talk:Sustainable city/draft

First draft of combined article

A sustainable city, ecocity or ecopolis is a entire city that is created with the intent to minimise, as much as possible, its required inputs (of energy, water and food) and its waste outputs (of heat, air pollution as co₂ and methane, water pollution, ...). One of the leading figures who first envisioned a sustainable city was architect Paul F. Downton, who later founded the company Ecopolis Architects.

A sustainable city can feed and power itself with minimal reliance on the surrounding countryside, and creates the smallest possible eco-footprint for its residents. This results in a city that is friendly to the surrounding environment, in terms of pollution, land use, and alleviation of global warming. It is estimated that by 2007, over half of the world’s population will live in urban areas and this provides both challenges and opportunities for environmentally-conscious developers.

Practical achievement

These ecological cities are achieved though various means, such as:

Different agricultural systems such as agricultural plots within the city (suburbs or centre). This, in order to reduce the distance food has to travel from field to fork. Practical work out of this may be done by either small scale/private farming plots or trough larger scale agriculture (eg farmscrapers
Renewable energy sources, such as wind turbines, solar panels, or bio-gas created from sewage. Cities provide economies of scale that make such energy sources viable.
Various methods to reduce the need for air conditioning (a massive energy demand), such as low lying buildings that allow air to circulate, natural ventilation systems, an increase in water features, and green spaces equaling at least 20% of the city's surface. This counters the environmental heating caused by factors such as an abundance of tarmac and asphalt, which can heat city areas by up to 6 degrees Celsius during the evening.
Improved public transport and an increase in pedestrianisation to reduce car emissions. This requires a radically different approach to city planning, with integrated business, industrial, and residential zones. Roads may be designed to make driving difficult.
Optimal building density to make public transport viable but avoid the creation of urban heat islands.
Solutions to decrease urban sprawl, by seeking new ways of to allow people to live closer to the workspace.^{[citation needed]} Since the workplace tends to be in the city, downtown, or urban center, they are seeking a way to increase density by changing the antiquated attitudes many suburbanites have towards inner-city areas.^{[citation needed]} One of the new ways is on how this is achieved is by solutions worked out by the Smart Growth Movement.^{[citation needed]}
green roofs
green transport
sustainable urban drainage systems or SUDS
energy conservation systems/devices
xeriscaping - garden and landscape design for water conservation

Present and planned sustainable cities around the world

Present Eco-cities

Växjö, Sweden ^[1]
Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom ^[2]
Hammarby Sjostad, Sweden ^[3]

Planned Eco-cities

Dongtan, China
Guangdon, China
Sanya, China ^[4]
3 more to be determined eco-cities planned by Arup in China ^[5]
Stockholm, Sweden ^[6]
Whyalla, Australia ^[7]
Sydney White Bay, Australia ^[8]

Today, still few real life examples of sustainable cities exist. On a small scale, green buildings such as the Melbourne city council building in Australia produce much of their own energy supplies. Many shanty towns in the underdeveloped world already practice the principles of an ecopolis: efficient power use, recycling, private agriculture, and pedestrianisation. The planned development of Sociópolis in Valencia, Spain will provide low-rise affordable housing integrated into traditional agricultural zones and irrigation systems. Perhaps the most ambitious project is a planned extension in the Chongming district of Shanghai, referred to as Dongtan. Dongtan is being designed with the specific aim of minimizing the eco-footprint of its residents, and includes plans to become self-sufficient in energy and water production.

External links

Ecocity Builders founded by Richard Register, originator of the term "ecocity".
Which way China?Herbert Girardet, 2006 October 2nd, chinadialogue. Discusses the emergences of ecocities in China.
Los Angeles: A History of the Future
Zonneterp-project (eco-neighbourhood)
Sustainable cities information
Transition Towns, a organisation building sustainable cities

References

[1] A proposal for a clean-slate city-state.]
Pearce, Fred. "Ecopolis Now". New Scientist Magazine. 17 June 2006. [2] (subscription required)
Paul Downton: "Ecopolis Now" [3]
"Ecopolis Architects". [4]
Sociopolis Master Plan (2005-2007) [5]
Arup: Dongtan Eco-city, Shanghai, China [6]

es:Ecociudad de:Stadtentwicklung ko:생태도시

--END OF FIRST DRAFT-- I'm already going to upload it into the article I created a while ago (sustainable city). If the draft is approved to be able to merge the other articles (ecocity and ecopolis), I'll delete those and put on the redirects.

