The Ecological City Structure
March 20 - May 8, 2007
San Francisco
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A pedestrian street intersection in KathmanduThe Ecological City Structure addresses the challenge of how to reshape current car-based, land and energy hogging cities into attractive and healthy pedestrian-based cities that can effectively run on renewables and restore the natural environment. Taught by Kirstin Miller, Executive Dirctor, Ecocity BuildersMore Information
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The Fuel-Free Future of Dhaka, Bangladesh
by Debra Efroymson, Regional Director, HealthBridge (Dhaka)
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WBB helped develop a new, improved bicycle rickshaw, above.
Since summer of 2004, WBB Trust (Work for a Better Bangladesh) has been working on transport policy, along with an alliance for which they are the Secretariat, called Roads for People. HealthBridge, a Canadian NGO with a new program on Ecocities, has been offering technical and financial assistance from the start.
Although WBB planned to start its program simply focusing on encouraging cycling, our plans soon changed, thanks to the sudden shocking announcement of a major series of new cycle rickshaw bans.
The government had already banned rickshaws on several of Dhaka's city streets, leading to an increase in suffering of rickshaw wallahs (those who pedal the rickshaws) and passengers, particularly women and children.
Government-sponsored research showed that transport costs had risen by 15%, and wallahs' incomes had fallen by 32-41% following the ban-so why extend it? After all, "rickshaw-free" roads soon became car-clogged roads, so the supposed main reason for the ban, to reduce traffic jams, made no sense.
WBB mobilized its allies, in Dhaka and around the world, and fought the ban. This included a heated conference call with the World Bank, street demonstrations, and an international letter campaign. We lost the battle-another section of Mirpur Road banned rickshaws-but won at least one stage of the war, as the other rickshaw bans were canceled, and officials announced that there would be no new rickshaw bans.
Having survived (not unscarred!) that battle, and shown that there are powerful forces on the side of the rickshaw, we turned our attention to other issues: promoting pedestrians' rights, better conditions for cycling, car control, and improved public transport.
We have designed and started a rickshaw service using a newly-designed rickshaw that is far more comfortable for the passenger, and far more "prestigious" than the current rickshaw.
We also started our favorite program, teaching children to cycle and giving them a chance to do so relatively safely, by blocking off part of the street in front of our office two hours a day, twice a week. The program is wildly popular, and five more NGOs in Dhaka are now engaged in similar programs. The children and their parents love it, the drivers are getting used to it, and we hope to use it to demonstrate to others, particularly those working on children's rights, that streets are for more than cars, and that we should love our children more than our steel boxes.
I saw a horrible sight on our street the other day-a Hummer. In Dhaka, city of 12 million people, it is hard to imagine anyone possessing such a space- and fuel-wasting vehicle. Then again, what's the difference, really, given that any sized car wastes fuel, wastes space, and takes away from the rights of pedestrians, cyclists, and children to move about and play freely?
It's hard to say when the full impact of peak oil is really going to hit, or when people are finally going to take climate change seriously, but we in Bangladesh plan to be ready. Or at least to keep fighting the changes towards a blighted future of SUVs, Hummers, and children kept prisoner in front of TV because the streets are too dangerous for them! Since most travel in Dhaka already occurs without the use of fuel, we will keep working hard to ensure it remains that way, and that children can reclaim the streets as theirs.
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A Green City Center for Downtown Berkeley
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Ecocity Builders is happy to report that the vision for a beautiful ecologically designed downtown gathering center for Berkeley, California, is making progress. Our current task, working with our partners in our Berkeley community group Citizens for a Strawberry Creek Plaza, is to help develop professional, high quality feasible designs options for public review and consideration.
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Ecocities, Rebuilding Cities in Balance with Nature
by Richard Register
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Order "Ecocities""Well-prepared, with vision, enthusiasm and powerful, practical tools, Ecocities enables us to challenge the doom-sayers and doom-makers to this race for a healthy, sane, compassionate future. We have to win, and the author explains how." -Lester R. Brown, President of the Earth Policy Institute and author of Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble
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 Dear Friends and Supporters,
We'd like to start the new year by saying thanks to all those who made our work in 2006 possible. We made progress with the downtown Berkeley Heart of the City Project, got about as far as we could with the Oakland Ecocity Mapping project and put it on the back burner for later reference. Maintaining and extending our outreach was very successful in '06. Richard made it to Washington, DC to meet with Congressmember Earl Blumenauer, Lester Brown and the staff of Jane Goodall's institute, and also to New Orleans to learn about and share strategies for rebuilding there. Richard was also off to Chungqing, China for another "Ecopolis" conference organized by our friend and convener of the Fifth International Ecocity Conference in Shenzhen, China in 2002, China Congressmember Rusong Wang. Then of course, the trip, covered in this issue, to the Sixth International Ecocity Conference in India and to Dhaka, Kathmandu and Auroville. Let's not forget the publishing of the Second Edition, replete with 125 pictures, of Richard's book, Ecocities, Rebuilding Cities in Balance with Nature, and a beautiful job of "up-grading" Richard's artwork for posting at events and for use in smaller meetings in a large stand-up display portfolio that accompanied his trips halfway around the world in airplane coat closets. In all these activities and a number of others we now remind all of you how much we appreciate the financial support we get from our members and especially our patron members and major donors. Link to rest of thank you's |
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 An Ecocity Journey to the Subcontinent
by Richard Register
President, Ecocity Builders
Bicycle training classes for
children hosted by Work for a
Better Bangladesh
Car-free Dhaka
Convinced the incumbent President of Bangladesh was rigging the next election, the Fourteen Party Coalition had called a general strike and set up its roadblocks around Dhaka almost two weeks earlier. But when we touched down at the airport at 10:30 pm, November 19, 2006, we were uneventfully taken by cab directly to our small hotel, the Ambrosia. We'd been worried some since not just roads but rail lines and ports had been sealed - and still were, it turned out. Mysteriously, the airport was an exception.
