Times of Opportunity
2007 delivered opportunities to Ecocity Builders well beyond any other year since our founding in 1992. Early in the year we received funding from the Foundation for Sustainability and Innovation for both our Berkeley downtown Heart of the City Project, known also as Strawberry Creek Plaza, and for our Oakland Ecocity Mapping/Oakland Urban Villages Project.
The Helen and William Mazer Foundation funded the launch of the website for our April 2008 Ecocity World Summit conference and also became one of the largest contributors to Ecocity Builders for our hiring of landscape architect Walter Hood for a set of designs for Strawberry Creek Plaza. Ecocity Builders' patrons Diana and Arjun Divecha and Marco Vangelisti also contributed to a large share of the funds supporting Strawberry Creek Plaza. Our heartfelt appreciation and thanks to these generous and visionary supporters of our work.
In the last days of 2007 the Mazer Foundation became the largest sponsor of the Seventh International Ecocity Conference (Ecocity World Summit). That same week we also learned from the Bay Area Air Quality Management District that our grant proposal was accepted for work on our ecocity mapping and Oakland Urban Villages Project, to be shared with local partners on the project. This grant is for work contributing to local solutions for climate change problems. More on that later in the newsletter.
Opportunities abound!
Link to rest of the article...
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ECOCITY WORD SUMMIT
The Seventh International Ecocity Conference
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This event is so well covered on our web site, www.ecocityworldsummit.org that we will do no more than cite it here. Go there! The planning is doing just fine and you can see at a glance the really wonderful people we are gathering from around the world. Sign up now if you haven't already and welcome to spring in San Francsico!
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Ecocity Mapping and Urban Fractals
by Richard Register
When I was in Shanghai, China late last October for the "2007 China International Architecture Design and Scene Planning Exhibition and Forum on Urban Planning of Senior Government Officials" several delegates to the conference said, "Your ecocity conference in April is magnificently situated. We need it and people are beginning to realize it."
Another Chinese delegate asked me to write a long essay for an up-coming book in Chinese about ecocities, on whatever I thought were the most important ideas or tools for building ecological cities. They would want my illustrations too. That's another reason to see opportunity. What that essay will be about is what I believe are the two most powerful tools for changing cities and our relationship with nature I can think of:
1. "ecocity mapping" of the future-oriented sort we have introduced to Oakland through the Oil Independent Oakland by 2020 Task Force and
2. "urban fractals" of the sort our Strawberry Creek Plaza in downtown Berkeley could represent.
Ecocity Mapping and the Oakland Urban Villages Project
Those two things could be incredibly powerful: ecocity mapping and actually building a few "urban fractals," a term from the fecund mind of Australian architect and good friend Paul Downton.
The mapping project I'll talk about first. It is tied to our Oakland Urban Villages project, a name Ecocity Builders' Kirstin Miller coined to speak as simply and clearly to the notion of the metropolitan miasma of cars, asphalt and scattered infrastructure becoming consolidated into village or small town-like centers and downtowns that become small towns and cities in their own right.
These would be part of an arrangement with far fewer people commuting because of what the cold heart of planning bureaucracy calls "mixed uses." We are talking about vital centers for people here, lots of people, people enjoying one another and serving one another, fixing each other's houses, cooking for each other, washing each other's clothes, helping heal broken limbs, hearts and minds - you name it, us staying alive and healthy as best we can. Density is people. Calling it density misses the life of people helping, sharing, singing and - hell! - dancing when the music's good and food's there and people say "we have a future!" Density shmensity! We need another kind of city and they even paid us to work on it. We got the grant.
The idea, which I brought forward in the Oil Independent Oakland Task Force, is to take to the public the idea of finding the city's most vital centers and making them even more vital, adding whatever is missing and making it extremely "green" at the same time. Working out a map to layout the future is the key element. Mapping the future. Imagine, for example, a "transit village" like Fruitvale Village on the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) East Bay main line to Fremont from Oakland, Richmond and San Francisco. It could become a real town in its own right with more people and more reason to stick around, more to do, more to help one another with. Imagine creeks in the area resurfacing fringed by expanding community gardens, parks and native plants and animals, and all this becoming linked with bicycle and pedestrian paths. We thought the people would like it and some seem ready to work with us on it. Not the NIMBYs who want to freeze the world in their personal comfort zone, but those realizing we need a change, or who aren't so comfortable they refuse to contemplate serious change.
Link to rest of the article...
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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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perspectives
Enduring Civilization
by Richard Register
Can we really contemplate such a possibility? Well maybe in the science fiction mode of thinking into the deep future. But what if that future could actually be coming as soon as late in the lives of the grand children of young people alive today? Think twice. Without major change, and not just driving a more energy efficient car, it is far more likely than anything close to the kind of society we are living in now.