KVDP (talk) 10:03, 27 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed merge discussion

Note: This discussion has been moved from Talk:Article 1, where it was incorrectly located. Some comments have been deleted which related to other incorrectly located merge discussions.

There are actually three articles with similar content - Ecocities, Ecopolis, and Sustainable city. It seems that the three terms are synonyms. I suggest a merging of the three articles into Sustainable City, which seems to be the most frequently used term. josei (talk) —Preceding comment was added at 14:09, 26 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Support. We actually appear to have five pages on more or less the same topic. Lets merge them all. DWaterson (talk) 01:41, 28 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Partial support: Hey there, nice to see the pages are finally being merged (I was thinking about it since quite some time before I finally had the energy to start making the article up myself). I would however strongly oppose to merge ecovillage into this sustainable city-article. The reason is that an ecocity is an entire city working ecofriendly and ecomunicipality/ecovillage is only a smaller 'neighbourhood'. I already proposed a move of ecovillage to "Sustainable neighbourhood". Ecomunicipality might be merged with this new Sustainable neighbourhood-article KVDP (talk) 08:59, 29 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

NO, NO, NO I don't support the merge of eco-municipality with any other term...specifically 'sustainable neighborhood', which I've never heard of or 'sustainable city.' The term eco-municipality refers to government actions around sustainability, not designed or preplanned urban or 'eco-village' types of developments. You can check out the Wisconsin Chapter of the APA for a definition. Reading these suggested merged articles they don't seem similar at all. Just because eco-municipalities is a stub article, doesn't need it should be merged. The reason there are different terms is because they have different meanings and merging them can muddle up the distinctions. --Ryandwayne (talk) 01:10, 2 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Like Ryandwayne, I cannot support the merger of "eco-municipality" with any of the other terms. Eco-municipality is a well-recognized and distinct term. I would have no problem seeing "sustainable neighbourhood" become a redirect to eco-municipality. Sunray (talk) 22:57, 2 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Likewise, "ecovillage" is definitely a stand-alone article. The concept is very well defined. There is a worldwide network[7] and even an audit tool to determine whether folks who espouse the term are on track. Sunray (talk) 23:08, 2 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Support. "Sustainable city" has been merged with "ecopolis" and "ecocity," and that makes sense to me. These latter three terms are all vague concepts at present [8] and subject to manipulation by folks in the development industry. There is a case to be made that "sustainable city" is an oxymoron (because of the scale of the energy sink a city represents—all that pavement will be unsustainable well into the future). However, "sustainable city" is the most often used (if, at times, misused) of the three terms (based on number of Google hits). Sunray (talk) 22:57, 2 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Further to the above, I think that the way the articles now stand is appropriate:

The Sustainable city article includes the terms "ecocity" and "ecopolis" both of which terms are redirected to it.
The Eco municipalities article includes the term "eco-town" which is redirected to it.
The Ecovillage article has a redirect from "Sustainable neighbourhood."

I've moved the "Eco municipalities" article to "Eco-municipality to respect WP naming conventions. Sunray (talk) 03:25, 3 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Re-creation of ecocity article

Olimacfan Re-created a separate article on "Ecocity." Perhaps he was unaware of the discussion here. I've changed "Ecocity" back into a redirect to "Sustainable city." The text is moved here for discussion. Do we need to reconsider the above decision and re-establish an article on "Ecocity"? Or alternatively, is there text here (below) that needs to be incorporated into the "Sustainable city" article.

Here's the text:

"Ecocity (also sometimes Eco-city and EcoCity)

Definition, basic concept

Ecocities are ecologically healthy cities. They are cities that conserve resources and energy, run on renewable energy, recycle assiduously, build soils and enhance biodiversity while providing their citizens the physical structure for social, cultural and economic thriving. If their prosperity is not for all, including the natural species of the locality and Earth, they are not ecocities.

