Ecocities Emerging
To support humanity's transition into the Ecozoic Era
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Ecocity Builders
April 2010
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Greetings,
Welcome to the April 2010
edition of Ecocities Emerging, an initiative of Ecocity Builders and the
International Ecocity Conference Series.
It has been a busy time for Ecocity Builders. Our Berkeley Center Street Plaza project took a major step forward when the Berkeley City Council voted 8-1 to endorse the project and seek funding to complete the final design work and implement. The project provides a multi-functional urban model emphasizing place-making, pedestrianism, transit use, and "low-impact design" (LID) stormwater interventions. The final design strategies, of more than 30 initial schemes, reintroduce Strawberry Creek while accommodating planning and code requirements, such as access for emergency and delivery vehicles. A pedestrian plaza with porous pavers will weave through the water features, over an underground stormwater storage cistern.
The Center Street project is one example of how Ecocity Builders works with community partners and professionals to build ecocity demonstration projects: pieces of the ecocity. In this collaboration with renowned urbanist Walter Hood, we are hoping that this work will achieve the highest level of "green" certification from the Living Building Challenge's "Living Landscape" typology. The certification of ecocity development projects ties into our larger initiative, the International Ecocity Standards Project, which is seeking to clearly define ecocities by developing a set of standards, criteria and metrics against which to evaluate and guide new and existing cities' progress towards becoming an "ecocity." International Ecocity Standards will evaluate different scales of development, from the small neighborhood scale to the regional scale.
Working with our core advisory team, we are currently developing a draft set of principles upon which we will base our criteria for the standards themselves. We will learn and incorporate as many of the principles expressed by other related standards and become synergistic with them where possible.
We will leave you today with this underlying core principle: Ecocities take seriously their place in the healthy evolution of life on the planet and as such recognize the value of the evolutionary drift toward more complexity and miniaturization in well ordered forms through time. The compact city, town and village of high levels of diversity at close proximity fit this pattern that governs formation of stars, planets, complex living ecologies and living organisms. Applied to the built environment, this means sprawl is the antithesis of the evident healthy pattern, scattering cities into a flat (two-dimensional) form of enormous size of generally uniform uses. The ecocity is much more compact (three-dimensional), complex and well ordered. One could call the city of cars and massive use of land and energy "counter-evolutionary" and the ecocity "co-evolutionary."
Sincerely,
Kirstin
Miller and Richard Register for Ecocity Builders
339
15th Street, Suite 208
Oakland
CA 94612 USA
www.ecocitybuilders.org
Keeper of the International Ecocity Conference Series
ECOCITY MEDIA
Posts, projects and people
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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.
Maybe one day all cities
will be ecocities.
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State of the World Forum Announces: 2020 Global
Climate Leadership Forum
Breakthrough
Thinking, Innovations, and Networks In the Emerging Climate Economy
Ecocity Builders is bringing city design and planning to State of the World Forum's upcoming conference on climate change, Salvador, Brazil, May 27 -30, 2010
State of the World Forum was founded in 1995 by Jim Garrison with Mikhail Gorbachev, who served as the Convening Chairman.
The Forum was established to create a global leadership network comprised of eminent individuals -- ranging from Heads of State to grass roots organizers, Nobel Laureates to business leaders, policy makers to social activists -- drawn from the governmental, business and civil society sectors, committed to discerning and implementing those principles, values and actions necessary to guide humanity wisely as it gives shape to an increasingly global and interdependent world.
Working with partners worldwide, State of the World Forum seeks to serve as an incubator, catalyst and integrator for innovative leaders and institutions working to gather creative solutions to critical global challenges.
The 2020 Global Climate Leadership Forum is being convened by the Brazil 2020 Climate Leadership Campaign, Globo TV, and the Roberto Marinho Foundation, sponsored by Braskem and a consortium of corporate and industrial groups, and supported by the Government of Bahia State and the city of Salvador.
The purpose of the Forum is to examine how innovative
leadership can emerge to create international connections and
collaborations in the development of climate economies, green
technology and eco-communities, and how energetic progress can be made
on the critical issue of climate change outside the COP regime while of
course supporting this process entirely.
If we can get traction in these areas and
among the nations willing to take climate leadership, while continuing
to focus on the over-all goal of significant reductions in CO2 by 2020,
making as many partnerships as possible as we move toward our goals, we
will be well served.
Unlike most conferences where there are numerous panels with too many speakers on a plethora of topics and concerns, the Salvador Climate Forum will focus on only five domains(1. Climate Change and the Global
Commons; 2. The Climate Economy and Innovative
Technology; 3. Climate Finance; 4.
