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Ecocities Emerging
To support humanity's transition into the Ecozoic Era
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May 2009
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Greetings,
Welcome to the May 2009 edition of Ecocities Emerging, an initiative of Ecocity Builders and the International Ecocity Conference Series.
We live in worlds of haves and have-nots. In both worlds there are underlying assumptions, some "sacred cows." For example, in the world of the haves a majority still believe the earth can indefinitely continue producing three to five times the resources actually possible in order to sustain their lifestyles. Representatives also frequently point out that over half the human population now lives in cities - but they don't often talk about how 30% of those urban dwellers live in slum conditions. Most of those people are moving to cities because their rural situation shifted from a self-sustaining base to a base for supplying the commodities and raw materials for the 'haves'. The system is displacing rural people and their traditional lifestyles.
There is however probably no more important symbol of the consumer lifestyle than the car, sacred cow of consumption.
We have designed an entire land and resource intensive way of life around cars and in some circles just a whisper of redesigning it out of our lives is considered heresy. But fortunately, in other circles civic leaders are becoming increasingly emboldened and are calling for a rethinking and redesign of urban spaces and lifestyles moving away from the car and significantly reducing ecological footprints.
Yet even as some cities are finally redesigning the cars out, other cities are just beginning to pour them in. For example, in India, the real sacred cows have, for countless generations, provided important humanitarian services --nourishment (milk), labor, fuel and fertilizer. Hindu scriptures cast the cow as the mother of civilization and in nations like India and Nepal, the cow continues to hold a central place of importance, often freely roaming cities, towns and villages. But India's real cows are now up against the sacred cow of the developed world. As the automotive industry looks for greener pastures in countries like India and moves their products into cities like Delhi with 13 million residents, car colonization is ramping up and the idiomatic sacred cow is replacing the real. The Indian government is currently frantically trying to figure out how to build and widen highways for all the new cars coming online and with air pollution already at critical levels.
So far, the car and its corresponding urban form - wide roads, highways, scattered, two-dimensional, energy, land and resource intensive development - remains a sacred symbol of the developed world. Heaven forbid phasing cars out, let's just work on making them better, reform the industry. If only it were that simple. Building a better car does nothing to change an unsustainable built environment and corresponding lifestyles that are destroying the planet.
There is a better way to build, to live. The time has come to call out the sacred cows of consumption and get on with working towards a civilization in balance with living systems. We can attempt to build an enduring civilization and a just society, but we can't get there by driving.
As we build, so shall we live.
Kirstin Miller, Ecocity Builders
Oakland, California, May 2009
ecocitybuilders.org Link to webpage version of this newsletter
http://archive.constantcontact.com/fs072/1100594
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The
Ecozoic Era refers to a vision, first promoted by cosmologist Thomas
Berry, of an emerging epoch when humanity lives in a mutually enriching
relationship with the larger community of life on Earth.
Will
we be able to make the transition in time to retain a biosphere healthy
enough to regenerate living systems now under extreme stress? Our role in exploring ecocities is to clarify a vision of cities that can. And then go out and build them. There is
no way to be certain we will succeed, but our position is that there's no time to just sit
around and wonder about it: now is time for action.
Thank
you for all that you are doing to help accelerate progress toward a
civilization in balance with living systems.
Maybe one day all cities
will be ecocities.
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Ecocity World Summit 2009
Istanbul Turkey, December 13-15
Organized by Yildiz Technical University, Ecocity Builders and Parantez International with support from the Istanbul Municipality and Municipality Unions of Turkey
Speakers include:
Richard Register - Ecocity Builders, USA
Wang Rusong - Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
Ken Yeang - Bioclimatic architect, London-Malaysia
Suha Ozkan - World Architects, Turkey
Agni Vlavianos-Arvanitis - Biopolitics, Greece
Arnold J. Goldman - Chairman and Founder, BrightSource Energy, Inc., Israel - USA
Andrew McKillop - Energy expert and economic analyst, Paris, France
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ARE WE FACING A 1929-style SEQUEL TO THE PRESENT CRISIS BECAUSE ECONOMIC GROWTH IS OBSOLETE?by Andrew McKillop, Speaker, Ecocity 2009 Leaders
attend a session at the World Economic Forum in Davos: Editor Newsweek
International Fareed Zakaria, South African President Kgalema
Motlanthe, South Korean Prime Minister Han Seung-Soo, UK's Prime
Minister Gordon Brown and Mexico's President Felipe Calderon Photo:
REUTERS
The most recent and perhaps last 'classic growth interval', starting in 2003 after the dotcom and hi-tech crash and post-911 crisis of confidence, and ending in 2007-2008 with the subprime crisis and massive upward price speculation in energy, food and mineral commodities, is followed by what the IMF calls "the worst recession since 1945". It may or may not end in late 2009 or early 2010. It could drag on for years. Any 'classic economic recovery' that does flow from incredibly massive injections of borrowed and printed public money is however almost fatally doomed to rapidly abort.
