City of the Future Conference in Singapore, then China
Richard Register will be among the 21 speakers at "Futuropolis 2058" conference in Singapore October 21 and 22. The organizing host is the Fulbright Academy and the conference is something like a continuing education of the Fulbright Scholars but open also to the public.
Singapore is a city famous for its clean, dense - even spectacularly dense - design.
New hotel in construction at Singapore
While there Richard will be meeting with Beng Lee Ong, director of the Singapore participation in the China/Singapore joint ecocity project to build the Chinese ecocity at Tianjin. Since the project is well along, his mission will most likely be to assess future possibilities. As far as he knows there are no "full spectrum" ecocities - with a full component of architectural designs, arrangements of infrastructure and all of that car-free.
Tianjin ecocity Ecocity at Tianjin, China.
This is an early model of the Chinese/Singapore ecocity project that just started construction this summer.
After Singapore, Richard travels to China again and advises with Rusong Wang for the district of Mentaugau, which is attempting green redevelopment of a former mining area west of Beijing. China is the county, largely because of Rusong's work over the last 20 years, that is embracing the term "ecocity" more energetically than any other and attempting serious development projects up to the scale of whole new towns, like Dongtan outside of Shanghai, based on many ecocity principles. Opening doors to the Far East...
The Singapore Futuropolis 2058 conference should be an exciting glimpse into the future - if you can, do show up! (This is a very international mailing list after all.)
Their website for more information: www.futureofcities.com
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West Oakland surrounded
The residential and commercial areas of West Oakland are surrounded by freeways, the Port of Oakland and the now abandoned Army base whose future is currently in debate.
West Oakland at West Coast Green
Ecocity Builders' Executive Director Kirstin Miller is co-leading a
design charrette with renown green developer John Knott of Charleston,
South Carolina. You're invited! It all happens Friday, September 26, as
part of West Coast Green at the San Jose Convention Center. Sign up!
The planning exercise will feature a focused look at Ecocity Builders'
Oakland Urban Villages and Ecocity Mapping work in relation to future
development in West Oakland. We are funded by the Bay Area Air Quality Management District to explore means of reshaping cities starting
locally, with an on-the-ground project that you are invited to
participate in.
The idea is to involve the community of West Oakland,
support existing residents and come up with schemes for shaping the
energy conserving, ecologically healthy, car lite or car free cities
for a healthy future. The basic notion is to help create vital "urban
village" centers of highly mixed uses at good densities so that
housing, services, jobs, transit and urban nature and food all become
available in close proximity.
Objectives supported by this pattern of
development include energy conservation and hence global heating
mitigation or reversal, bicycle and transit convenience and nature and
agriculture rebounding right in our present cities. Short talks will
lead into the participatory session, complete with separate tables
for recording our thoughts, maps, photos, drawing materials and
facilitators.
Presenting and participating will be Kemba Shakur of the Oakland
tree planting organization Urban Releaf, Mimi Silbert of San
Francisco's Delancey St. Foundation, East Bay developer Rick Holliday,
Valerie Garrett of the City of Portland, and Colin Grant from
Vancouver's computer graphic tools company Visible Strategies. Also
present will be partners in the West Oakland project from the Western
Institute for Social Research, and Ecocity Builders' interns Rick Smith and David Reid.
Key introductory presenter John Knott is head of the Noisette Company. After building expensive barrier island houses off the coast
of South Carolina designed to minimize environmental impacts and
protect local beach, marsh and aquatic life, he went on to buy a
military base north of Charleston which he is developing in a
remarkable project for people of wide income range. Many parallels
between circumstances there and in West Oakland suggest that charrette
participants might want to look into his work at the website,
www.noisettesc.com.
You can register for West Coast Green at www.westcoastgreen.com
Don't forget to sign up for the charrette!
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Berkeley's Downtown Strawberry Creek Plaza
 Walter Hood discusses his theories on public spaces at the National Building Museum. Photo by F.T. Eyre
Last you may have heard on our project for downtown Berkeley was that Ecocity Builders hired Walter Hood, internationally leading landscape architect and former head of the Landscape Architecture Department at the University of California at Berkeley. He's designing a scheme for a pedestrian street, plaza and creek opening project where we currently see Center Street between Shattuck Avenue and Oxford Street.
