URBAN ECO VISIONARY
JAIME LERNER
TO HEADLINE
ECOCITY WORLD SUMMIT
April 22-26, 2008
San Francisco, California, USA
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If there is a Mr. Ecocity anywhere on the planet, it is without question former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil. Lerner is the architect planner who led the work to transform his city, starting in 1972, into a world model of ecological and social policies, design and built projects. Said Maria Terezinha Vaz, film maker of Urban Solutions from Curitiba, Brazil, "I've never seen him so enthusiastic" (as when he accepted our invitation face to face with Vaz). That's saying something because it was on his good ideas and enthusiasm that the world-famous ecocity innovations of his hometown have been largely based.
Check out the conference website for more information.
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Landscape Architect
Walter Hood
Joins Our Effort
Into this mix suddenly appeared an offer of contributions totaling $150,000 to hire a landscape architect to supplement the City's process in its work on the Strawberry Creek Plaza site. After a review of best talent in the area we approached Walter Hood, who, after several meetings with us to explore the possibilities, agreed to accept the commission.
Hood is Principal of Hood Design and Professor and former Chair of the Landscape Architecture Department at the University of California, Berkeley. His recent commissions include the landscape for the deYoung Museum in San Francisco, Splash Pad Park in Oakland, the Jackson Hole Center for the Arts in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and the Poplar Street Improvement Project in Macon, Georgia.
Hood's many awards include the 2003 American Society of Landscape Architecture National Award of Honor; the 1999 Place Design Award, EDRA/Places, for his design for Lafayette Square Park in Oakland, California; and the Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture. His publications include "Urban Diaries" and "Blues and Jazz Landscape Improvisations."
Ecocity Builders and our colleagues, Citizens for a Strawberry Creek Plaza, feel extremely fortunate to have Walter Hood working on the Strawberry Creek Plaza commission!
Meet Walter Hood on Monday, July 9 at 4PM, Gaia Arts Center, 2116 Allston Way, Berkeley. See Events listing.
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STRAWBERRY CREEK PLAZA
Powerful Possibilities
for Ecological Urban Design
Four recent anonymous private donations and two foundation grants, one from the New Jersey-based Helen and William Mazer Foundation and another from the Foundation for Sustainability and Innovation out of Laguna Beach, California have given Ecocity Builders' Heart of the City/Strawberry Creek Plaza Project a big boost. Approximately 80% of the funds are project-directed to downtown Berkeley and destined for the work of landscape architect Walter Hood for our Strawberry Creek Plaza Project, with some for our own research and organizational work in support of his design.
In the last two months there have been three major advances for the project we sometimes call an "integral" or "urban fractal" project for Center Street and the block to the north, from Shattuck Avenue to Oxford Street. For newcomers to our work, why is this important? Cities need to be redesigned and reshaped with knowledge of their potentially healthy relationship with nature - from the resources base for "civilization" to the richness of the biodiversity we need to support because it also supports us. We need to recognize, plan and even celebrate our urban relationship with nature as we go about designing, building and living in cities.
That's most centrally what we advocate at Ecocity Builders. In downtown Berkeley we are working hard to help create a pedestrian plaza and creek opening, along with buildings that relate powerfully to those and the whole city - balanced development some call it, and right next to the Berkeley Bay Area Rapid Transit Station (BART).
Link to rest of article
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The nest-evoking Beijing Olympic Stadium under construction at the Olympic Village, as seen from a passing taxi.
More Stories From China
by Richard Register
Arrival
It seems like only yesterday I was in Chungqing and just after that writing about the Yangtze River, the Three Gorges Dam and speculating about Dongtan while trying to find out more about this world's first "ecocity" to be built in China. That was three newsletters back.
The day I left for China scientists reported the extinction of the Yangtze River dolphin. Two were seen last year. This year boats explored 1,100 miles of the river finding not a single dolphin. While there I learned that China builds two new large coal fired power plants every week. Those two bits of news...and a news item on my return, that China just passed up the US in greenhouse gas production (total production, not per person), bracketed my trip. It was full of encouraging and discouraging insights and experiences all jumbled together. Seven months after Chungqing I was back in China again but this time in Beijing.