This could arise from another spiral of oil prices, the return of inflation, or from interest rate hikes to defend national currencies under increasingly vigorous attack. Other reasons for rational pessimism abound. The 'survivability' of a hoped-for classic economic rebound is threatened by geopolitical conflict and rivalry left over from the Bush years, by national and private debt, trade tensions and rivalries, by climate change and by environmental limits - and also by what at present is only dimly perceived, but will leap to prominence. Recovery is also heavily threatened by the simple obsolescence of 'classic economic growth'.
In 2003 the outlook seemed different. From that standpoint in time it was possible to predict a mild but constant growth in Commodity prices driven by oil supply shock and Chinese industrial growth, a grumbling-and-whining rise of oil prices from around $ 55 per barrel to not much above $ 100, the right level to constantly stimulate world economic growth by what I call 'Petro Keynesian Growth'. This in fact happened for three years: the 2005-2007 Petro Keynesian Growth interlude.
For many reasons - not only compulsive gambling by financial traders, but also obsolescence of real world economic growth - this spiraled into economic slump. Oil prices overshot, food prices overshot, credit growth and debt overshot. Financial engineering, or the creation and trading of increasingly bizarre derived instruments overshot. Global economic growth undershot. Although strong relative to the troubling 'underperformance' of economic growth in the OECD countries that has continued since the 1980s, it was finally not strong enough to save the US bank, finance and insurance sector - and those of most other OECD economies - from meltdown. The feedback of falling economic growth in the 'real economy', on the paper mountains of notional and fictional assets cobbled together and frenziedly traded by the so-called financial community was radical. Estimates published by the IMF in April 2009 suggest the US finance sector has lost about $ 3 000 Billion to date, and its European and Japanese counterpart 'players' have lost a suspiciously smaller and more moderate $ 1 900 Bn to date.
We can already be sure that this paper asset implosion will not be followed by a quick and reassuring 'real economy bounce', as in 1987, or following the crises of the 1990s, or in fact what happened in appearance from 2002-2003. In other words the 'real economy' was quickly, or relatively quickly able to shake off the paper asset losses. It soon returned to hewing wood in the world's disappearing tropical forests, and drawing oil from its rapidly depleting oil-bearing source rocks, while changing the world's climate at an ever accelerating rate, chasing several thousand animal and plant species to extinction, each and every year. The new industrial powerhouse of the world, China, burning about 2.2 Bn tons of coal per year, was there to reassure lovers of traditional economic expansion that 19thC-style industrial growth was still possible. Even today, in 2009, perhaps with a trace of nostalgia and certainly with plentiful naivety, some political and business leaders in the OECD countries still talk of 'China and India decoupling'. This now outdated and fantasist theory allowed, or for some still permits hope that these two emerging economy giants will play locomotive, and pull the rest of the world out of recession, through their copybook and classic, but totally obsolete and unsustainable economic growth. For the OECD countries the reality of economic obsolescence is hard to shrug of.
One easy conclusion is that most, or nearly all of the OECD economies, led by the USA, have for at least 20 years made a one-way shift towards economic growth only coming from completely unsustainable credit-based personal consumption growth and debt-based business expansion. Since the 1990s this model has been given an additional, but fixed-term lease of life through massive imports of decreasingly cheap Chinese industrial goods, and decreasingly cheap services from India and elsewhere. This 'structural problem', of course generating permanent and sometimes massive trade deficits, is today openly admitted by several leaderships. After this mea culpa, due of course to bad advice and briefing from their former advisers, they quickly pass to pro-active page 2 of their speech. This announces that yet more billions of borrowed and printed money must be injected into the economy, to repurchase 'troubled assets' placed in 'bad banks', and to encourage purchases of cars, or houses, or machines and equipment, or offices and financial trading terminals, using credit from newly solvent and ever friendly high street banks.
"read on"
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Tough climate change policy would benefit China
By Scott Moore and Julian Wong
(China Daily)
2009-04-13
The year 2009 may well be remembered as the Year of Climate Cooperation.
Shortly after the New Year, the inauguration of Barack Obama heralded a new effort to reduce America's greenhouse gas emissions, and to place special emphasis on working with China on climate issues. In a few more months, the world's nations will gather in Copenhagen, Denmark, to try to forge a global agreement to prevent catastrophic climate change.