Eco-Communities; 5. Climate Education and Media) and do so in a way that enables extended discussion and debate in each. We will have a simple format: we will dedicate three hours to each of the five topics, which will allow for comprehensive presentations, discussion, break out sessions, and conclusions. The major sessions will mutually inform and influence the other sessions building to a series of conclusions and recommendations that will be presented to the public and the media.
Ecocity Builders will be a facilitator of the eco-communities track. We will be showcasing the International Ecocity Standards Project and efforts
and will conduct a series of workshops to further develop the Standards
with participants of this event.
Eco-Communities
If the climate crisis is going to be solved, it will have to be solved at the level of our cities or probably not at all. Cities are the largest creation of our species and where most of humanity now resides. The complexities involved are staggering but there are cities worldwide that are taking up the challenge of becoming carbon neutral and energy efficient in a range of ways. The conference will convene leading municipal planners and specialists in urban design from around the world to discuss the breakthrough technologies of our urban future.
Conveners:
Richard Register - Founder, Ecocity Builders
Sergio Besserman - Chair, Council on Sustainability, Rio de Janeiro
Facilitated by Marco Vangelisti and Kirstin Miller
Initiative:
International Eco-City Standards with Ecocity Builders International
Working Group:
Nicky Gavron - Member, Greater London Assembly; former Deputy Mayor of London from 2001-2008; founder, London Climate Change Agency
Rob Hopkins - Founder, Transition Network
Kirstin Miller - Executive Director, Ecocity Builders
Zhengrong Shi - Founder of Suntech Power, China
Brent Toderian - City Planning Director, Vancouver, British Columbia
Cassio Taniguchi - Congressional Representative, Brazilian Congress; former Secretary of Urban Development, Federal District, Brasilia
Isabel Wade - Founder and President, Urban Resource Systems
Rusong Wang - Director, Urban Systems Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Dongying Wang - Energy and Climate Change Program Officer, The Global Environmental Institute, Chinese NGO, Beijing.
Additional initiatives to be showcased:
Sky Charter with the creation of a Global Commons Trust
Rights of Nature with Pachamama Alliance
Generating Climate Wealth with the Carbon War Room
Exemplar Zero Initiative with IREO/Humanitad
Global Innovation Commons with M-CAM
Climate Bonds with the Climate Bonds Initiative
STCO Bonds and Trade Credits Initiative with M-CAM
Fundo Brasil for New Technologies: Climate-Transforming Capital Solutions
Four Years Go Campaign with Pachamama Alliance
2020 Women's Leadership Caucus with State of the World Forum
Protocol for Brazilian electoral candidates with Brazil 2020 Climate Leadership Campaign
Power Shift: Education and Media for Sustainable Energy
Green My Parents: Youth Movement for Education and Action
For further information on the Forum themes and participants: http://2020climatecampaign.org/
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The Bruntwood initiative for sustainable cities at the University of Manchester
http://www.ecocitiesproject.org.uk/ecocities/page.aspx
Eco Cities is a joint initiative between the University of Manchester and property company Bruntwood. The project looks at the impacts of climate change and at how we can adapt our cities to the challenges and opportunities that a changing climate presents.
It is an interdisciplinary research project which draws on the expertise of Manchester Architecture Research Centre, Centre for Urban and Regional Ecology, Brooks World Poverty Institute and Manchester Business School.
The core aim of Eco Cities is to create a climate change adaptation blueprint for Greater Manchester, by the end of 2011. The blueprint will be based on leading scientific research, will include an exploration of possible future scenarios for Manchester, and will incorporate case studies at three spatial scales: building, neighbourhood and conurbation. As a decision-aiding tool, it is hoped that the blueprint will become a key resource for planners and other relevant stakeholders in the city region as they seek to adapt to climate change.
Central to all the work of Eco Cities is the concept of 'building adaptive capacity' i.e. helping cities to build the skills, knowledge and expertise necessary to adapt to the impacts of climate change. Eco Cities will not presume to take decisions for stakeholders or look to create a 'one size fits all' adaptation policy. Instead, Eco Cities will seek to visualise possible futures, enable information sharing and work directly with key stakeholders to help them plan and respond locally to the impacts of a changing climate.
Eco Cities also has a strong international dimension and seeks to position Manchester at the centre of a global network of individuals and organisations with an interest in climate change adaptation. This network will help us to share best practice on how cities are designed, built and managed in the face of a changing climate. Manchester will benefit from mutual learning with partner cities including Dhaka, Austin Texas, Nagoya and Singapore.