My first impression: incredible, this Olympic Stadium! But what was I doing there? The airport is on the east side of town and there I was on the south side in the Olympic Village. The tourist advisors at the airport said I should take a particular airport bus to a taxi, then to my hotel - on the north side it turned out. Traveling three times as far as I needed to go was a bit mysterious but as it turned out, well worth it to experience a glance at the incredible new building that looks something like a ball of strange metallic lace rising hundreds of feet into thin air. At least at this stage of its construction that's what the Beijing Olympic Stadium looked like. It is symbolic of a nest, everyone said, where things hopeful for the future are hatched and sheltered. Whatever it is, with 8,000 people working on its steel structure all at once, weaving metal like a soft yarn back and forth into itself high in the sky, as conferee David Greenberg of Maui and Hianan said, "It could only happen in China."
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Greetings Friends and Members
It's a warm summer day in Oakland, ozone-y around the fringes as the sun-drenched California Great Central Valley draws in air off the cold Pacific Humbolt Current. A thin acrid spice of San Francisco and West Oakland's yellow-gray automotive vapors taint the sky.
Nonetheless, a cool pleasant breeze slides inland around the buildings and off over the East Bay Hills and under the rising hot air of the Central Valley. Beautiful Lake Merritt with its first bird refuge in the USA beckons from just two blocks away.
I contemplate our fast-breaking recent good fortune in our Berkeley and Oakland projects, and a trip to China with new insights since our last newsletter. I'm thinking of my new and rekindled friendships at the China conference - being my sixth trip, I'm getting to know some people fairly well. Then there's the steadily building momentum of our Ecocity World Summit coming up in April 2008. Said a Swedish delegate at the "Eco Summit 2007" conference in Beijing, "You have magnificent timing for your conference next year. America is finally waking up to the problem of climate change, maybe even the coming end of cheap energy. You have a chance now to wake up everyone to solutions." I certainly hope he is right. We are assuredly working on it, and you are invited to join us!
View from our Ecocity Builders' work/live office rooftop, solar hot water in the foreground and solar electric, all in yellow, on the roof of the Scottish Rite Center Building two blocks away. Our own building has solar hot water.
Meantime I sit behind my desk in our live-work office with a view to the solar hot water panels on the roof of the apartment next door, and solar electric system on the Scottish Rite Center off in the distance and just beside the lake. Solar is coming up roses everywhere and we will tell you our good news right away. Like a stealthy editor, though, I won't put the difficult news on the "front page" of our electronic publication - which is my assessment that we are running out of time and why. It is a little harder to confront. But in the service of full disclosure of what we have been learning, there's the bad news along with the good. What's important is to keep cranking out the good news as best we can. Read on!
- Richard Register, President, Ecocity Builders
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Events
Meet Walter Hood
Monday, July 9, 4:00pm at the Gaia Arts Center, 2116 Allston Way, Berkeley
This
is an opportunity to meet and hear from Walter and Ecocity Builders
regarding the Strawberry Creek Plaza commission. Delicious refreshments
will be served!
 The SLO Experience and A New Vision for Center Street
Friday, July 13, 9:00am at Berkeley City College Auditorium, 2050 Center Street, Berkeley
Join us for a day of discussion, information and sharing ideas about how to design, implement and nurture successful public spaces. Featured will be special guests from San Luis Obispo: Mayor David Romero, Former Council Member and Mayor Ken Schwartz, SLO Chamber of Commerce representative Pierre Rademaker and City Administrative Officer Ken Hampian. Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates and Downtown Berkeley Association President Mark McLeod will introduce the day's meetings, which include a public workshop, a tour of Center Street, a special economic roundtable led by Berkeley's Acting Director of Economic Development Michael Caplan and an evening discussion with dinner. It's a day of thinking, sharing ideas, exploring opportunities and learning.
SCHEDULE OF EVENTS ON JULY 13
9:00 -12:30 a.m. at Berkeley City College, 2050 Center Street. Public Forum with SLO guests.
2:00 p.m. Meet at the Bank of America, corner of Center Street and Shattuck Avenue.Guided tour on the block of Center Street from Oxford to Shattuck and along Strawberry Creek on UCB campus by Citizens for a Strawberry Creek Plaza and Steve Maranzana, UC Berkeley Office of Environment, Health & Safety.
3:00 p.m. At Alborz Restaurant, 2142 Center Street. Meeting focusing on economic revitalization and the Strawberry Creek Plaza Project, hosted by the Downtown Berkeley Association.
7:00 p.m. Evening event at the Gaia Building, 2116 Allston Way. Comments by Richard Register of Ecocity Builders and members of the SLO delegation, with time for audience discussion. How can cities be far healthier for both people and nature, now, and into the deep future?