After many meetings with numerous varied groups involved in downtown Berkeley, Walter has now produced a final preferred design.
This design soon to go before the Berkeley Planning Commission (in November) and from there to City Council. In the meantime Walter's office and Ecocity Builders are jointly editing and soon to publish a book of his drawings on the project together with writings and commentary from numerous stakeholders including Walter himself and Ecocity Builders' president, Richard Register.
North of Center Street and on the Oxford Street, or east side of the block, is the University's art and film museum project. Presently there is a closed printing press building and parking structure there. The museum administrators are in the midst of a major fund raising campaign said to be doing well. Toyo Ito, a leading Japanese architect, was selected two years ago for the museum and has produced a magnificently intriguing design.
Image of Berkeley Art Museum of UC Berkeley designed by Toyo Ito
A hotel conference center plan has been in the works for even longer for the western end of the same block and has seen no basic design alternations since introduced to the public by Carpenter and Company out of Boston more than three years ago. Unfortunately, their particular design makes creation of a plaza shaped anything like a real one quite impossible.
The museum in its present plan is set back a short distance, giving a little more latitude there. We can't wait for better at the west end, however, and are proceeding, hopefully to build a beautiful project for the public, businesses and waterway.
Walter's designs have been very successful and much loved in the past and his current drawings for the waterway and pedestrian street - which would be the only pedestrian street in Berkeley - are an inspiring sight to see as we think you will all agree when the book comes out.
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Bicycle City
Somewhere in the South
Bicycle City
Proposed buildings and land use layout for Bicycle City by Richard Register. Yes, there is a railroad line through the property!
Ecocity
Builders has recently taken on an ecovillage project as a design and
green strategy consultancy. The project is called Bicycle City. Can't
say where exactly it is since the land deal is in negotiations at
present, but it's definitely a greenfield model project in a very
beautiful place rich in nature and agriculture. We met Joe Mellett,
founder and CEO of Bicycle City at our Ecocity World Summit where he
was an enthusiastic exhibitor, participant and advertiser with the
inside cover of our conference guide and program.
The assignment for
Ecocity Builders now is to develop designs and plans for a village of
700 people capable of expansion to 5,000 or more, car-free or extremely
car-lite, and in a location that exhibits how to create a very energy
and land conserving human habitat that's friendly to animals, both
domestic and natural, and effective in helping stabilize climate. The
area is excellent for organic farming and gardening, has impressive,
beautiful wildlife and is six miles from an existing charming
southern small town. All they can say at the moment is at their
website: www.bicyclecity.com.
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UC Berkeley Extension Offers
Ecological Cities
X400.7
Beginning November 6, 2008
Six classes
Taught by Kirstin Miller, Executive Director, Ecocity Builders
A student from a previous class makes a presentation
This course familiarizes participants with strategies to create a sustainable built environment using principles and methods grounded in ecology and whole-systems thinking.
Basic ecocity theory is presented, as are an overview of the city in evolution, the city today, and a step-by-step method for building the low-energy, sustainable city of tomorrow.
Slide lectures, selected readings, in-depth discussions, a field trip, mapping projects, and collaborative working groups allow students to acquire useful knowledge of key issues and concepts.
This class is open to all backgrounds and disciplines. Planners, developers, architects, designers, students, citizens, builders, landscape architects, sustainable designers, etc.
Sign up!
For more information and to get the syllabus, email kirstin@ecocitybuilders.org
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Great Blue Heron at the Cordornices Creek "daylighting" project in West Berkeley, photo by Emily Wright.
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Learning from FDR, or...