The tide of history is shifting towards a belated but crucial effort to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. China has a uniquely important opportunity to help shape this momentous new chapter in history, one that can be grasped by taking a new look at its national policy on climate change.
The Chinese government's 2008 "White Paper on China's Policies and Actions on Climate Change," together with the 2007 National Climate Change Program, outlines substantial efforts to improve energy efficiency and reduce emissions. China has an opportunity to build on this effort by formulating a visionary policy that will enhance its national security, promote sustainable economic development and position it as a full partner in one of the most important global efforts of our era.
A visionary national climate change policy should be forward-thinking - too much time has been wasted in debates over the carbon that is "embedded" in China's exports and the responsibility of developed nations for the majority of historical global emissions.
These arguments are not wholly without merit but miss the point at a time when all nations, including China, must act quickly to build energy-efficient, low-carbon economies or risk runaway climate change.
A national climate change policy should also express China's willingness, in time, to commit to greenhouse gas emissions reductions, focusing initially on specific industrial sectors and, eventually, on economy-wide "caps" on total emissions. This step is necessary since battling climate change requires the decrease of absolute emissions of each nation, as opposed to merely decreasing energy consumption per unit of GDP, which is China's current policy.
The policy should use a mixture of incentives and mandates, to place China on the road to an energy transformation, away from conventional fossil-fuel power generation and towards the use of renewable energy sources and energy conservation measures.
China will benefit from a bold and visionary climate policy in several areas including enhanced security since the country will be in an increasingly precarious position as a result of changing climate, particularly in terms of water availability.
Most of the major river systems that feed and water China, India, and Southeast Asia depend on meltwater from the Himalayan region. Climate change is endangering this vital source of water for 60 percent of the human population. Himalayan glaciers, which provide some 70 percent of the flow of major Asian rivers, are melting at an extremely rapid rate; one study, published in the prestigious journal Nature, predicts that the Himalayan-Hindu Kush region will start to "run out of water" during the dry season. Besides disrupting agricultural activities and destabilizing massive and volatile populations, such a situation would imperil China's economic growth.
Additionally, the aggressive pursuit of a truly low carbon economy can help establish an era of unparalleled innovation and economic prosperity. A study by CERNA, for example, shows that countries that committed themselves to mandatory emissions reductions under the Kyoto Protocol experienced increased levels of innovation in green technologies over those that did not.
The depth and diversity of these economic development opportunities are enormous; China can create millions of urban, high-tech jobs in the manufacture, installation, operation and maintenance of renewable power systems. It can also revive rural economies through the development of sustainable agriculture practices. In all regions, huge amounts of money can be saved as citizens breathe cleaner air and drink cleaner water, reducing the incidence of some diseases.
Action on climate change is also an important sign of membership in the international community. Climate change has emerged as a global issue of paramount importance and by demonstrating that it is prepared to act boldly to combat climate change , China can help to reinforce its image as a responsible nation. Two Hunan University professors wrote in a recent China Daily editorial that "developing a low-carbon economic is a must as China continues to industrialize, not only for the nation's energy security but also as part of an urgent international responsibility to address global climate change."
By embracing this responsibility, China can gain recognition as a full partner in one of the most important global efforts in human history, while also ensuring it has a seat at the table as a global agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is forged.
The fundamental value in a bold, visionary national climate policy is that it builds the foundation for a sustainable future. China stands to gain a great deal from becoming a leader in green technologies, a resource-efficient economy, and a largely self-sufficient energy consumer. China's current policy on climate change is significant and a step in the right direction, but hopefully it represents merely a rough draft of a strategy equal to the challenge of climate change.
Scott Moore is a Fulbright Fellow with the Environmental Economics and Policy Study Group at Peking University. Julian Wong is an independent energy analyst, founder of the Beijing Energy Network, and author of the blog GreenLeapForward.com. The views expressed in the article are their own.
(China Daily 04/13/2009)
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Istanbul in December
 Istanbul can be great in the winter especially if you are staying close to the actual tourist sites so that you are little affected by the weather. Weather is really a case of luck in December and you could have everything from beautiful clear days to rain. There are plenty of taxis so even if the weather is bad its very easy to get around as well as on the tram. From a hotel in the Sultanahmet district most of the main sites are about 10 minutes away so its wonderful to walk and explore. The Spice Bazaar is about 15 minutes walk and the same with the Grand Bazaar. It's all wonderfully convenient.
If you encounter a rainy day, spend it in the Grand Bazaar or the Spice Bazaar which are both covered. All the tourist sites will be open in December except on perhaps New Years Day. The Grand Bazaar is always closed on Sunday and some museums are closed on Tuesday so check at your hotel reception for details.