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NEWS & NOTES
a quick update on some of our programs and projects
1. In Berkeley: Heart of the City/Strawberry Creek Plaza Project: In the last month we've received donations and grants sufficient to hire internationally renowned landscape architect Walter Hood to develop a conceptual design for a proposed Strawberry Creek Plaza in central downtown Berkeley. Hood is principal of Hood Design and a professor and former head of the University of California at Berkeley department of Landscape Architecture. Thank you to the Helen and William Mazer Foundation, Foundation for Sustainability and Innovation, and our generous anonymous local donors for making this important next step possible.
2. In Oakland: Ecocity Builders' President Richard Register was appointed by Oakland City Council Member Larry Reid to Oakland's ambitious "Oil Independent Oakland by 2020 Task Force." The work of the Task Force will inspire and inform our Oakland Urban Villages Project; our mapping and urban reshaping approach to sustainable land use. The mapping approach could help Oakland take the lead among other cities in reshaping its land use infrastructure toward pedestrian/transit centers while restoring agriculture and natural features such as urban stream corridors and shorelines. Most importantly, the project could create a model for gradual withdrawal from low-density development in areas of high automobile dependence and development on top of urban creeks and streams. Could Oakland actually go up against cars and sprawl? We shall see.
3. Next Big Conference - Ecocity World Summit 2008 in San Francisco: The Ecocity World Summit 2008 is building momentum. San Francisco's Department of the Environment has joined Ecocity Builders, the University of California at Berkeley Extension, San Francisco Neighborhood Parks Council, San Francisco Urban Planning and Research (SPUR) and other institutions as co-sponsors.
Gabriel Metcalf, Executive Director, SPUR.
Check out our progress - and our up-dated conference web site, launched on Earth Day and now home to slide shows on our past six conferences. There are many stories and pictures there, in addition to what you will see here in our newsletter.
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Emily Wright and Richard enjoy lunch by the creek in Mission Plaza, San Luis Obispo, 2004
San Luis Obispo Leaders to Visit - a Success to Consider
In May of 2004 forty-two city, business and environmental leaders from Berkeley took a trip organized by Ecocity Builders' own Kirstin Miller to explore San Luis Obispo's extraordinarily successful Mission Plaza revitalization project.
That small college city of 44,000 people initiated a series of changes more than twenty years ago that started with the closing of a parking lot and one block of a street between the city's neglected downtown creek and historic mission.
Then the creek was celebrated with pedestrian paths, bridges and new trees, the parking lot and street turned into a small park with poetry sized amphitheater facing the creek. The historic mission just north of the creek was refurbished and a parking structure was built a discrete two blocks away and guess what? People didn't mind walking to their delightful new ensemble of ecocity components. The result was economic and social revitalization of the center and the creation of a center-city centerpiece attractive to locals and visitors alike. Add Thursday night market there and an always-on duty-maintenance person and a curator of music, performances, festivals and other activities to enhance the city center and you have one of the most successful town center revitalization efforts we know of - and all focused on the rejuvenation of the creek and banishment of the car from the new sociable area.
Some of those who made it all possible and continue to carry the torch are coming to Berkeley from SLO for various events on Friday the 13th of July. They include the present Mayor Dave Romero, past Mayor Ken Schwartz, City Manager Ken Hampion and historian, Chamber of Commerce leader and planner Pierre Rademaker.
Join us in welcoming our delegation from San Luis Obispo on the 13th at Berkeley City College, 2050 Center Street at 9:00 a.m., free to the public. (See events listing for more information about this event.)
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Ecocity Builders Staff
President: Richard Register
Executive Director: Kirstin Miller
Oakland Urban Village Project Staff:
Rick Smith, Lucas Patzek, David Reid
Web Master: Max Heim
E-Newsletter:Kirstin Miller
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Ecocities, Rebuilding Cities in
Balance with Nature
by Richard Register
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...a wonderful account of how we can transform cities into places that are not only sustainable, but which are a joy and an inspiration to live in. EcoCities nees to be read not only for its intellectual contribution to future city development, but also for how it speaks to the heart about the true meaning of the city.
-Jeffrey Kenworthy, Professor in Sustinable Cities, Institute for Sustainability and Technology Policy, Murdoch University
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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. If you are not currently a member, please consider becoming one!
Ecocity Builders
PO Box 697
Oakland, CA 94604
Ecocity Builders
510-444-4508
ecocity@igc.org
www.ecocitybuilders.org
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