A feature of the Roundtable was be a Mayors Panel moderated by V. Sherry Tross Executive Secretary for Integral Development of the GS/OAS, which addressed the theme: Portrait of a Sustainable City.

 

IEFS PRINCIPLE OF RESPONSIBLE RESOURCES AND MATERIALS

 

The International Ecocity Framework and Standards Initiative (IEFS) is a project of Ecocity Builders and the IEFS Advisory Committee, funded in part by the BCIT's School of Construction and the Environment. 

Cities concentrate people. This has a positive benefit in terms of enabling people to access services more efficiently. However, by virtue of concentrating people, cities also concentrate consumption of resources and materials. Residents of the world's industrialized economies account for only 20% of the global population, but consume approximately 80% of global resources including: aluminium (85%), paper (81%), iron and steel (80%), and lumber (76%) (Young and Sachs, 1994).  

 

The International Ecocity Framework and Standards (IEFS) calls for the city's renewable and non-renewable resources to be sourced, allocated, managed and recycled responsibly and equitably, and without adversely affecting human health or the resilience of ecosystems. Furthermore, it calls for most resources/materials to be primarily sourced from within the bioregion.

 

The ecological footprint of high-income/high-consuming cities is approximately 200 times their physical land area (Rees 1996). This means that the amount of land required to produce all the resources consumed in these cities is 200-300 times greater than the physical space the city actually occupies. If one excludes food and energy from this estimate, the amount of goods consumed and the resources required to produce them along with the materials used to physically construct the city requires an ecosystem area, assuming global average bio-productivity, of approximately 43 times the cities physical size. Of this amount, approximately half is attributed to the consumption of goods and half is attributed to the materials used to construct the city (Rees and Moore forthcoming). The latter may seem surprisingly low considering how much materials are used to build cities. However, it is important to consider the duration of the material's life once incorporated in the construction of the city. Whereas most goods are consumed and discarded within the year they are purchased, the buildings and infrastructure (i.e. the built environment) of the city typically lasts for 50 to 75 years, if not longer.

 

To achieve the IEFS principle of responsible resources/materials requires a focus on both the type and amount of goods we consume as well as the way we build and maintain our cities. Manufacturing processes associated with the production of just five products: paper, plastics, chemicals and metals account for 71% of USA toxic emissions (Young and Sachs, 1994). Paper and metal products enjoy high recycle rates in many industrialized economies, but the process remains energy intensive and some products, such as many plastics, can only be down-cycled not recycled. This means that decisions about what we consume and the durability and capacity for reuse of what we consume are important aspects of responsible resource/materials use.  

 

Decisions about what materials to use in city-building are also important from both the perspective of the functioning of the city, and its impact on local and global ecosystems. For example, local governments in high-income cities are typically the largest users of concrete for municipal infrastructure, including roads and sidewalks. For every tonne of concrete produced, one tonne of greenhouse gas emissions is also produced as part of the cement manufacturing process.  

 

Sustainable cities use materials responsibly. This means building durable cities that will last a long time, and that allow for the flexible use and reconfiguration of spaces. It also means avoiding materials that produce or use toxic substances in their manufacturing. Cities that make use of locally available materials reduce the need for importing foreign substance and support locally appropriate building technologies that enable people to access these locally available materials to construct their own residences. Appropriate technologies that match supply of materials to demand for services is also an important strategy. For example, not all urban surfaces need to be paved. Maximizing green spaces and using alternatives such as stone pebbles to line heavily trodden paths can provide similar surface integrity to concrete.

 

References

 

Rees, W.E. 1996. Revisiting Carrying Capacity: Area-Based Indicators of Sustainability, Population and Environment, Vol. 17, No. 3.

 

Young, J. and A. Sachs. 1994. The Next Efficiency Revolution: Creating a Sustainable Materials Economy. Worldwatch Paper 121. Washington DC: Worldwatch Institute. (http://www.worldwatch.org/bookstore/publication/worldwatch-paper-121-next-efficiency-revolution-creating-sustainable-materials)

 

British Columbia Institute of Technology School of Construction and the Environment is Lead Sponsor of the International Ecocity Framework and Standards Initiative  

 

 

 

Martha's Vineyard Island: Part 2  

by David Waight

 

Ready for a getaway?  

 

 

 READ ON  

 

is the international forum...

• for innovators and pioneers, designers and planners, policy makers and administrators, professionals and business people, environmentalists and developers, teachers and students;
• of sustainable cities, towns and villages of the future;
• from theory to the application of all things related to the ecological city 

5 themes 

 

 

We seek conference hosts who agree that we need both bottom up and top down approaches to solving our urban and environmental problems and that the same applies to approaches for the content of the conferences, that the particulars down to the personal and local level effect the global, climate and biosphere level and vice versa, good policy working its way down to the benefit of everyone at the "grass roots" as well. We have been, from the first conference on to the present, a conference series with a very international, multi-cultural and social justice oriented set of events. We have held conferences on all continents except Antarctica.

To receive an information packet on how to apply to host the next Ecocity World Summit, please email Conference Correspondent Richard Register, ecocity@igc.org and cc Ecocity Builders' Executive Director Kirstin Miller, kirstin@ecocitybuilders.org    

                      
                                                                                                                            

Ecocities: using creativity to express our future urban needs

 

SE: What's an ecocity and where can I find one?

 

Richard Register: There are many cities in the world that have various pieces of the ecocity in place. They are pretty inspiring in many cases, but I don't know of a city where all the pieces yet come together. Villages often have all the essential elements of an ecocity-type pedestrian structure. For example, you'll find that the old villages and small towns in Europe have work, education, residence, services, entertainment, and transportation elements at a scale where these pedestrian environments work pretty well. However, with fossil fuels enabling cars and trucks going vast distances, cities have spread out all over the place and become fractured.