The Sultanahmet district is the heart of historic Old Istanbul, what 19th-century travelers used to call "Stamboul." This is where you'll find Topkapi Palace, Ayasofya (Hagia Sophia), the Blue Mosque (Sultan Ahmet Camii), the Byzantine Hippodrome, Yerebatan Saray (Sunken Palace Cistern), the Istanbul Archeological Museums, Great Palace Mosaic Museum, and several lesser sights.
Luckily for visitors, the district of Sultanahmet (sool-tahn-ah-MEHT, named for Sultan Ahmet I, builder of the Blue Mosque) also has a number of serviceable restaurants and dozens of good hotels in all price ranges. Many of the hotels are literally a few minutes' stroll from the major sights.
More photos of Istanbul in December
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Cities Can Save the Earth
by Richard Register, President, Ecocity Builders, Speaker, Ecocity 2009
Foreign Policy In Focus
(Editor: John Feffer)
http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/6113
The climate crisis won't be solved by changing light bulbs and inflating your tires more, planting a tree and driving a little less. It's going to require a truly fundamental shift in how we build our cities and live in them.
The key to changing our cities involves the car. Cars dominate cities in the rich countries, and they are increasingly swamping poor countries as well. Big auto companies, are rapidly building car factories and highways in China and India. Many cities, like Berkeley, California where I lived for 30 years, don't have a single pedestrian street - and their citizens don't even notice how completely given over to the car their towns are. Only one out of 10 people on the planet actually drives cars, but drivers are causing a vastly disproportionate share of planetary damage through the automobile-sprawl pattern of development.
The concepts behind the ecocity are fairly simple. They involve a shift in development toward centers of high diversity:
Switch to a pedestrian and transit-oriented infrastructure, with ecocity architecture built around compact centers designed for pedestrians and transit;
Roll back sprawl development while vigorously restoring nature and agriculture;
Integrate renewable energy systems while using non-toxic materials and technologies and promoting recycling.
A major difficulty in moving toward ecocities is that cars have influenced urban design for 100 years. Many of us caught in this infrastructure find it extremely difficult to get around in anything but the car. The distances are just too great for bicycles, the densities just too low to allow efficient, affordable transit.
Despite these obstacles, there are tools available to help us move in the right direction immediately. In many places - such as San Francisco, Chicago, and Portland, Oregon in the United States, and to a greater extent in Curitiba, Brazil - a certain amount of this "ecocity" thinking is already going on. Sometimes it's simply a matter of recapturing the past. Cities used to be built for pedestrians. The core of some of these cities remains in Europe and China, though China is bulldozing some of these ancient city centers as we speak. Some cities like Venice, Italy, the Medina of Fez, and hilly Gulongyu, China are 100% car-free - and very successful.
It's possible to build ecocities, and we must do so if we are ever to solve the looming triple crisis of climate change, declining biodiversity, and dwindling fossil fuel energy.
The Biggest Things We Build
It's puzzling that almost no one connects the largest things we build - our cities - to the largest problems that we're experiencing, much less connects them to solutions to those problems.
When I was the convener of the First International Ecocity Conference in 1990, our keynote speaker was Denis Hayes, chief organizer of the first Earth Day. We have made a lot of good progress in the environmental movement, Hayes said, and then cited all the battles we had won, all the good laws and policies we had implemented, all the adjustments in lifestyles and better recycling and energy conservation we had put into effect. But somehow in regard to the largest problems of all - chief among them climate change and species extinctions - we were losing the war. We needed, he said, to rethink the way we design and build our cities, and how they function as a whole.
As Hayes suggested, we haven't won that war for the health of the environment, and in fact are worse off now than ever before simply because we never confronted the largest things we build. We said, "Let's change a light bulb and fill our tires up more," rather than, "Let's look at the big picture." When he spoke 10 years later, on the verge of the millennium, he gave pretty much the same speech - because virtually nothing had changed.
Cities are "whole systems" and function something like living organisms. Their main organs are linked together, complementing each other's services for the benefit of the whole and relating the whole to its environment in a way that could be of reciprocal benefit to all organs and the whole organism. The city's organs include structures for transportation, living, working, education, shopping, recreation, manufacturing, and distribution.