Since no ecocities exist, though some cities are far better than others, ecocities represent a goal and a direction to guide development. Richard Register, who coined the term in 1979, says the ecocity is “a city like a compost box.” The compost box is a physical structure that, with modest regular work and maintenance, takes human “wastes” and makes soil.

Similarly, once built, the ecocity is configured to build soil and produce a net gain in the richness of biodiversity and in healthy human culture. This is possible if sun angles and local climate are respected, local flora and fauna understood and enhanced, food is produced organically nearby and within and such global issues as climate stability and health of the biosphere are understood so that the design of the city is ultimately healthy for all.

The ecocity, in specific terms, is the city designed for the human being on foot and bicycle, supported by transit. It’s architecture and public spaces define a vital and intimate pedestrian environment. It is inherently more equitable for its people than the city requiring ownership of cars for full participation in the community. The ecocity is the compact city of great diversity of functions – housing, jobs, commerce, education, social and cultural facilities, public services – all at close proximity. This is often called “mixed uses” or “balanced development.” The ecocity takes up much smaller land area than today’s sprawling giants. The operative principle is sometimes expressed as “access by proximity,” or as Register says in his book “Ecocities – Rebuilding Cities in Balance with Nature” (2006, New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, British Columbia, Canada), “The shortest distance between two points is placing them close together.” Environmental solutions, he says, are largely design solutions: making the largest creation of our species – cities – harmonious with their total local and global environment.

Organic analogy

Prevalent in “ecocity theory” is the notion that cities can in their own organization and design have a close analogy to living organisms with organs arranged according to function and in a healthy relationship with the surrounding environment. This “anatomy analogy” suggests that architecture is something like the bones of the city; streets, bridges, elevators, rails, pipes and wires like the vascular system; telephone and broadcast media like the nervous system; government and business centers like the brain; schools to teach continuity and change into future generations like reproductive organs and so on. People informed by this analogy can better understand the arrangement of buildings, parks and plazas, streets and pedestrian/bicycle paths in good relationship with one another and with natural features contributing to and honored. These include hills, creeks, shorelines and significant trees, groves, rock outcrops, etc. In the anatomy analogy, the ecocity is healthiest that coexists in a mutually supportive way with its living and geographical environment, giving back to its “resource base” in kind for taking.

Car-free City

Arguably, cars are so damaging to the local and world environment no city but a carfree city could qualify as an ecocity; at 10 times the speed, 30 times the weight and 60 times the volume of the average human being, the automobile is a design parameter alien to healthy cities and a future on its way to collapse. A series of conferences called "Towards Carfree Cities" have been organized since 1998 in Prague, Berlin, Budapest, Bogota, Istanbul, and Portland and largely attended by bicycle activists, environmentalists and urban designers and planners from around Europe. The World Carfree Network organizes and authorizes future hosts of the conferences and, along with Ecocity Builders of Oakland, California and Urban Ecology Australia of Adelaide, Australia and many other ecocity advocates support the idea that no true ecocity can be designed around the speed, dimensions and demands of the automobile.

Early History

Ancient cities were walkable cities because of generally much smaller size than contemporary cities and absence of vehicles except owned by a very small elite with wagons, chariots, buggies, or sedan chairs. They were, in the ecocity model, compact and diverse in “land uses,” meaning facilities for a wide variety of activities. They were not very ecologically healthy however and their construction and supply of food often decimated forests for thousands of acres around and salted over-producing agricultural soils. They also were not strong on ecological theory and design practice, though some ancient planners like the Greeks colonizing around the Mediterranean Sea, arranged street grids diagonal to local conditions so that “the winds would not sweep the streets.” Probably American Southwest Indians did much better than most with their solar-oriented cliff houses and vertical “apartments” that were up to six stories high, as at Pueblo Bonito in New Mexico and were actually full living environments and not solely residential. There has always been some awareness of “design with nature,” also the title of an influential book on land use planning by Ian McHarg. (“Design with Nature,” 1969, MIT Press, Cambridge.)

