Ecocities Emerging - May 2010 Issue

Ecocities Emerging To support humanity's transition into the Ecozoic Era	Ecocity Builders May 2010

Greetings,

Welcome to the May 2010 edition of Ecocities Emerging, an initiative of Ecocity Builders and the International Ecocity Conference Series.

The contemporary degrowth movement can trace its roots back to the anti-industrialist trends of the 19th century developed in Great Britain by John Ruskin, in the United States by Henry David Thoreau and in Russia by Leo Tolstoy. Degrowth thinking surged again in the 1970s when the Club of Rome think tank commissioned MIT for a report on solutions to global problems. "The Limits to Growth", published in 1972, was the first major study underscoring the ecological perils of unprecedented economic growth.

"Degrowth" is now a very real phenomenon hitting many former factory and industrial strongholds. As the impacts of decades worth of unchecked economic growth and related resource plundering, overshoot and ecosystems collapse ramifications start to play out, many cities are going through rapid changes they hadn't prepared for. Some cities are shrinking.

"Degrowth" may also provide an opportunity if we are able to respond in time and with a clear vision and plan for how to "shrink for prosperity" using ecocity principles, to rebuild healthier and more planet friendly economic foundations as well as restore and rehabilitate natural systems that have been dug up, burned, cut down, torn up, polluted and paved over during the Age of Oil.

Degrowthing cities is something of a very major necessity given that cities need to be reshaped to fit a diffuse, renewable energy future. With the sort of design layout and features we promote in Ecocity Builders, we estimate renewable energy cities should be able to run on 1/10th the energy and 1/5th the land of the average fossil fuel and car based city. Not that the ecocity would pop forth immediately, but a shift in that direction, says Jaime Lerner, architect (literally and metaphorically) of Curitiba Brazil's famous remodel starting in 1972, can progress very substantially in as few as two years.

With the infrastructure changes that results from ecocity design and technologies -- (solar and wind energy, bicycling and streetcars, organic local farming, etc.) along with progressively improving lifestyles (bicycling and recycling more and more while driving less and less) -- and in context with Lerner's statement "positive change is possible, we can do it", we would then be well down the path toward sustainability.

Sincerely,

Kirstin Miller and Richard Register for Ecocity Builders
339 15th Street, Suite 208
Oakland CA 94612 USA
www.ecocitybuilders.org

Read Richard's blog on degrowth for "The Broker" -- He met correspondents for the magazine at the Barcelona Second International Degrowth Conference earlier this spring and is now contributing a regular column for their publication.

Keeper of the International Ecocity Conference Series

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.

Ecocities
SETTING THE STANDARDS
by Kirstin Miller and Sven Eberlein
Summer 2010 issue of the GreenMoney Journal

Google the word "ecocity" and you'll get over a half million hits, ranging from "Ecocity Vehicles" to "Sex and the Ecocity." Ecocity is fast becoming a buzzword among urban greenies, both on- and
ofﬂine. With climate change front and center in our public discourse, this sudden interest in urban planning and development comes as no surprise: Home to over half of the world's population on less than one percent of the earth's surface, cities consume over two-thirds of the world's energy and account for more than 70 percent of global CO2 emissions. There is growing consensus that the path to reversing climate change must lead through cities.

In many ways, this is a welcome acknowledgment of the tremendous role urban design can and must play in changing our wasteful ways and reducing our global carbon footprint. However, as with the terms "green" and "sustainable," the rising popularity and widespread use of "ecocity" has brought with it the need to deﬁne what it actually means and what it should be used for. Not unlike greenwashing, "ecocity" used as a feel-good word for any town with a bike lane or a recycling program can hurt the cause of building and reclaiming an integrated urban ecosystem more than it helps.

At what point then, does a city graduate from boasting a collection of "eco-scores" to becoming an actual ecocity? Fortunately, a lot of footwork (pun intended) has already been done in answering this question: from when Ecocity Builders President Richard Register ﬁrst coining the term in 1979 to the
current development of International Ecocity Standards, the ecocity model is a well-seasoned concept already being applied in cities around the world and is on its way to becoming a globally recognized metric. After twenty years of ﬁne-tuning and eight international ecocity conferences, urban planners and governments worldwide are poised to submit their cities to an evaluation process comparable to the USGBC's LEED ratings system for buildings.

But let's back up just a bit...

What is an Ecocity?

"Eco" is derived from "Oikos," the ancient Greek equivalent of a household or family, in which everyone works together to create a functioning unit. Similarly, eco cities are conditional upon a healthy relationship of a city's parts and functions rather than just a laundry list of random "green features." While there are single categories such as transportation, buildings or industries that play important roles in deﬁning a city, ecocities' complex living systems interact three-dimensionally and in relatively close proximity, not unlike our human bodies.

