It is predicted that the next century will see 70% of the world's populations reside within the 'safety' of the modern metropolis. Here are 15 ways to make our cities more healthy, creative and sustainable.

If we are seriously attempting to address a holistic approach to sustainability, we must engage with our cities too, attracting the attention of architects, urban planners and developers the world over, in order to provide substance to the 'green,' 'eco' architectures of our present day.  

This challenge calls us to think differently about permaculture and the way we apply the skills we learn following on from design courses. Permaculture is predominantly based on three principles: Earth Care, People Care and Fair Share. However, As Looby Macnamara's People & Permaculture emphasizes, the vast majority of permaculture courses only deal with Earth Care, often excluding in one way or another, the other two principles.

Could this give us an insight into the cities of the future?  

Picture by Richard Register

Herbert Girardet's Schumacher Briefing, Creating Sustainable Cities, describes the sustainable city as a place "organized so as to enable all its citizens to meet their own needs and to enhance their well-being without damaging the natural world or endangering the living conditions of other people, now or in the future."

Adding to this, Richard Register - the man responsible for coining the term 'Ecocities' - states that "the whole notion is to have a beautiful city that is really creative". Working as a sculptor in the 1980's, he envisaged that "we could all be living in these sculptures that are very supportive of human creativity".

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Sven, "Soil is the Solution" might be the most important environmental story you'll ever write. It is part of the solution to our environmental challenges. The story belongs on the front of the NY Times and on 60 Minutes. - Email from Robert Reed, composting manager at Recology, San Francisco's waste management company

This is a story of hope and possibility in times of great turmoil and struggle.

Richard Register

What on Earth is going on? Well, the US is big and cars are losing popularity gradually as young people turn to portable electronic communications, take in the advantages and direct experience of the pleasures of urban life - and can rent the damn things for travel to the country any time they want and save thousands of dollars every year. (Maybe rising college tuition is a factor against cars for the youthful...) In Russia, still bristling with nuclear weapons, Pussy Riot is threatening to bring down the 13 year Putin regime - at least someone still prays over there even if in dance and song. In China, biggest of all, four times the population of the United States, they are building automobile infrastructure like crazy and, for the last two years buying more cars than Americans are. And attempting at the same time to build what they call eco-cities.

"Tong Yen Ho, the former UN senior diplomat from Singapore and CEO of the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-city Investment and Development Co. Ltd. Sent us this image of the new building cluster just completed with solar electric power and showpiece field of sunflowers

That's the strong card in my hand since I came up with the term many years ago and there and in Korea I get credit for the linguistic innovation. California Governor Jerry Brown doesn't answer my mail though I knew him and worked with him for a couple years just before he became Oakland Mayor, traveled with him three times to his 25,000 acre spread west of Williams to dream about his ranch's future and ecocity designs and organized a number of seminars at his We the People "compound" in Jack London Square. But in China I meet with the country's second in command for housing, rural and urban development Qiu Boaxing, big developers and heads of city planning agencies. So we do the best we can and China is currently more friendly than the US to my work. To say, with its stunning rate of building, China is the place to be if you are interested in new city development is a 21st century understatement.

This was my third trip to Tianjin Eco-city and second to speak at the world Binhai Eco-city Forum in the new development district on the coast next door to Tianjin proper. I was hired earlier this year by Xuefeng Lin, Director of the project known as the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-city. My assignment: to write a report from Ecocity Builders' perspective on the SSTEC effort, throwing in a few added suggestions for amendments into the future. I found their project inspiring.  

There was to be a predecessor: Dongtan, the "worlds first ecocity" according to Arup, the engineering firm from England that was doing the main design and planning for that effort to be located on Chongming Island just north of Shanghai. But mysteriously all work ceased on the project. I think it had something to do with the fact that the chief local champion of the project, a high politician in Shanghai, ended up in jail for 18 years for corruption and influence pedaling, which tends to dampen things in that country where honor and saving face is a prerequisite for surviving, much less leadership. That, back around 2009, left standing only Masdar in Abu Dhabi and just-starting Tianjin Eco-city as the world's two remaining serious new town ecocity contenders. Given that Masdar represents the weirdest of circumstances - deep pockets of money from literally deep pockets of oil nearby, which almost nobody else in the world has, makes considerably less relevant as a model for any kind of city much less an ecocity. And it's in an enormous desert so hot and large the only way it can survive is by shipping in massive amount of food from great distances spending the energy they save on compact development just to keep the city relatively cool. News has it that much of the early enthusiasm and considerable investment money has dried up and left Masdar close to spinning its wheels there with little progress happening at the present time. That leaves Tianjin Eco-city, and the first to use the word I made up back in 1979 in its official name. Am I happy to be involved? Very.

How's it doing? Pretty well. The first 200 families are moved in and more coming quickly. But you'd think by looking at the scale and number of the buildings 20,000 families would already be there. That's because the interiors of dozens of buildings in the 10 to 20 story range are still being worked on while many are rising pillars, slabs and floor plates surround by ever rising scaffolding and those green sheets of cloth that keep falling material under control and dampen the breezes in the structures under construction. The first shopping center has about five stores, an exercise club, a couple restaurants and more stores being outfitted for opening shortly. A modest sized Hilton Hotel in traditional Chinese style is to be opened in the early New Year. Classes are underway at the first high school for residents and a few students from outside.