The first self-conscious theory and efforts to build something on track toward the ecocity was the Garden City movement of Patrick Geddes and Ebenezer Howard around the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries. (“Garden Cities of To-Morrow,” by Howard was first printed in 1902.) Partially as a reaction to the squalor of urban slums of that period and industrial pollution another design for cities was clarified and pursued. Quite a few cities in that lineage were constructed including most notably Letchworth and Welwyn in England, both aspiring to a 25,000 population and falling only slightly short, both vital economically and needing no state financial support, both highly mixed use but also economically tied to significant commuting to larger centers.

By the first third of the 20th century social and design critics were beginning to worry about the impacts of the automobile claiming that the real designer of the modern city was Henry Ford for democratizing the automobile in the United States and scattering the city thither and yon. Lewis Mumford was probably the most articulate of these critics attacking the automobile and identifying the multiple disasters that the car/sprawl/paving/oil infrastructure was causing and like to make much worse into the future. He was largely unheeded by the larger society and those making money on cars, sprawl development, highways and the whole fuel system from well head to pipeline to ocean tanker to refinery to truck to gas station to individual gas tank – not excluding insurance agents, car salesmen, ambulance drivers and mortuary operators. One theory, however, holds that the very desire to move to the suburbs was indicative of an “ecocity impulse” (see Register, Ecocities – Rebuilding Cities in Balance with Nature), of the desire for both city and nature at the same time, but conceived of as an individual desire and not a way of designing for people living in a fully functioning community. Escape from the city was the stronger desire in this period, which is still ongoing, than understanding what nature was all about.

Recent history

Recent ecocity history probably starts with Paolo Soleri, an architect born in Italy and moved to the United States in 1947. He was the first to articulate the necessity of the more three-dimensional city – as compared to the flat, two-dimensional city spreading out toward him at that time in the late 1950s. He founded Cosanti in Paradise Valley, Arizona to develop his theories in writings, drawings, models and a small campus of intriguing buildings. What he had in mind were more compact, dense and tall cities, as if cities in large sculptures, but very small in terms of materials utilized, walls erected, streets and pipes laid down and energy and land consumed, far more “lean and efficient” than conventional cities. Thats what you get when you go three-dimensional and why so much liveliness gets packed into living organisms, which always take a form that is much more three-dimensional than flat. His would be cities very “miniaturized” and “complexified” compared to sprawl. Ironically, Phoenix spread flat out it’s gigantic mat of asphalt and lawns in the next twenty-five years to cover tens of thousands of acres and envelop his small pioneering institution, completely surrounding it in development as typically car-dependent and suburban as one can find.

Soleri also said that the city was an expression of natural evolution, but evolution rising to the level of intention, as humanity can now steer evolution by way of what we do, and especially, what we build as active agents of evolution at this time in evolution. His hope was that the steering would be done consciously, and not mindlessly as seems to have happened – and lead directly to paving millions of acres of farmland and natural land, causing climate change the whole planet over. He was suggesting the city could help us evolve to higher states of more “complexity” not toward the tangle of complicated irrelevancies and “simplifications” of environments that has produced the current phenomenon of extinctions on Earth. He called the concept for his body of thinking and acting "arcology", combining architecture and ecology.

In the enthusiasm of the times of early modern architecture, coming out of World War II with a dedication to avoid such catastrophes again in the future, a number of exuberant experiments in urban design with a significant accent on ecological theory and striving for more peaceful and just community emerged. In that tradition one of the most powerfully conceived was Auroville. The aspiring city was initiated by a woman named Mirra Alfassa. She had joined philosopher guru Sri Aurobindo and his ashram in 1920 in Southern India. By the early 1960s she wanted to apply her spiritual work to helping change the physical world. The Mother rather quietly launched a city to further human creative and compassionate evolution. “Auroville belongs to nobody in particular. Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole,” she said. The community was to be very international, house 30,000 people and be located in southern India just a few miles from Pondicherry. It’s famous “spiral galaxy” plan designed by architect Roger Anger is still yet to be built or redesigned. But buildings are appearing in a relatively haphazard scatter and organization of architecture and open space influenced by ecocity thinking is still yet to happen there. The reforestation accomplished on the desolate area in which Auroville was established was, in any case, quite spectacular and an inspiration for many communities around the world. Despite partial sponsorship by the United Nations, the country of India and enormous volunteer commitment after an auspicious 1968 initiation with people arriving from nations all around the world, the town now stands at less than 2,000 inhabitants.