Peak Oil doomsdayists say oil will peak any day now and production world wide will start a slow decline at first, then pick up speed and God help us when the unemployment lines get as long as they were during the Great Depression because this time we won't have the vast oil deposits, broad forests, full aquifers and seas rich with life to bail us out. But even the oil companies themselves say the day will come, if a couple decades later. A couple decades aren't that much time. Where were you 20 years ago?
There is a small tree, barely a seedling, about six inches high, in my apartment window box. It was a gift at a conference, delivered with appropriate ceremony and optimism, from Champion Tree International, an organization saving the genetic stock of America's oldest and largest trees in an attempt to eventually restore genetic strength to the forests. They sprout seeds and grow cuttings into new trees. The largest and oldest trees were preferentially cut so it's something of a detective story to find and reproduce them for their own prosperity as well as ours. This tree we affectionately call the "Methuselah Baby" in our home because its parent, a bristlecone pine from the White Mountains on the border of California and Nevada, is the oldest known living thing on our planet.
So I sometimes catch myself staring out the window at this small perky little plant wondering about time and civilizations. The Methuselah Tree is 4,770 years old, give or take a couple years. It was a seedling when the first urban civilization on Earth appeared. Our window box seedling is five years old. What will it look back on it lives as long as its parent? 4,600 years back there would be no recoverable oil left on Planet Earth. 4,400 years back, no recoverable coal - and our former roommate, now about 20 feet tall growing somewhere, probably in Washington state in a climate something like the White Mountains at the beginning of the 21st century, would still have about 93% of its life ahead of it. How long uranium will last seems more controversial, but probably it will be unrecoverable after sometime between the demise of oil and coal. These energy sources will be harder to get because holes will need to go deeper, poorer ores need more refining, costs in transport will go up and up. At a certain point these energy sources become effectively unavailable forever. Meantime the large electricity generating dams will be silting up and losing power.
And finally, the recyclable materials like the metals that seem permanent fixtures in our cultures, are steadily sliding away to something I call the "rust factor." This attrition is expressed as bottle caps, bits of wire, old tools, rusting cars in the desert, whole ships scuttled at sea rust or corrode away to complete unrecoverability or are simply lost in sand or snow, or forest duff or backyard mud, salt or flowing water, street gutter or landfill. These may be recyclable but not all of it, as the years tick away. Much becomes lost to any economically recoverable effort. Once ores were available in relatively small areas of great concentration. Outside of ships, vehicles, buildings and appliances, much of which can be recycled, people are distributing these materials thinly about the surface or throwing them into landfills at a more dilute concentration than in the good ore deposits. Will our not so distant descendants be stuck with sticks and stones again?
Link to rest of article (it gets more hopeful, really!)
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Visiting Australia and China
by Richard Register
Australia
I was a speaker at the Asia Pacific Cities Summit, a conference held every year, switching from Brisbane, Australia, the founding host, to another city in the Western Pacific, East Asia region, then back to Brisbane. Next year it will be Incheon, Korea to host the event. This year I enjoyed a dozen talks in Brisbane and some private guided tours about the city with its very dense center and broadly sprawling suburban fringe Houston would be proud of.
Brisbane Australia. Three dinosaurs at the Museum of Natural History
The language of sustainability is thriving there and in the pockets of higher density mixed uses, taking some tangible form. There are restoration areas in the vicinity of locations of every place of origin of each of the speakers and boat or hiking trips to visit them, all of the sort I'm seeing in conference after conference and this is good.
But, in Queensland for example, the vast majority still wants passionately to have their backyards and their "barbies" for meaty private cookouts. The welcoming dinner and gala extravaganza for 1,000 guests, with acrobats on ropes five stories high, featured dancers in bathing suits and surfboards carrying charcoal lighters aglow and ready for steaks of beef, mutton and kangaroo, and it was great good fun. I enjoyed it enormously. With Gold Coast tourist paradise 80 miles to the south along sweeping beaches and warm waters, they see their lives as very out-doorsy, yet many work in the very dense sort of downtown one sees the world over: glass and steel.
Despite the verbiage, city parents there are drilling a gigantic tunnel under the Brisbane River to take hurtling car drivers from one side to the other, despite several existing bridges and a good rail system too, which I used on several occasions. Like Boston's problem-plagued and fifteen-billion dollar Big Dig, Brisbane's rough equivalent promotes car traffic and does not help create a region of more fine grained centers of mixed uses, but rather promotes bedroom communities and a less mixed-use downtown.
Perhaps even more contradictory is the State of Queensland's espoused stance for sustainability and its massive shipments of coal to help put China's development into hyperdrive. I asked but never got a clear answer how much energy was saved in the full suite of energy conserving moves in Queensland compared to how much was burned in exported and locally used coal. Nobody seemed to know. Coal is Australia's largest export and Queensland Australia's largest coal export state. Most of it goes to China and Japan. How sustainable could that be? The biggest mine I ran into on the Internet was going to run out and shut down in 15 years. All those one-way trains and ships no more.
Link to rest of article
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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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