To find out more about EcoCities visit www.manchester.ac.uk/ecocities
To find out more about Bruntwood visit www.bruntwood.co.uk
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Join Ecocity Builders!
Kirstin Miller, Executive Director, in Huaibei, China
Join us and help rebuild cities in balance with nature.
Ecocity Builders and our network of members -
- Pioneer ecological concepts in urban transportation, landscape design, policy, and planning
- Engage with communities, government, and industry leaders in designing thriving neighborhoods
- Convene movers and shakers in urban and regional planning and community building at our International Ecocity Conference
Ecocity Builders nurtures great visions for healthier cities - for people and nature alike - and provides practical tools for building them. We are a nonprofit organization, and donations are tax-deductible. All levels receive a subscription to the newsletter, special invitations to meetings and events, updates and more.
CLICK HERE TO JOIN
Buy our books
Take part in our active projects
Volunteer
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Car Free Journey
by Steve Atlas
 We hear a lot about the Pennsylvania Dutch and the Amish countryside near Lancaster. And you don't need a car to enjoy a visit here. Amtrak serves Lancaster from Philadelphia, Harrisburg, New York City, or (once per day) Pittsburgh. You can also get here by Greyhound bus. The Amtrak/Greyhound Terminal's address is 53 McGovern Ave. in Lancaster. Downtown Lancaster, Pennsylvania is a small city with many hidden treasures. Walk and explore this historic city. Discover all it has to offer. Lancaster City, the oldest inland city in the United States, was originally settled in 1718. Try to visit Monday-Friday when Red Rose Transit's Historic Downtown Trolley route takes you from the Amtrak/Greyhound Terminal to Downtown Lancaster. An All Day Pass, good on the Trolley and Red Rose Transit Authority (RRTA) buses is $5. The regular one-way bus fare is $1.50. Senior citizens age 65 and older ride free on all Red Rose trolleys and buses. (The statewide Senior Free Transit Program allows seniors age 65 and older to ride any public transit system in PA FREE.) For bus and trolley schedules, visit www.redrosetransit.com. Or call 717/397-4246 weekdays from 7:45 a.m.-5:15 p.m., or 7:45 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. weekends. RRTA's Queen Street Station is in the heart of Downtown Lancaster on the 200 block of North Queen Street. Here, you can catch any of the 17 bus routes traveling through the city and beyond to many of the other towns in Lancaster County. The Route 13/White Horse bus takes you through the famish Amish Country to Bird-in-Hand and Intercourse. Read on |
Help us spread the word about ecocities and Ecocity Builders!
If you like the
work of Ecocity Builders, then tell the world! We have an opportunity to gain more visibility. GreatNonprofits-
a site like Yelp - is conducting a
campaign to find the top-rated environmental nonprofits.
Won't you help us participate in the campaign by posting a
review? It's easy and only takes 3 minutes!
Go to:
www.greatnonprofits.org/reviews/ecocity-builders
Be sure to choose "Green Choice Campaign"
from the drop down menu of campaigns when writing your review. With your help, we can gain greater
visibility for the ecocity vision within the international nonprofit
community.
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Back from Changwon, Barcelona and The Big Apple
by Richard Register, President, Ecocity Builders
 I landed back in the Bay Area about a
week ago. Five talks in Korea, one in Barcelona where I participated in a
"degrowth" conference, one in Brooklyn, another in Manhattan and a
final at Ecovillage at Ithaca two miles outside of Ithaca, New York. It
was a tough job but somebody had to do it. Read on |
Ecocity Builders' News
Board of Directors
Ecocity Builders is pleased to welcome two new Board of Directors members - Isabel Wade, Founder and President, Urban Resource System and Steven A. Bercu, Esq. lime, llc - Lawyers for Interactive Media & Entertainment.
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Berkeley Eco-Plaza Wins Council Endorsement
Our Center Street Plazaproject was recently endorsed with an overwhelming majority vote by the Berkeley City Council.
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International Ecocity Standards Project
The International Ecocity Standards Project is moving steadily forward. We will be showcasing the work to date at the upcoming State of the World Forum in Salvador Brazil this May, and at the Gaining Ground Summitin Vancouver in October. More information about the process and our expert and science advisors to follow in next month's e-newsletter.