Last Chance to save the Economy
by Richard Register, President, Ecocity Builders
You guessed it - save the economy by a massive new New Deal Program - building ecocities. We need to add the energy (solar), transport (rail and bicycle) and agriculture (organic) systems that fit the ecocity as well, and if we build that, we have a viable plan. Oh yes - also take seriously regulating the genuine greed that exacerbates the mistakes, in real place and time, of the current cycle of production, consumption and creation within the limits of our Earthly world. Alas, most people are focused only on the corruption and corruption correction, as if economics were separate from the gritty everyday nature to human exploitation of nature.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Does "building ecocities" sound simplistic in the face of the intricate convolutions and filigrees of high finance now being balled up into a Gordian knot of occult design, yet fraying out before our very eyes as the Feds hack away at it? Or maybe it is the unseen hand behind the scenes that maybe even puzzles the captains of industry and robber barons of finance rolling the dice for our future? What's really going on? Who are the chosen ones in this process that bails out some cronies and lets other capitalists sink while the anti-socialism forces adopt socialistic nationalization and control strategies pretending economic omniscience and who knows what else? Or is there no "who" behind it at all, those who think they are notwithstanding? Yesterday they were lionized soothsayers. Today they are surprised.
But what's happening in the Real Economics may be something very different than you'd think reading the mainstream press. We might better look back to the 1930s and World War II for some useful reflection. But even more basically, to an admonition from Thomas Berry, who coincidentally I just wrote about in our Ecocities Emerging newsletter that went out only days ago. He said, "Nature's economics are primary. Our economics are derivative." Translated that means, "Never, at your peril (or loss of future creative options) lose track of which is built upon the other." Futurist and anti-economist Hazel Henderson has a cake chart to throw in the face of the pie chart makers, with the bottom layer being nature's economy. The second layer is the volunteer "love" layer that people do most personally for one another uncompensated by dollars, the third, the black market layer that uses currencies but is not taxed and regulated and finally the top layer, the monetized layer that most economists treat as a world divorced from the bottom two layers completely and only related to the fourth layer like chaperones against their teenagers.
If this past week looks hauntingly like those days of late September and October in 1929, for those who know something of that period of history, we might learn a bit asking how Franklin Delano Roosevelt got us out of the Great Depression and on to victory in the Second World War. By building his way out of it on our behalf, harnessing the natural world's resources and the human world's coordinated sweaty hard labor and ever so skwunched brows of good willed and prudently self preserving humanity thinking hard and seeking survival.
It's time to do that again in a modified, 21st century style.
Things have changed but some have not. We are again fighting for survival as the democracies did against Hitler and Hirohito, but this time, for the very life of the planet embedded in the collapsing climate system and biosphere. And all this as we are experiencing early signs of what it will be like to see fossil fuels fall short of demand and begin the descent to economic unavailability - forever. As when the Great Depression descended, we are again dealing with rampant speculation, this time largely characterized by the sales job of the wealthier lenders suckering millions of ordinary folks into buying houses beyond their means in the bizarre belief that prices could rise forever so they could sell, profit wildly and go on to be rich, rich, rich - the good old chain letter but made of really heavy investment in concrete, wood, glass, asphalt, cars, lawns, weekend boats in the driveway for goofing off on Lake Mead, which is drying out, and about as much stuff and as fast as could possibly be organized.
What did Roosevelt do?
The country, then the world, needed saving back when the Great Depression, then the Second World War hit. Franklin Delano Roosevelt did the opposite of what our present Grand Leader did with his "stimulus" checks to encourage Americans to spend their way to solvency. Like the dumb fools we all tend to be, I happily deposited my $600, too - spent along with the rest of it, as far as I know, with no basic change to anything, except the US Government losing $146 billion. Remember that most Democrats jumped on the popular sympathy too, being after all co-pilots of the same empire. Everyone had long ago forgotten the positive side of our country's frugal protestant finger-wagging called conservative values. FDR called for the people of America to save, buy bonds - that is invest in the government - and spend their sweat and talents on a healthier future. Save and invest in survival, not spend and hope vaguely for the best.