Two years later, in 1970, Soleri launched his own experimental city, Arcosanti, Arizona. It has grown even more slowly than Auroville and what could have been one of the most influential and important ecocity projects continues moving at a snail's pace far from the notice of practically all designers and planners of cities in the early 21st century.

In Curitiba, Brazil, starting around 1972, architect mayor Jaime Lerner decided he did not want his southern Brazilian city to grow into a car-clogged, pollution-strangled city like nearby Sao Paolo. His idea was to create many pedestrian streets and areas, keep density located around dedicated bus routes (streets dedicated to buses and emergency vehicles only – no cars or trucks), restore waterways and buy land around them so that in floods the parks thus created would temporarily be flooded with nobody hurt – formerly those same lower income dangerous areas were flooded with much damage and loss of life. He instigated a high degree of recycling and many novel approaches to popularizing awareness about ecology, energy conservation and public design to serve all classes of people in his city. His approach and those of is colleagues planning the city while he was mayor remained strong in policy and built infrastructure and the city is still a world leader in ecological city design and governance.

As cities spread over vast land areas from the 1950s to now, reactions against the pattern in more conventional cities, as compared to new community building experiments and would-be models, began to take various forms. One of the most influential were the neo-traditionalist ideas re-named “New Urbanism. The steps in the ecocity direction made by the New Urbanists beginning in the 1980's, was to promote, design and help build more compact and sociable transit oriented development, but retain cars at the same time. The compact development with mixed uses constituted a major step toward ecocities. Accommodating the cars, and thus validating them as the norm, according to the ecocity adherents, was not helpful, in fact a serious contribution to further degradation of the local and global environments. As architect Peter Calthorpe, one of the New Urbanists most vocal practitioners, said in 1990 at the First International Ecocity Conference, in Berkeley, California, it was a bridge strategy. New Urbanist emphasis on pedestrian design and density in medium range – up to four stories – helped raise awareness of the potential of a friendlier, much more pedestrian community than possible in a suburb of widely scattered single family homes, each with front, back and side yards, garage, driveway, sidewalk and miles of streets servicing the suburban area. Another tenant of New Urbanism is “human scale” development of no more than four stories.

Another urban movement, coming slightly later, took the name Smart Growth. Despite the fact that on a finite planet growth can not go on forever without ecological catastrophe at some time, which would seem something less than “smart,” the meaning prevailing among its adherents was not constrained to the four story limit but did maintain the idea of mixed uses and a more vigorous urban design for larger centers.

Direct addressing of ecocity issues, however, developed most clearly in the tradition initiated by Soleri and his students. The insistent search for basic principles of healthy urban arrangement and severe criticism of the energy, land and life waste of the automobile became the lineage of a group called Arcology Circle, emulating Soleri’s term arcology – architecture and ecology working together to create a new kind of ecologically tuned city. Coincidentally, as this cadre of activist theorists was getting organized, Ernest Callenbach published the novel “Ecotopia” – in the same town where and same year when Arcology Circle was founded – Berkeley, California, 1975. “Ecotopia” was a future fantasy set in Northern California, Oregon and Washington. The country of Ecotopia had ceded from the United States to set up a nation founded on ecological principles – and zero cars. Callenbach say the story was miscontrued to be a back to the land tale, but in fact was about how cities and their hinterlands could be symbiotically sustainable. “There is no such thing as a thing,” Callenbach had one of his characters say, “only systems.”

