The Ecological City Structure
March 20 - May 8, 2007
San Francisco |
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Rooftop of affordable housing project in Missoula Montana, the Gold Dust ApartmentsThe 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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San Francisco is the only city with a working cable car systemEcocity World SummitThe 7th International Ecocity ConferenceApril, 2008
San Francisco, CA,USA
The Summit will focus on key actions cities and citizens can take to rebuild our human habitat in balance with living systems, and, in the process, slow down and even reverse global heating, biodiversity collapse, loss of wilderness habitat, agricultural lands and open space and social and environmental injustices.
Bottom line: We want to unite people around a new way of living on the planet that provides the best possible cities for people to live in without destroying the biosphere.
Past conferences have featured a wide range of leaders and innovators, including Jaime Lerner, Mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, environmentalist David Brower, Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, Joan Bokaer, founder of Ecovillage at Ithaca, largest ecovillage in the United States, Ecotopia novelist Ernest Callenbach, visionary architects Paolo Soleri, Ken Yeang and Paul Downton, Rusong Wang, member of the Chinese Peoples Congress and head of the environmental sciences division of the Chinese Academy of Science, youth leader of the Village of Yoff, Senegal, Serigne Mbaye Diene, Denis Hayes, director of the original national Earth Day in 1970 and keynote for the first Ecocity Conference, Executive Director of the Neighborhood Parks Council of San Francisco Isabel Wade, Huey Johnson, former Secretary of Resources for the State of California and currently head of Resource Renewal Institute, ecocity author and activist Richard Register, anthropologist Amilia Cordova of Chile, and perception psychologist Vasily Filin of Russia, as well as more than 300 others.
International Ecocity Conferences address:
-ecological city design
-governance and social justice,
-green architecture and urban layout,
-streetcars, trains and bicycles
-renewable energy
-restoration of natural ecologies and agricultural lands,
-recycling, pollution abatement and business incentives.
A 2-day Academic Conference will
precede the Ecocity World Summit Main
Conference. Students, innovators and
researchers from around the world will
present their best ecocity solutions for
review and discussion, an excellent way
to bring forward new and up-to-date
ideas.
Next, the 3-day Ecocity World
Summit Main Conference, with top
international plenary speakers, experts,
authors, and breakout sessions. Tours,
cultural events, party and SF Bay
dinner/dance cruise.
A variety of sponsorship plans and benefits are already available. Contact Kirstin Miller, conference director, at 510-419-0850 or kirstin@ecocitybuilders.org.
Watch for the conference website to launch in late April 2007. www.ecocityworldsummit.org
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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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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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Autokind vs. Mankind and the Denis Hayes Paradox
by Richard Register
President, Ecocity Builders
My friend Ken Schneider was laid to rest, more or less, yesterday. He disappeared. He drove a beat up old car deep into inaccessibility in Utah a year and three months ago.
The car was found but not him. The Sheriff's department, family and friends, dogs and helicopters couldn't turn him up anywhere in those vast canyon lands of echoes and whispering winds. And when he disappeared he could hardly walk. He loved that country more than anywhere else. So that mystery abides and the memorial service was held with near certainty that he's not spending the last of his days living it up in an unfamiliar distant tropical paradise where none of the ladies give him a glance and none of the drinks bring back his youth or realize his dreams of helping the rest of us. Ultimately, it looked like a graceful if strange parting, filled with different kinds of pain for family and friends for a different kind of man.
Ken wrote an obscure book that should have been the clarion call to save our civilization back when we still had resources availability on our side. Of course nobody wanted to be saved when they were drunk with power, fun, confidence and the sense of youthful immortality.
Link to rest of article
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Oil Company Funding UC's
Misplaced Priorities
by Richard Register
With the oil corporation's flag and logo in prominant display alongside flags of the nation, state and universities, BP America chairman Robert Malone announces that the BP-funded Energy Biosciences Institute will be based at UC Berkeley. Flanking him at Thursday's ceremony are Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau.
This is the largest grant from any company to a university in history. It is important to see how off target this is from the very start.
For those celebrating the University of California at Berkeley's new BP-funded bio energy center paid for by half a billion dollars in oil money, a word of caution: if that money is spent with the idea of creating a new energy economy with no attention to the physical thing that the energy operates in, we will see only further damage.
We don't need a fuel that will transform agricultural land into land to feed cars instead of people. We don't need a fuel to promote the sprawl that is destroying agricultural land itself.
Scientists can be famously narrow-minded and they are trying with the new UC bio-energy center to tune up a disastrous way of building communities - the car/sprawl/paving/cheap energy infrastructure - by simply substituting one energy source for another. We need cities that are smaller, more compact, more diverse in their activities in any given land area, something often called "mixed uses." We need cities that are pedestrian-oriented, bicycle-friendly and that have transit as the means to move longer distances when necessary. Yes, renewable energy sources like solar wind and a limited amount of bio fuels are good. But what does not fit with renewable energy systems is cities that persist in driving, driving, driving and making anything but driving virtually impossible, cities that demand massive amounts of any form of energy for their basic operation. Sprawl is destroying the atmospheric system and climate balance of a whole planet - ours!
Link to rest of article. |
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Great Public Spaces Give Identity to Communities
Pioneer Squre, Portland, Oregon
The world's best-loved cities all have something in common-beautiful public squares and plazas surrounded by magnificent buildings. They are the places where people meet and things happen, the places we tell stories about. Across the United States, public squares and plazas are being rediscovered as a powerful way of revitalizing and transforming downtowns.
Cities are also taking stronger steps to heal the natural environment within their borders. They have discovered that restoring nature in the city not only helps the environment, but also connects people with place, while, in many cases, enhancing local prosperity via tourism, increased visits by local citizens and increased land values. As one model of a successful strategy that celebrates nature in the city, the City of San Luis Obispo's Mission Plaza and San Luis Creek restoration has unequivocally contributed to bringing the downtown commercial vacancy rate from 60% to current full occupancy.
Berkeley recently took an exciting and positive step towards transforming its downtown into a world-class destination with nature as inspiration when the City Council appointed Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee voted for the pedestrianization of one block of Center Street, between Oxford Street and Shattuck Avenue, as their preferred option for the site. And, in acknowledgement of a decades-long community vision of restoring, honoring and celebrating Berkeley's "green" infrastructure, her creeks, the DAPAC also said that a "maximum practical" creek design should be prepared as part of putting together a plan for Center Street.
The Berkeley Center Street project site is not only the core of the downtown but is also a transit hub served by the downtown Berkeley BART station and several AC transit lines. Approximately 10,000 pedestrians already traverse Center Street each day, walking from BART to campus. If there is any one place in downtown Berkeley that is practically begging to become a pedestrian plaza, this is it. It's a location that has great importance to the citizens of Berkeley and the greater Bay Area as a destination for the arts and entertainment, as well as education and commerce.
Also coming to this central location are a "green" hotel/conference center and a world-class art museum, to be designed by one of the most exciting architects alive today, Toyo Ito. It's an exhilarating time for downtown Berkeley, especially now, with the newly added hope of a beautiful and functional world-class public space accessible to all citizens, regardless of age, ability or income. A trademark of a great community!
by Kirstin Miller, Executive Director, Ecocity Builders
Published in the Berkeley Daily Planet, February 6, 2007
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