Throughout the Depression the Roosevelt Administration made some stunning progress with the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) creating the "green jobs" of the era and restoring soil fertility. They set up the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and rural electrification programs to energize the country. They enacted the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) and fired up the Works Progress Administration (WPA) putting thousands of people to constructive work, from arts to bridge and dam building, and they established the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to try to prevent the kind of economics high crimes and petty misdemeanors we see balancing their karma right now in 2008, but dragging the innocent down too.
For all his work in the 1930s, the Depression just went grinding along. But in those years Roosevelt did created something of a foundation in real economics - delivering resources and energy to society, transformed into institutions and dams, bridges, Post Offices with great historic murals, essential products - somehow they could distinguish essential from trivial back then - revived soils, and, with the repeal of prohibition, revived spirits. All this was possible by way of planning, good organizing and hard physical and mental work. It took an outright war - which Roosevelt said he hated, which in another time the Bush Administration created whole cloth with unabashed glee - to unite the country in the project of Building for Survival. There was no unity, commitment, resolve before the war. Everyone was grousing against the federal government taking too much power from the states and not leaving it to the captains of industry and finance.
To all the foot draggers, Roosevelt said we needed to get organized, committed. To the car industry he declared, "You are not going to build any cars. Switch to tanks, planes, ships, guns, bombs. Period." Centralized government - and it worked. By the way, reading a few Internet histories on the era I saw the line about the Second World War that "inevitably" Hitler lost. There was nothing inevitable about it. The US and her allies had no guarantee we would not be under some form of fascist dictatorship, after tens of millions more dead, starting around 1945 and on into the future. It was a heroic operation, dragging the US out of the depression and into victory in the Second World War. Roosevelt said to the people of the United States you are going to have to work hard and invest, not spend, lend us your money by buying savings bonds and we will guarantee paying you (if we survive this disaster at all), enough to live on as we move forward unified, productive and solvent - even if the product of our efforts is to be blown to pieces against armies and factories thousands of miles away. Amazing that all that effort ended up in the literal wasting of architecture, productive capacity and human bodies, and at the same time constituted a economy growing strong and vital at home.
I was born in the middle of the 18 month period - in May of 1943 - when the auto industry was proscribed from building cars, appropriate to the anti-automobile activist that I am. That was also the year of the iron penny - I have one in a drawer. It's still there - I just checked. One might say, broadly defining government organizing for the common good as the right wing is prone to do these days as "socialism," I suppose socialism, or at least central planning, triumphed over freedom's deadly enemy, fascism.
Plan B Refined
In any case we now need what Lester Brown has been calling Plan B for many years. He refers to FDR's precedent too. Rather than Plan A, business as usual, we need to fight for survival once again. His own plan is in my mind pretty good, but flawed with a few serious contradictions, including the big one of supporting "better cars." For example he misleads people into thinking the car is far more "reformable" than it really is, saying an electric hybrid car can get fired up at night with electricity for the energy equivalent of $1 a gallon - which compares rather favorably with regular cars, and regular car owners just have to say, "Gee, that sure sounds swell." I've talked with him about this personally, saying we need to build better cities that don't need cars in the first place and start the transition ASAP. But to his point: it is damnably misleading to not point out that the reason the electric car gets its energy cheaper has nothing to do with energy efficiency miracles in technology but because electric companies sell their energy very cheap at night when the car is plugged in, when the utilities are spacing out their production more evenly around the clock, charging much more during peak use periods in the day. Electric cars charging up at night are capitalizing on the off-peak loss leader. Kilowatts are kilowatts whether they represent water over the dam or uranium sizzling or wind blowing or oil, gas or coal burning. Whether you pay premium or loss leader prices is irrelevant to the physical real world problems of attaining and using energy. In addition high mileage cars are generally much lighter cars and physics says lighter cars take less energy no matter what energy source. Big deal! And finally, the "better" car perpetuates the myth that we can tune up the monster to be healthier, when healthier monsters are unhealthier for you! The better car excuse for postponing the better city has gone on far too long already and any Plan B with a ghost of a chance of helping has to acknowledge that.
