ISTANBUL - Hürriyet Daily News
Istanbul hosts ecocity summit

The Eighth Ecocity World Summit has convened in Istanbul concurrently with the United Nation's climate change summit in Copenhagen.

The summit's mission is to send a message to world leaders to "look at the form and function of the existing environment as an engine of both climate change and climate solutions."

"We don't believe that we can have a sustainable world without 'ecocities,'" Luc Roubin, the executive director of the Urban Ecology Center in Montreal, told the participants of the summit, hosted by Ecocity Builders and organized by Varyap, a Turkish construction and real estate company, on Monday.

Panelists spoke of the need to rethink the whole idea of the city in order to stem the tide of global warming. To build "ecocities," said Professor Sudarshan Tiwari, an architect and historian, it is necessary to have "resource efficient infrastructure."

The heat island effect, which describes how developed areas such as large cities produce and trap more heat, is one of the main problems the Ecocity conference hopes to address. One solution, offered by Roubin, is to tackle the problem at the grassroots level.

"Our main idea is to try and face the environmental crisis at the neighborhood level. We do not believe a lot in the capacity of our nation states to face real challenges ... Sometimes there's some agreement, but implementation is another thing," said Roubin.

Roubin's organization depends on citizen action and citizen participation in Montreal to reshape the environment. Their projects include creating green urban spaces, advocating for public transportation and other public policies that will help to create a "workable urban village."

"If the power comes from citizens, we will get changes," said Roubin.

However, Professor Ahmet Samsunlu, from Istanbul Technical University's Environmental Engineering Department and a former minister with a portfolio for urban planning, told the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review that such grassroots projects are difficult to implement in a city like Istanbul. "That is because we do not have those old neighborhoods anymore," says Samsunlu.

He believes that unlike Montreal, the layout of the city in Istanbul is not favorable to green development, and particularly neighborhood initiatives. "The city is overcrowded, preventing people from coming in contact and bonding with one another as friends and neighbors. They do not have the neighborhood spirit."

Asked if there were any positive outcomes for holding the Ecocity conference in Istanbul for Turkey, Mr. Samsunlu said: "It was a good chance for us in Istanbul to have people come tell us about what they have done [in terms of] their projects, and we had a chance to see what other people were doing." Based on the presentations delivered at the conference by visiting speakers, Samsunlu said: "Istanbul has not done enough. We have not thought about energy savings, green areas and green buildings as much as they did."

Samsunlu believes that so far the government has achieved some progress on this topic. "Actually, the government has some kind of movement for this...,specifically in terms of accrediting buildings in terms of their energy insulation and things of that sort."