---------------------- Toward a Just Metropolis - June Ecocity Builders and our community partner Village Bottoms Neighborhood Association/Black Dot Artists will be leading a mobile workshop for this upcoming conference, highlighting our Urban Villages Project in West Oakland. http://www.justmetropolis.org/home/mobile_workshops
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"The problem is
the present design of cities only a few stories high, stretching
outward in unwieldy sprawl
for miles. As a result of their sprawl, they literally transform
the earth, turn farms into parking lots and waste enormous amounts
of time and energy transporting people, goods and services over
their expanses. My solution is urban implosion rather than explosion."
-Paolo
Soleri
www.arcosanti.org
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The Business of a Better World
THE OFFICIAL BSR BLOG
PPPs and Eco-city Infrastructure in Europe
By Farid Baddache, Director, Europe and Nandini Hampole, Associate, Advisory Services
Public-private partnerships (PPPs) in Europe on eco cities, and for other smart and clean technologies, have been on the rise. And the recent European Commission Recommendation to mobilize the information, communications, and technology industry to facilitate a transition to a low-carbon economy is sure to provide a further boost.
This Recommendation comes on the heels of a 2007 target set by the European Commission to reduce GHGs across Europe by 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. In addition, EU Renewables legislation binds the region to satisfy 20 percent of its energy consumption from renewable energies. This makes Europe a fertile testing ground for larger and longer-term strategic partnerships between companies and governments.
We see these partnerships begin to take root in cases like GE who recently entered into a partnership with the Assembly of European Regions to develop 'clean energy solutions' for potentially 270 regions across 33 European countries. Earlier this year, the Danish government and companies including IBM, Siemens, Better Place, and Dong Energy kicked off EDISON, a project to pilot smart grid infrastructure in Denmark. Better Place also intends to build on its ongoing work with the governments in Israel, Hawaii, Canada, and San Francisco to extend to Denmark its automated battery swapping stations.
These efforts mark a good start and provide important insights for the future success of similar PPPs.
First, the development of eco-city infrastructures can succeed only if companies take the long-term view. Siemens, for instance, is looking to receive orders for more than US$6 billion by 2014 for intelligent power networks as it estimates the demand for electricity will double by 2030, due to trends like e-mobility.
Secondly, public authorities can contribute by providing more stability and continuing to foster these new technologies. Governments-in particular, city governments-have a large role to play in enabling a large-scale deployment of these initiatives, such as Paris' Autolib (an electric car sharing scheme built on the success of the city's bike-sharing program) and the administrative Region of Paris, which provides financial incentives to customers installing equipment that use renewable sources of energy.
Lastly, voters and consumers need to endorse and support such partnerships. We need to see consumers as agents of change ready to move beyond their sometimes tepid acceptance of smart grid technology. A behavioral change is requisite, and technologies like smart meters which target lower energy consumption make sense only if consumers also learn to reign in their energy use.
We think activating consumer participation in energy efficiency is key to transforming PPPs into success. With this, we could move beyond traditional public-private partnerships into a next generation of "P3" structures-public-private-people partnerships.
BSR works with its global network of more than 250 member companies to develop sustainable business strategies and solutions through consulting, research, and cross-sector collaboration.
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SAVE THE DATE!
August 22-26, 2011
Palais des congrès de Montréal, Canada
The first Ecocity World Summit
held in a northern climate city
DES DATES À RETENIR !
Du 22 au 26 août 2011
Website
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World Slogan
- by Richard Register
We need a world slogan.
The United States has a pretty good one - thanks President Thomas
Jefferson: Life, Liberty and the
Pursuit of Happiness. But we need a little modification to fit
the times.
Here's my nominee:
Life, Liberty and the Experience of Happiness for All
Call it the basis for the new prosperity to replace the one that called human beings consumers instead of something a little more exalted like producers, nurturers, creators or lovers.
Americans overdid "pursuit" quite a bit, as if chasing it down in a hunt. Twisting happiness to equate with seeking and gathering as much stuff as possible, or agreed upon numbers in a bank to represent maximum potential stuff, like a sport with as high a score as possible, hasn't ultimately done the world much good. Taking the notion of the pursuit of happiness to its high level of gamesmanship greed that characterized - and still does - the motivations and actions of the biggest investors and gambling theorists who designed the exotic investment instruments - hedge funds, derivatives, bundled mortgages, credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations and so on - took "pursuit of happiness" just a little too far into distorted realms. That it went so far that the exotic instrument designers are running the climate solutions game called the carbon credits market may prove to be a sort of ultimate joke on the planet.
Why not just figure out what needs to be done for climate change solutions and do that? But instead we have to be trading carbon credits so the clever can once again inflate their bubbles and skim billions until the world bubble pops.