I know why Lester Brown says what he does though since I've talked to him about it - same reason Al Gore says, "Inflate your tires; change your lightbulbs": people aren't ready for the full scoop. So, goes the theory, get them interested in energy conservation in a simple first step. OK, but now they either did that a few years ago or not and it's time for second grade, ready or not: we need to build the infrastructure that demands far less energy in the first place as if our lives depend upon it and they do.
That's what we need to build for survival now.
I doubt if an Obama-Roosevelt is in the wings for us now to tell the car companies to start building streetcars, bicycles and the green arrangement of cities, buildings, open spaces, restoration projects and networks of ecocities. And to tell the oil companies to get into solar and wind or else. But we can agitate and educate for, and help empower such a leader. To survive the collapse of the biological and economic world we inhabit, as once happened for the political world of blood and guts war, in Roosevelt's time, we need to understand that the base of human economics is our planet's resources and healthy energy systems built into healthy cities and their subsystems.
We have a few added problems that maybe people didn't even know they didn't have back at the opening of the Depression. We have far less healthy soil now, aquifers are far lower, and in the meantime we've burned up amazing amounts of fossil fuels and most notably the easiest one of all, oil. We may well have used two thirds of all the oil that will ever be available on this planet in the time between September 1929 and now.
What is also different is the seriousness with which Americans take the crisis. Now it's climate change and collapsing biodiversity around the world but the reaction of the American people is far from the high order of real desperation our grandparents were beginning to feel around 1940, looking to Europe and Hitler and China, recently invaded by Hirohito, and contemplating the continuing sorrows of the Depression.
There are many words of concern about climate change but they do not run very deep. Some are outright phony. Promoters of "green" development don't get anywhere unless they claim everyone can make a lot more money doing it. The attitude is more like "optional if profitable" rather than "urgently required no matter what." Nobody dares talk about difficult choices, sacrifices and actually increasing taxes to produce a plan, get organized, join the battle, invest in and work to triumph in health and happiness. Sounds almost ridiculous even to suggest it.
Imagine if today's federal administration said buy war bonds now, for the war for the Earth, bonds for the future of stability and life on the planet, for rebuilding local economies, money to spend on an actual plan to build cities for people and nature instead of cars and maximum consumption. Buy bonds for all the things that go with ecocities in terms of renewable energy sources, trimming way, way down our energy demand and restoring nature. It is an understatement to say the commitment, resolve, even courage isn't there.
The clarity of the mission is missing too, mostly because people have not wanted to look at the real alternatives so long as energy was cheap and cars worked so well in the context they continued shaping for approximately 100 years. Well the days of dreamy cheap energy are over right now. Events have overtaken that dream. Now for the reality of an expensive energy future. It can be designed along with a great deal of a new kind of richness in peace and with healthy environments. But, like the Depression and the Second World War, it will take something quite different than a government denigrating government while bailing out and buying up the financial institutions, "nationalizing" them as some would say.
And oh yes, what about those greedy ones? I'm a designer of environments, not a psychologist or advertising master of manipulating opinion, including self-respect or lack of it. I'm also not a reformer regulator, but I know we need them. But if we want to get the economy at the foundation of our relationship to resources and the other living things that will either thrive with us on this planet or go down with us, about that base economy I know a lot. I know we can build our way out of disasters now as we once did before, if we know what to build. I know that first layer of Hazel Henderson's cake is real. We either pay attention to nature's economy and that last economic rescue plan of President Roosevelt, advised by what we know of a consistent Plan B and the basics of ecocity design or give our future away, and to we know not who or what.
Richard Register is President of Ecocity Builders. Contact him at richard@ecocitybuilders.org to comment on this 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 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization
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Ecocity Builders is a small nonprofit organization with a big message to get out to the world. If you are interested in joining us, please give us a call or send us an email.
Click here for membership information
Membership levels include: Basic $35; Patron $100; Sustaining $500 and so on. 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
Please check in regularly with our Ecocity World Summit website, which we are keeping updated in preparation for the 8th International Ecocity Conference in Istanbul, Turkey in 2009. We were happy to announce the venue and organizers in our last Ecocities Emerging newsletter. The Ecocity World Summit website will keep you current on plans for the event.
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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