The whole organism of the city we've been constructing for the last 150 years has been built on the basis of linking functions through ever-lengthening strands of connection. First, there were rails and trains and streetcars, then much more massively, highways, cars, and trucks. After World War II, a wildfire of enthusiasm for consumerist development swept the world. The United States emerged from the war the only industrialized country that wasn't pounded into the dust in direct warfare on its own territory. Assessing the results, the United States noticed it had about 5% of the world's population and half its resources at its disposal. We were the Saudi Arabia of oil in the 1950s and had half the world's cars. The United States spent that victory bonus building its freeway system and low-density housing, blasting off into the age of consumerism. Each house was a big, prosperous shell in the suburbs, accessible only by automobile and demanding to be filled with consumer products. This consumerism was as internationally contagious as the flu and spread everywhere. Today, perhaps the ultimate expression of this consumerism is the Chinese development model.
In the wealthy world, cities are whole systems made up of low-density development called suburbs, largely "single-use" downtowns called central business districts, with asphalt and pavement covering vast areas of land to facilitate travel by car. This is all supported by an oil infrastructure that stretches from our local gas stations to our 725-plus U.S. military bases scattered around the world, and heavily concentrated in and around the Middle East and Central Asian oil fields. With its far-flung support systems, says social critic and author James Howard Kunstler, this scattered city of suburbs constitutes "the greatest misallocation of resources in history." This diffuse city structure has been based on fossil fuel energy that became cheaper and cheaper over the last 150 years. Now such energy is getting more and more expensive as we approach peak oil production. After that, oil will become scarcer and even more expensive, as will any nonrenewable resource that's burnt up instead of recycled.
Redesigning the City
"read on"
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Colin Grant Weighs In
Colin Grant is Founder and CEO of Visible Strategies and is contributing a regular column in Ecocities Emerging. Colin is a Speaker at Ecocity 2009 in Istanbul.
Irascible and Ornery
I just ran into a friend and colleague, (she is well known in the sustainability world), in a sandwich shop. She looked distressed and far from her usual huggy self. I asked her what was wrong and her answer was along the lines of:
"The state of the world I'm leaving to my grandchildren of course! We've been talking about this for forever and I'm done with the polite discussion!"
Her friend added, "She's kinda Irascible and Ornery", (this is Vancouver, Canada- we're very polite and full of good vocabulary up here, even when we're upset).
I do know how she feels. I've been to countless conferences, dialogue sessions and have engaged in most forms of discussion around sustainability in its many guises, social, environmental, economic, spiritual - yet the dialogue doesn't seem to be changing significantly as the blindingly obvious nature of our predicament becomes ever clearer. I recently spoke at a Corporate Citizenship conference in New York where the speakers and panelists were largely still trying to define the myriad twists and turns of the relationship between CSR, Sustainability, Corporate Citizenship and all the other euphemisms for, "we've had it if we don't make massive changes now!" Talk about a meeting of the first class passengers to discuss deckchair re-arrangement on the Titanic!
Most of my work is now focused on cities, where I believe the majority of the change has to take place, but I have yet to attend a city conference where the bullet was firmly bitten. Yes, the urgency is increasing a little, but it's still all very polite and within the normal conventions and it is so clear that the current baby steps, (with a few notable exceptions I have detailed in previous articles in this series), approach is going to fall spectacularly short of what is needed.
Last month, I laid out a series of recommendations for the December Ecocities conference that might just create the necessary tipping point where desire and isolated brilliant achievements turn to massive action worldwide. In earlier articles, I've laid out some of the science and the solutions, the case studies and the fiscal and legislative tools that can be applied. Something big has to happen. Maybe it will take a little irascibility and orneriness in the mix?
Link to more information about Colin Grant and his company, Visible Strategies, offering the world's most visually-engaging performance management and communications software, SEE-IT.
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Car-Free Journey
by Steve Atlas
Sometimes, it can be frustrating trying to get information about a vacation destination that you can enjoy without having to drive. I recently had that experience when I participated in a training call about connecting with people on a social networking website who would enjoy a car-free vacation at the beach. Perhaps, I didn't explain clearly what I meant.
Still, I was surprised when the webinar leader told the group that enjoying a beach without a car was only possible for people who lived in the local area near a beach. Since she lived several hours from a beach, going there without driving made no sense to her.
You too may have had a similar experience when people misunderstand your desire to vacation without a car. It's important that we not forget about the great majority who depend on their car to get wherever they need to go.
Many people don't live near public transportation and depend on their car for everything. They can still enjoy a car-free day or vacation at the beach.
When considering a beach to visit, ask the Convention and Visitors Bureau (CVB), if there is a park & ride lot where you can leave your car during your visit. If so, is there a shuttle or some other way to take you to the beach?
"read on"
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Principal Features of an Ecocity
http://www.ecocityprojects.net/
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Click here for more information and to register for classes
in the Sustainable Design Program at UC Berkeley Extension.
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