Regarding slogans, my solutions to climate change and other elements of the mega crisis that is upon us, such as species extinctions and a rapidly degenerating world resource base, a major element of which is called Peak Oil, I've condensed into what I call "the Solution Question":
How many building, eating, giving and teaching what?
If you don't ask the right question you don't get the right answer. Why not face the big ones and go for that? That is, why not deal with massive population ("how many"), build ecocities and their associated energy and transportation technologies, not car infested cities ("building"), change diet to consume far less land and soil which means much lighter on meat and much more variegated and organic agriculture close to home ("eating"), being generous by investing seriously in the future, by not stealing or killing for people's stuff and by taxing ourselves and spending on the above three ("giving") and teaching with highest priority on the above four items ("teaching what").
We could go for those Five Big Ones but instead we have let the big money people get richer or bust themselves entirely gambling on something vague, opaque and amazingly convoluted. The direct approach might actually solve our most important problems instead of turning them over to the intentionally invisible hand, that obscured hand, of the market place.
But back to our slogans. In "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" we could take life to mean not to "take life" as well as mean "live and let live," which is getting close to the "liberty" idea. So "life," in allowing life as well as in leading life, implies "peace" and that's good.
"Liberty" generally implies we are all free to do pretty much what we want but in deference to others having the same idea. Along with the "pursuit" idea of happiness pushing perhaps a little too hard, perhaps the "liberty" idea lacks something in the realm of responsibility. Pursuing the thinking in the Declaration of Independence, wherein the US national slogan appears, the founding parents came up with the notion of a Bill of Rights but no similar document called a Bill of Responsibilities. "Responsibilities" would certainly throw a bucket of cold water on the happiness part of the party. "Liberty" has something of an impulsive self-centered orientation that can be quite anti-social, the "I can do whatever I want" attitude. Home on the range without too many other people around maybe it can work pretty well. But it does mean good things too, such as promoting a solid degree of self-reliance and personal responsibility for creative innovation. So I suggest we keep it.
Happiness is something of an ultimate that people resonate with and to think of "happiness for all" is probably all we really need if we are to include in the "all" all the other living things on this planet: the plants and animals. The "experience" if not the all-too-human single minded pursuit of happiness needs to be available to all other living things, too, their experience being to thrive in their ways and in their ecological world while they can, as we humans should be able to do in that world and our constructed world while we can.
Experiencing happiness as a goal instead of having the goal of maximum acquisition representing happiness is actually a pretty healthy, radical idea. And it is not just the material acquisition monomania but the abstract attachment to having a big number in the bank or investment portfolio, that alluring, golden bottom line that is the problem. Going more directly to the experience of happiness and not seeing it as a pursuit but as something more ever-present and available in small as well as larger things begins to define another kind of prosperity that promises life on the planet and not death in multiple ecological catastrophes.
The "happiness index" idea started to gain traction in Bhutan in 1972 when then King Jigme Singye Wangchuck decided it was more laudable and healthy to have happy subjects than to have them stashing their money and dreams and representations of the above two in intricate agreements with Wall Street and in off-shore tax havens. It may be part of our planet's salvation, so let's just add "happiness for all" at the end of our world slogan, to reiterate:
Life, Liberty and the Experience of Happiness for All
I started thinking on these lines when reading an article by Johann Hari in the March 22, 2010 edition of The Nation. It was called "The Wrong Kind of Green" and it detailed how environmental groups are partnering with the largest corporate exploiters for gaining financial support for their own institutions known generally as conservation groups, environmental NGOs (non-governmental organizations) or the part of the "civil sector" that deals with environmental issues.
In return for money the environmental groups support the funders' profit making by way of supporting (among other things) carbon credits that work mainly to shift exploitation from one location to another and also into an unknowable deeper future - while bringing yet more money to those causing the damage. The environmental groups then support hopelessly weak legislation in a hopelessly bought out US Congress, transforming themselves, as most Congress legislators have been, into lobbyists for the companies that fund them. The result: Copenhagen fails, targets for climate solutions become dangerously weak and the environmental organizations so bought off (not all are of course but many of the big ones) go on to claim they are doing what is politically realistic while the planet begins to burn up.
"The Wrong Kind of Green" is a very good article about this situation and, in dramatic detail, it names names of profiting environmental groups and their donor businesses. It explains the problems with supposed CO2 sequestration projects carbon sink by carbon sink. You should read it: http://thewrongkindofgreen.wordpress.com.
Read on
Richard Register is Founder and President of Ecocity Builders and the International Ecocity Conference Series. He can be reached at ecocity@igc.org
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Principal Features of an Ecocity
http://www.ecocityprojects.net/
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