The Ecological City Structure
March 20 - May 8, 2007
San Francisco |
 |
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 Director, Ecocity BuildersMore Information
|
News and Notes
A quick update on some of our projects and programs.
The path at Cordornices Creek with ceonothis in bloom.
1. In Berkeley: Heart of the City/Strawberry Creek Plaza Project. Working with our local allies and supporters, this project is moving along. Recently, the City Council appointed committee to revise the Downtown Area Plan passed a resolution that calls for the creation of a pedestrian environment as the preferred option for that location. They also said that a "maximum practical" creek design should be prepared as part of putting together a plan for site. This is an intense public process and it takes a long time! But we're in it for the duration. Next step is to focus on specific design options for a pedestrian plaza with creek as central feature. If this all comes together, the sum total will be a breakthrough model of how density, diversity and natural design can add up to a healthy, beautiful, urban environment.
2. Berkeley/Albany: Cordornices Creek Daylighting Project with Pocket Park and Community Urban Orchard. Spring has arrived at this ongoing project, begun in 1994. What was once a parking lot is now a beautiful open creek lined with willows, alders, oak and buckeye and ringed with fruit trees of 20 varieties. Resident hummingbirds, vireos, jays, wrens and sparrows provide the sound and movement, along with lots of ladybugs and a few butterflies. The plum blossoms and jasmine smells divine! We're working on building up earthen mounds using our on-site compost for some vegetable gardens.
2. In Oakland: The Oakland Urban Villages Project was put on hold during the recent Mayoral transition. To date, in partnership with a team of graduate students at UC Berkeley, we finished a GIS referenced base map for Oakland, have identified existing good candidate "urban village" locations and have done some initial analysis of those locations. A partnership with the City of Oakland in the next phase of the proposal--refinement of the mapping system, input and collaboration with local government and the public--is now being considered by the new administration. We have plenty of interns waiting in the wings to help make this project fly.
3. On the international scene: In partnership with our colleagues in China, England, and Bangladesh, we're working on launching a website for our new International Ecocity Society. This site will help us to describe, promote, organize and focus ecocity work around the world. This will be a membership organization with a resource center, learning and professional development opportunities, news and upcoming events listings, and featured projects and places inventory.
4. Ecocity World Summit: We're gearing up to meet our Earth Day 2007 website launch on April 22nd! The conference is already in full planning mode, with our seasoned Steering Committee navigating a course to a successful, fun and deeply relevant event. Stay tuned!
|
San Francisco is the only city in the world that still has a working cable car systemEcocity World SummitThe 7th International Ecocity ConferenceApril 22-26, 2008
San Francisco, CA,USA
The Seventh International Ecocity Conference (Ecocity World Summit) will be held in San Francisco during the week of Earth Day, 2008. This world renown series follows the first, held in Berkeley in 1990, and five subsequent conferences in South America, Australia, Africa and Asia.
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 FranciscoIsabel 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.
Ecocity World Summit Founding Sponsors:
www.ecocitybuilders.org
www.bluepractice.com
Ecological Society of China
|
Ecocities, Rebuilding Cities in Balance with Nature
by Richard Register
|
 |
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
|
|
|
|
|
Dear Friends and Members
Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" wake-up call, delivered to the American public last year, helped open up the discussion about global warming and what we should be doing about it. One year later, almost everyone now agrees (in theory at least) that we need to dramatically reduce our levels of consumption and find alternative energy sources that aren't harmful to the environment. The word is out that the entire life support system of the planet is at stake. We have reached the tipping point.
The good news is that the global warming discussion is finally happening. People and politicians are now willing to take action and work together. The problem is that the two main areas of focus (lowering consumption and alternative energy development) are not being addressed in proportion to their relative importance. What's getting the press ink and the money are technology based energy substitution dreams, like the recent $500 million dollar deal BP (British Petroleum) cut with the University of California, Berkeley. BP has announced that they want UC Berkeley to help them figure out how to replace existing fossil fuel based road fuel with biofuels. From our perspective, this is a massive misplaced priority. Richard outlines more of his thoughts in his BP/UCB article.
In other news, the apparent death of a friend to the city, and a personal friend of Richard's, Ken Schneider, brings us to some deeper probing into the nature of our cities, times and prospects.
There is news too about planning for our up-coming Ecocity World Summit, as we move from working out the basic structure to beginning to "pencil in" some of our speakers. The snowball has been set rolling and it's getting bigger. This conference is gearing up to tackle that other, more difficult to broach side of the dilemma: how to dramatically reduce our overall demand for energy so that in the future, alternative energy sources can actually run entire cities without destroying the biosphere. Look for our Ecocity World Summit conference website to launch on Earth Day 2007.
|
Autokind vs. Mankind and the Denis Hayes Paradox
by Richard Register
Ken Schneider in the 1960s.
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
|
Events
March 22: The Ecological City Structure class begins in San Francisco.Taught by Ecocity Builders' Kirstin Miller. register online
April 26: Bernard Maybeck And The Hillside Movement. A talk by Tim Holt at The Hillside Club, 2284 Cedar St., Berkeley. 7:30pm. $5 donation. Info at (530) 235-4034.
May 3: The Rooftops of Katmandu and Other Ecocity Adventures in Asia and the Subcontinent. Evening slide show and talk by Richard Register and Kirstin Miller. 7:00PM at the Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave, near Dwight Way, Berkeley.
|
Danger and Opportunity in the Big Biofuel Deal Between BP and the University of California
by Richard Register
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 based on biologically derived fuel for cars, with no attention to the physical thing that the energy operates in, which is the city, town and village structure, we will see only further damage.
Don't get me wrong. I'm a booster of renewable energy - solar, wind, even a measure of good old biofuels like wood and ethanol down on the farm. I was writing about solar energy for local Los Angeles papers, including the Los Angeles Times starting in 1968 and '69. We've burned up somewhere between one third and half of the world's total supply of oil since then. I still believe renewables are the wave of the healthy future, now more than ever. The problem is with the absolutely planet-crushing scale of the enterprise.
Link to rest of article. |
Anywhere USA. A pedestrian stands on the median, waiting for another chance to finish crossing the street as cars stream by.
Can't Design a City for People
and Cars Too
We've looked some at the life and times of Ken Schneider herein and at an oil company's efforts to take over the biosphere as well as the last of the petroleum supply. So while we are at it, here are a few more demerits for the automobile.
You just can't design a city for people and cars too. The differences between flesh, bone and hair and steel, glass and rubber and wildly different diets just gets you started on the rant. But for now, let's try to get a grip on the physics and geometric implications of the two user groups for cities and see how they mismatch.
The automobile at around 3,600 pounds, compared to the person at around 120 pounds, is roughly 30 times as heavy.
I always have a difficult time grasping the meaning of numbers and so I have a habit or raising my fingers. One finger in this case for the weight of a person. Then I raise all ten fingers - three times - for the weight of a car. That's one to thirty.
Link to rest of article
|
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
|
|
|
|
|