 

So there's no real full-on ecocity that I know of, but there are places that have the core of what was close to an ecocity before they became embedded in today's automobile infrastructure. Zermatt, Switzerland, which has nothing but little golf carts that mix with pedestrians quite nicely - they don't run over people and kill them like cars do - is one example. Venice is another. Avalon on California's Catalina Island, where only a few collectors' cars are allowed. I don't even know if it's so much of an ecocity, but it's just a lot more pleasant than most places. It's a tiny town, and everyone is close together.

 

In Changwon, South Korea, where I'm on the international board of advisors, they have what's called the City 7 project that does get quite a few of the pieces of an ecocity together. When I say that I mean that work, living, and education aspects are placed in close proximity so you can get to everything by foot or bicycle, and for longer distances you have public transit. The City 7 project is pretty exemplary, heading in the right direction. It has housing, hotels, conference centers, all sorts of shops, movie theaters, clothing stores, bars, cafes, rooftop gardens, lots of plants. Nothing native and no food plants, so you're missing that, and the buildings don't have any kind of logical relationship to views or sun angles, but if you added those elements in you'd pretty much have an ecocity fractal, a fraction of a total ecocity in one place.

 

SE: You've been drawing up ecocity designs for over 40 years. How did you get into it?

 

RR: I met Paolo Soleri on a hitchhiking trip in 1965, even before he started his experimental town Arcosanti, and his ideas made so much sense. The city can't be scattered all over the place like a sheet of paper. It has to be like a living organism, much more three dimensional. Since the city is a complex living organism, constantly growing, changing, disintegrating, and re-forming, it has many parallels with normal living organisms. If it's compact and three dimensional like the European compact city where people can walk around easily, then it's well on its way. But you can take it much further, the way Paolo did, like single structure cities, a whole city in a single building. Not an enclosed block but rather a lattice work of living, breathing air and light penetrating, bridges between buildings, and rooftop gardens.

In 1973 he came out with his book (The Bridge between Matter & Spirit Is Matter Becoming Spirit: The Arcology of Paolo Soleri), in which he said that the city has to miniaturize itself and implode to a center where a lot of things are going on close together. That way you don't need a lot of energy to get to where the information, the people, the tools, and the ideas are. It all needs to be close together. He also said that cars are a big problem, pointing out that places like Los Angeles - where I was living at the time - basically consisted of a bunch of little buildings and was totally flat. He said that this was a problem, that while it may look like just a bunch of buildings this was in fact an absolutely gigantic, unprecedented infrastructure with miles of pipes per person for water and sewage and wires for gas and electricity, and asphalt and concrete for all the streets and drivers. A quarter of your whole house is for your car and the driveway is ten times wider than your sidewalk. He thought that was crazy, and I thought he was right on. So that shaped my thinking.

 

The other thing was that I'd always liked dinosaurs, paleontology, cosmology and such. Paolo pointed out that there's a pattern throughout evolution towards miniaturization and complexification. Gas clouds condense and new things start happening. Stars explode and throw out heavy metals that never existed before. Those elements congregate and through chemical reactions they form up in much smaller areas called planets within which life emerges, and within that life consciousness evolves. So there's a pattern of miniaturization and complexification throughout the entire cosmos, and here you see cities going in the exact opposite direction, spreading out, requiring more and more material, more and more energy, more and more time, money, and everything to accomplish specific functions in your life.

To me this seemed like really powerful stuff. I was making sculptures at the time because I love tactile art. So I started making sculpture for temperature ranges, vibrations, surface texture, resiliency, moisture and dryness, because there are all these things you can feel and nobody is developing an aesthetic expression of it. I was having an enormously good time making tactile sculpture, but at one point I thought, well this is fun but the world is falling apart, cities are growing rapidly, covering agricultural land and burning up our fossil fuels. I've got to apply this to real life problems.

 

SE: What role do you think art and creativity can play in inspiring and facilitating ecocity design?

 

RR: If you try to figure out what it means to evolve into a more fulfilling human future, individually, as a society, and as a species, the best I know how to do that is through compassion and creativity. Creativity of course is smack in the middle of the arts, and as a teen and in my twenties I wanted to do nothing but tactile art. But it's about the content and the message, what it means to be alive on this planet. A lot of artists get there, but you have to have a discipline of some sort, something to hold your style together and help communicate.

 

If you want art with meaning, it needs to connect with two things: the eternal-the laws of the universe, ecology, biology, and things that emerge in evolution-and the human heart-our capacity to feel for each other and be compassionate. I think Marshall McLuhan misses the point when he says "the medium is the message." No, it's not. What's the content here? Are you going to build a society that's damaging the planet or are you going to build a society that's advancing human creativity? What are you actually going to be doing with your art? You can't just toss out whatever you want to express, it has to actually connect with society, with other people's feelings and how they organize things.

 

SE: Like someone sitting on a zoning committee with a creative mind? How do we get to that?

 

RR: Well, those folks need the language, and the language is really scantily developed. Part of that language is visual language, which is why I draw so many pictures. Being creative also helps if you want to enjoy your work and be inspired to collaborate. If you can't figure out a way to enjoy this struggle - and it really is a struggle - with your comrades and friends, how can it work? And if you don't have the experience of working together, you can't magnify things. I think that's where art comes in, but it's almost too subtle to even talk about. It's about how we fit in the world, and artists create all kinds of possibilities for precious and wonderful ideas, because they're open-minded.