The key word here is proximity. If there is a single deﬁning feature of a lean and functioning eco-city, it would be the ability of its residents to access basic goods and services by foot, bicycle or public transportation, preferably in that order. While a complete phase-out is not realistic at this point, the staggering environmental costs associated with the automobile (ranging from the extraction of raw materials to production, road building, disposal, petroleum depletion, and CO2 emissions) should keep driving at the very bottom of this inverted pyramid. Using the analogy of our human body, the automobile is like a 5000-calorie daily diet, a burden on the system that negatively impacts all other organs and our overall health; any serious attempt at establishing an ecocity must keep car-free, pedestrian designs at its core.

Read on

Earth Day 40th Anniversary
Oil Spill Disaster
by Richard Register

I sometimes write longish e-mails to share ideas about one thing or another. Our ecocity perspectives are often not to be found elsewhere it seems, so here's another view to an ongoing news story "exclusive" to this publication. In a recent correspondence, the BP Gulf Oil Spill came up. I just responded with some of my thoughts about who's responsible:

Blame - and what to do about it

"Some simple lessons (that people don't want to look at) fall out of an honest inquiry. One such is that the single-family house compared to the apartment is a major problem. More closely related than most people would notice, another is that it is the automobile driver - not BP, or Transocean, or Halliburton, or drilling in mile-deep water, or regulators, or a particular piece of technology and so on - that is most responsible for the environmental disasters like the current Gulf Oil Spill. People who are getting more sophisticated about ecology recognize that there are chains of cause and effect and networks of cross influence and they talk about and use whole systems thinking as when organizing their businesses. But when they don't want to hear or see something amazingly conspicuous in ecological terms they 'don't go there.'

Earth Day 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon drilling platform collapses into the Gulf of Mexico releasing a disastrous oil spill.

In other words it is a simple exercise to trace back the cause of the current Earth Day Oil Disaster (happy 40th Birthday! - April 22, 2010, that's when the flaming Deepwater Horizon drilling platform tilted, toppled and sank to the bottom of the sea breaking the riser pipe and setting off the oil spill).

If you trace the chain of causes back through the explosion, the drilling companies, the refineries, pipelines and gasoline trucks, gas stations and into your gas tank you find the original cause. And why do we drive cars? They are part of the whole system called sprawl city and if we don't use them we can get almost nothing done if we live in suburbia. But who is courageous enough to say, 'Hey! It all starts with me forking over that money for the mortgage and for the car and gasoline and paying taxes to pave the planet.' And it takes some work and imagination to recognize that we can actually change the way the city is designed and built, as well as use the car less and plan on moving into a functional community where everything you need is close together enough that you don't need to drive. Sensing too much work and discomfort - or at least that's my guess about the personal dynamics involved - 'they don't go there.' The subject never comes up. I've read dozens of articles and letters to the editor now and not one has mentioned the real causes and where responsibility resides. Interesting!"

One day later, after writing the above, one letter to the editor did cross my reading list. It said, "Let's face it. We drive cars and we should all take some responsibility. So the question becomes can we find a better energy source?" He missed the whole topic of conservation and the fact that a few million people in the US don't drive at all and so too for the vast majority of people in the world. What if we design cities so we don't need to drive? That sounds really obscure in the U.S. for example, but it lies at the beginning of the chain of causes and we'd get there if we were committed and courageous enough to think ecologically.

It is our responsibility to design better. Sounds far, far away, but in fact it is the physical foundation upon which we've built our whole society. Can we change it? It's changing all the time and its not the dogs and cats that are changing it. That must mean we are responsible and we do change it irrespective of our attitude about whether we can.

"The solution to pollution is dilution"

Read On

Car Free Journey
by Steve Atlas

walking

I want to recommend a new website devoted to traveling by public transportation. This site is a great resource for anyone who wants to drive less. The site includes articles about the benefits of public transit, and even includes information about how to use intercity buses, trains, and local buses, subways, trolleys and more. And spread the word! We need more resources like David Waight's easy-to-read www.pubtrantravel.com!

It's hard to believe that a year has gone by since I first wrote my e-book, Car Free at the Beach. (For information about the book, visit http://carfreeamerica.com.) As I prepare to update the book, I want to mention 3 new beach areas I have discovered. (I hope to add more each year.)

Most of us have heard about the Mississippi Gulf Coast communities of Biloxi and Gulfport, and their casinos. But few people know that these communities + the quaint community of Ocean Springs have a regional airport in Biloxi (served by Air Tran), great Gulf beaches (be sure to check before going there to be sure the oil spill has not affected the beaches and the rest of the area), and Coast Transit that serves all 3 communities, the beaches, casinos, and key attractions and shopping in the area. For more information about visiting the Mississippi Gulf Coast by public transit, visit www.coasttransit.com, or call (228) 896-8080.

Read on

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