Arcology Circle, acknowledging after five years it was unlikely to build the larger structures advocated by Soleri any time soon, and more interested in transforming the existing city than building new cities on “greenfields,” changed its name to Urban Ecology in 1980. In that debate, its first President, Richard Register, originated the term “ecocity” to designate the broad range of ecological cities possible, one of which could be the essentially single structure, highly interconnected city Soleri called “an arcology.” Later, in the early 1990s, Urban Ecology morphed into an organization advising and promoting social justice issues popular with foundations at the time but with considerably less emphasis on ecological issues. Register and some of his associated then founded Ecocity Builders, a non-profit educational and research organization, to continue the ecocity study, design and advocacy. Their projects included building solar greenhouses attached to houses, opening buried creeks (often called creek “daylighting”), redesigning streets for easier bicycling, changing energy policy with the objective of more conservation and renewable energy technologies, working for ecological mapping and rezoning of cities and other work, writing books, speaking at and organizing conferences and generally trying every peaceful means for advancing the ecocity concept and practice.

Cultural/physical conditions evolving to the present

Before Henry Ford brought the car to the broad public, it was seen as a plaything for the wealthier set or a special tool for the elite to magnify their status and good fortune. Now that the world is swarming with cars, say the ecocity adherents, we, in our very large car-dominated cities tend to forget something very crucial: the car is still a very elite luxury. Our world of cars is so big, according to this view, we don’t notice how much larger the world without cars actually is. Is this a social injustice, they ask, or just an ecological disaster? With only one out of about nine people on the planet actually owning a car, and with them being responsible for the vastly larger share of climate change, death and injury on the highway, local and regional pollution and so on, the impacts of the automobile should be a much larger issue of democracy than it is.

The 1960s and 1970s saw enthusiasm and hope, a wake up to environmentalism with publication of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” 1962, and Earth Day, 1970, influence in helping species preservation, solar energy, experimental back to the land communities and the recognition that pedestrian areas work. In Europe, the post war inundation cities by cars began to reverse and plazas covered with cars began to be opened again to people on foot.

But in the 1980s energy alternatives and support for rails, anything in the public trust and anything straining toward energy conservation and renewables was sidelined in the United States by the Ronald Reagan Administration and pretty much accepted as the style by the public. The 1990s and leading into the 2000s saw the slow reawakening of ecocity consciousness. Then followed the strange phenomenon going on in China followed shortly by India and admired almost universally in the developing world: growing interest in alternatives tending to ecocities yet at the same time a massive, well-funded (by the World Bank and large corporations) move toward more highways and cars, reversing their efforts.

Now in the early 2000s something else is crossing paths with these trends: climate change, coming Peak Oil production and the extinction of fossil fuel resource forever on the face of the planet. Add that to rapidly declining species diversity, known to the scientists as the “Sixth Great Extinction” on Earth, and caused by people.

What only the ecocity advocates seem able to say to date is that the city, largest creation of our species, is responsible for the lion’s share of all these phenomena, the particular kind of city that is cars/low density development/massive paving/cheap energy. Say Peak Oil activists, that cheap energy is on its way out forever right now.

Solutions

In the early 2000's ecocity activists see that forces may be gathering against the city of cars and for the city for people. New Urbanists, Smart Growth advocates, ecovillage residents and promoters, civic leaders and urban designers who appreciate the value of city centers are beginning to see a pattern emerge that ecocity theorists call the "whole city".

New tools are available for understanding this pattern too. For example, the notion of “urban fractals” proposed by Adelaide, Australia architect Paul Downton, co-founder with Cherie Hoyle of Urban Ecology Australia. An urban fractal is a fraction of the whole city that has all essential parts and functions of the whole, if on a much smaller scale, assembled and arranged very well, maybe optimally or even ideally. These smaller pieces of the ecocity are easier to plan, finance and build than whole cities at once. They don’t require a whole new general plan and zoning code if the idea is to transform a whole city over time. Yet they can show people how ecocities look and function with extremely low energy demand, solar greenhouses, rooftop gardens, pedestrian bridges between building and other ecocity features. They can illustrate minimal pollution impact, best of recycling and actually adding to soil fertility in the region while helping restore waterways, regenerate biodiversity and soak up CO2 through reforestation. These projects can be “integral neighborhoods” as small as two blocks in area with housing, small crafts manufacture, shops, cafe, some office space and community services, micro-movie theaters... something like ecovillages in the city, or larger projects of several more blocks.