Our first news was that the city was uncharacteristically quiet. No cars. A few had been torched in demonstrations and only the rare cab and some public buses, run by small private companies, were out and around. Hundreds of bicycle rickshaws plied the streets producing neither air pollution nor the grinding and roaring of gears and engines, taking customers here and there at three or four times the speed of walking.
"I can't tell you how peaceful it is compared to the usual constant honking around here," said our host, Debra Efroymson. We were to get somewhat used to constant honking in Kathmandu, Bangalore and Pondicherry - on the back of many of the trucks, busses and even taxis there were signs saying "SOUND HORN." Chaos on the streets was so intense that drivers wanted a reminder of any vehicle approaching from the rear - and they always were. But while we were in Dhaka you could hear distant voices calling to one another, bells on the rickshaws and the songs of birds.
Link to rest of Dhaka article
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 Surprise! Kathmandu is an Ecocity
Richard in Kathmandu, Nepal
Largely anyway. It does have awesome pollution but...
Debra joined us on our flight to Kathmandu. We bargained for window seats facing the Himalaya Range, like everyone else, and traded seats off and on to view the spectacle. Even locals stare at the awesome line of immense peaks, the teeth of Asia rising there before our eyes, glistening white, up to 29,000 feet high, trailing streamers of cloud and wind blown snow. Buildings may be "skyscrapers." These mountains scrape outer space. It's anything but a wilderness on the mountains leading up to the snow peaks, though. Looking down on craggy hills - sizeable mountains in any other region of the world - we see slopes tipping steeply into the river canyons below, but on all the ridges there are houses alone or in small clusters, farms with terraces on the high places everywhere. There are cultivated patches and narrow strips only near the ridgelines where the slopes moderate and level out somewhat before plunging down into the valley on the other side. A slightly depressing haze from the whole subcontinent's pollution obscures the canyon depths, but closer to the airplane through a thinner layer of air the ridge-top crops sparkle in yellow green. Footpaths so slim as to be almost invisible from the descending airplane wander the ridges and from farms on one ridge to others not so far across the valley "as the crow flies," even as the voice carries. It looks like it would take a long, long journey following the ridges, following the footpaths most of the way to the head of the canyons and back again to reach a house across the valley and otherwise so very close.
Link to rest of Kathmandu article
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 Pokhara
(Right) High school age students going home across Lake Pewa at the end of the day.
Off to the Sixth International Ecocity Conference, but first a brief vacation and one quick note. Kirstin and I flew up the edge of the range one hundred and twenty-five miles to a place where the mountains went from a valley at an elevation of 2,600 feet to mountains 26,800 feet high rising just twenty miles away, the stunning Annapurna Range at Pokhara. It's an awe-inspiring place where we enjoyed more rooftop pleasures of the sort we enjoyed in Kathmandu plus lakeside cafes in addition. A walk up the hills into views like nowhere else in the world and a day paddling a small boat were sheer delight.
Link to rest of Pokhara article
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 Bangalore and the Seventh International Ecocity Conference
Bangalore is the technology capital of India, they say. Everyone repeats that mantra civica there. It's the IT center of the subcontinent, Silicon Valley II and picking up speed. Some of the locals we met saw its mission to be the leading economic edge in an effort to outgrow China. Our experience there was highly mixed: inspiring on one hand, with some intriguing new grist for the ecocity mill and a bit, shall we say, challenging as we tried to cut out a cozy spot for thinking in the noise, crush and stink of heavy traffic in a city layout like none other in my experience and not so good. A businessman acquaintance, an Indian who travels in that country extensive warned me, "The infrastructure is terrible. The place is going to implode." We went anyway. The conference series must go on!
A group of Ecocity 6 conference attendees pose for the camera (below).
Link to rest of Bangalore article |
 Auroville - City to Evolve a Compassionate Future
Large map and drafting room at Auroville's City Center complex with the central structure for meditatin, the Matrimadir, in the background (right).
Last stop in our adventure was Auroville. My emotional response to the place was quite a surprise. I had a kind of surge of memory of a different time when anything was possible, called my enthusiastic, idealistic, artistic, peace movement-oriented youth. Oddly it was all bathed in tragedy, fired by horror, really. When the "Mother" of Auroville, born of Egyptian and Turkish parents in Paris as Mirra Alfassa, declared in 1964 that she wished to found a city dedicated to humanity evolving toward a compassionate and creative higher state of being the world was, in many circles, a place of infinite possibilities. It was the age when progress was going to triumph over adversity, when architecture and technology was modern and modern could deliver riches to the poorest. Everyone agreed that soon energy would be too cheap to meter.
Link to rest of Auroville article
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 Ecocity World Summit
The 7th International Ecocity Conference
- April, 2008
- San Francisco, CA,USA
Look for the conference website to launch in late April 2007. It is being underwritten by a grant from the Helen and William Mazer Foundation.
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Ecocity Builders is a small nonprofit with a big message to get out to the world. If you are interested in helping financially, please give us a call. We'd love to talk to you more about our work. Renew/rejoin at http://www.ecocitybuilders.org/join.html. If you are not currently a member, please consider becoming one!
You can also mail your donation to Ecocity Builders, P.O. Box 697, Oakland, CA 94604. Contact Kirstin Miller if you have questions: kirstin@ecocitybuilders.org
Sincerely,
Kirstin Miller and Richard Register
PO Box 697
Oakland, CA 94604
Ecocity Builders
510-444-4508
ecocity@igc.org
www.ecocitybuilders.org
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