A section under construction of the future eco-valley pedestrian and bicycle pathway that will run the full north to south length of Tianjin Eco-city.

The weak side of the story there is the general layout following the development pattern so well established in China at this point, which looks every bit as if created to encourage driving. Their goal is 90% "green trips" by 2020, meaning that 90% of all trips anywhere, commuting or local, would be by foot, bicycle or transit. I'm assured that the long, wide streets that stretch along the "super blocks" that must have four to eight times the land area of the typical American urban block, will be interrupted by signal light controlled pedestrian and bicycle crosswalks to dampen the speed and mellow out the psychology of the driver in the car while making the whole environment more friendly to the cyclist and person on foot. Their goal that improves the alternatives while not talking about what they are alternative to, is a somewhat delicate criticism of cars - they could name names and say, "We are trying to get rid of them as quickly as we can." But in China, as in the USA, and everywhere else I can think of, the automobile has almost sacred status, the fetish of overmobility as a German friend once called the hurtling boxes of metal and glass on rubber. It is so taboo that of course the Key Performance Indicators guiding development at Tianjin Eco-city don't mention the car at all, and even our own International Ecocity Framework and Standards (IEFS) eschew direct criticism. Implied yes, explicitly stated, not so much. Meantime I dream of the day we pass over the threshold and can just say with impunity that this strange thing that weighs 30 times as much as a human being, goes ten times and fast and takes up 1000 times the volume of space over the surface it requires - parking as well as driving space - is just a dangerous, damaging thing to design cities around. Better to design cities for people. But meantime we prepare the ground for the leap over the threshold into a new world of ecocities pouring forth.  

Kenneth Boulding once said peace in the world might be something like the myth of Sisyphus: you keep rolling the rock up the hill toward the summit but it slips away and falls back and you try again and again. It's hard but once you get to the top and over the rock rolls ever faster down the other side. He used the example of slavery, an institution that goes back thousands of years to even before city-based civilization began... evaporating in the 19th century. (People quibble that we have economic slavery among some now - but they aren't thinking through the full meaning of the reality that was full-on slavery.) Steven Pinker in his book "The Better Angeles of Our Nature - why violence has declined" points out the same humanizing trend put an end to dueling too: he says, "...dueling petered out in the English-speaking world by the middle of the 19th century... Historians have noted that the institution was buried not so much by legal bans or moral disapproval as by ridicule. 'Solemn gentlemen went to the field of honor only to be laughed at by the younger generation, that was more than any custom, no matter how sanctified by tradition, could endure.' (He credits only 'Stevens,' 'Ridicule ended Dueling,' 1940.) Today the expression 'Take ten paces, turn, and fire' is more likely to call to mind Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam than 'men of honor.'"

All that to suggest that a civilizing trend my be just a glimmer in the eye of places like Tianjin Eco-city, but the small, almost counter culture trend away from cars might just break free and usher in a flood of real ecocities fairly soon.

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Recent UNISDR stock-taking workshop in Incheon, South Korea. Left to right: Baltz Tribunalo Jr., Plan Internatiional Philippines; Masahiko Murata, Diaster Reduction and Human Renovation Institute of Japan; Violeta Seva, Senior Adviser, City Government of Makati, Philippines and Kirstin Miller, Executive Director, Ecocity Builders

The Making Cities Resilient: 'My City is Getting Ready!' campaign will enter its second phase 2012-2015 and Ecocity Builders is joining as a campaign partner. The campaign, launched in May 2010, addresses issues of local governance and urban risk.  

Among other things, Ecocity Builders will work with the campaign to develop a set of common standards, metrics and indicators to help facilitate and coordinate the shared discussion, planning, design and implementation of integrated strategies to increase health and resilience in urban areas.   

Utilizing ecocity design principles informed by the Ecocity Framework assessment, cities and citizens can implement preventative measures to reduce risk and increase the health of the whole city-system. Examples might include ecocity advanced planning and implementing more compact, energy and land saving urban design; building on elevated fill in flood prone areas; building safely on hillsides and slopes; clustering to protect against fire hazards; and educating citizens about how integrating healthy nature and green spaces in cities can help buffer against disasters while boosting health and livability.   

UNISDR World Disaster Reduction Campaign

Car Free Journey

By Steve Atlas

Baltimore, Maryland    

Nicknames: Charm City, Mobtown, B'more, The City of Firsts,  Monument City, Ravenstown 

Mottos: "The Greatest City in America.", "Get in on it.", "The city that reads.", "Believe." 

For the past several years, my hometown of Baltimore, Free Fall Baltimore: held every October to a series of free events, free admission to several attractions, and many other free programs and activities. The city offers several free shuttle buses that serve downtown Baltimore and other nearby attractions. The free bus service, Charm City Circulator, makes it easy and fun for visitors to enjoy a weekend here without needing to drive.  

Baltimore's local public transit system, Maryland Transit Administration (MTA) provides light rail, subway (Metro), and local and regional bus routes. (On weekdays, MTA provides MARC commuter train service between Baltimore and Washington, D.C.-just an hour away.) A one-day bus (good for unlimited travel on MTA local buses, subway and light rail) costs just $3.60 ($1.20 for senior citizens age 65 and older). For more information about MTA routes, schedules, fares and passes, visit www.mtamaryland.gov, or call (410) 539-5000.

October is a great time to visit Baltimore, the city we will visit in today's Car Free Journey column.

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