Another ecocity tool is the “ecocity zoning map” which is a future oriented map that identifies the centers that should be increased in density and diversity and the areas where sprawl should be removed to restore waterways, expand urban agriculture and community gardens, augment parks and so on. These maps provide a guide into the future for reshaping cities to benefit people, bicyclists, transit users, the plants and animals of the region and future generations. Another tool, transfer of development rights (TDR) enables real estate transfers with willing sellers makes reshaping cities much more equitable and flexible.

Projects and policies

Projects and policies around the world are heading toward ecocities. Ecocity advocates say it is a race between business as usual with its massive investments still flowing to car infrastructure and the climate change and peak oil clocks ticking ever more loudly, and vigorously reshaping cities to consume on the order of one tenth the energy they now demand. All this happens, they say, while shifting to solar energy and instituting other changes characterized here. Chicago is greening its rooftops, San Francisco is a leading solar and wind energy supplied city, Paris is launching tens of thousands of cheap rental bicycles easily available to anyone. Oakland and Richmond, California, working cities with large lower-income populations, are the scene of an ecocity mapping program called The Oakland Urban Villages Project funded by the Bay Area Air Quality Management District for helping solve global heating problems. Solar electric companies are writing contracts with major utilities to deliver ever more solar electric energy, recycling is getting ever better, streetcars are coming back, education is improving and so on. Positive changes in sync with ecocity transformations are happening.

Dramatic high-profile projects like Dongtan, China have been announced, this one as “the world’s first ecocity” by its designers at the British engineering firm Arup and its client the Shanghai International Investment Company. The new city will be located on the Island of Chongming off the coast of China near Shanghai. It has many features of the ecocity from thorough recycling and use of non-toxic and local materials where feasible, to supporting foot and bicycle access and preservation of a wildlife sanctuary nearby. But the city is not planned to be carfree, its architecture is limited to eight stories, which loses relevance for the larger cities in the world, and does not illustrate the more fine grain design and many possibilities of ecocity features. Perhaps most oddly, it is sited on a alluvial island of silt barely above sea level with climate change promising to raise the sea some unknown amount in the next few decades. More problematic yet is the fact that that particular delta is that of the Yangtze River and the new Three Gorges Dam promises to sequester most of the silt that would normally replenish the sand and mud washed away by the normal action of the ocean waves and river. The debate on Dongtan, in fact, has brought forward the notion that perhaps we will need a full spectrum” ecocity, one with all features present and well ordered, including car-free overall design, if we are to realize and communicate adequately about what an ecocity is and how to design, build and operate it.

Ecocity Education

Efforts to explore ecocity ideas have been promoted by Paolo Soleri, Richard Register, Paul Downton, Jaime Lerner and Australian Jeff Kenworthy who, with his research partner Peter Newman, have done some of the best studies extant on urban form and design in relation to energy, transit, pedestrian environments, levels of prosperity and poverty and pollution and climate impacts. On-going and particularly focused on ecocity exploration and development have been the International Ecocity Conference series launched in 1990 under the auspices of Urban Ecology and the Ecocity Builders. These have been held in Berkeley, California, 1990, (775 participants); Adelaide, Australia, 1992, (225 participants); Yoff, Senegal, 1996, (150 participants); Curitiba, Brazil, (200 participants); Shenzhen, China, (550 participants); Bangalore, India, (120 participants) and in April 2008 in San Francisco, California, the Ecocity World Summit, with an estimated 1000 participants.

External Links

Ecocity Builders founded by Richard Register.
Ecocity Summit 2008, April 22-26, San Francisco, California.
Interview with Richard Register on Ecocities (8 minutes).
World Carfree Network
Resource Guide on Sprawl and the New Urbanismedited by Deborah Sommer, Environmental Design Library, University of California, Berkeley.