Valérie David,

Director of Sustainable Development Department, Group Eiffage

Are these ecocity times? Perhaps I should put a question mark at the end of my title. Putting forward that notion - that we might be at the dawn of ecocity times - might produce some interesting insights, maybe strategies for success.

We are approaching the Tenth International Ecocity Conference (Ecocity World Summit) to be held in Nantes, France and it is intriguing to notice how much Ecocity Builders and the whole ecocity enterprise going back several decades now has seeped into the unconsciousness of what Tielhard de Chardin called the "noosphere," aka "noesphere." By that the Catholic priest, philosopher and evolution theorist meant the total flux of consciousness, unconsciousness and preconsciousness, all that information plus the physical substance housing, remembering, accessing and carrying that information, which is our brains, books, phone wires and microwaves, radio sets, even our schools and cities, and etc. You could even add that the neurological material of all the other animals, their mating calls and displays, warnings of aggression, and even the rudimentary signs of some kind of awareness in plants all participate in wildly various way in the noosphere. You could think of the noosphere in brief as the planetary brain/mind. That planetary noosphere has recently been practicing the design, planning and building, in so many places around the world, bits and pieces of what an ecocity would be if... if all those pieces were drawn together and organized well into a physical new type of city. That's why I say the ecocity features that are being built now are emerging from an unconscious place rather than a conscious one: it seem impossible for today's noosphere to quite yet get the overall design of the whole urban system, the largest physical component of the planetary brain going about its citified business. But, ecocity neurological information flux and communications could go live and conscious any time now.  

Richard Register and Jaime Lerner, Ecocity World Summit 2008, San Francisco

Some of us have presumed to known for some time now what that new brain for containing that planetary mind would look like in terms of its urban design and arrangements, even most of its detailing. But this new world is beginning to be built without reference to our prior promotions in Ecocity Builders, and before that in Urban Ecology, and before that in a group we called Arcology Circle, and before that at Arcosanti, Arizona. We might think of these efforts and kindred work such as that of Joan Bokaer's and Liz Walkers at Ithaca Ecovillage, Paul Downton and Cherie Hoyle, conveners of our Second International Ecocity Conference in Adelaide, Australia and Rusong Wang, convener of our Fifth International Ecocity Conference in Shenzhen, China and others as well known as Ian McHarg and Lewis Mumford and as powerfully insightful and obscure as Kenneth Schneider and Paul Glover, authors and activists both. Such has been our small ecocity galaxy of people with their ideas and projects leading the way for many decades now. Over the past ten or fifteen years, though, so much has been changing and yet so little awareness of the character of that change is coursing with strong amperage and voltage through our global consciousness circuitry.

That's why I say it is in the unconscious mind of the planet. The thoughts are there but not well ordered and not easily "brought to mind" then applied. Scattered ecocity ideas have been manifesting in concrete and steel, wood and glass, pedestrian zones and bicycle streets, bridges between buildings like the Highline in New York City and even the future perspective of removing automobile sprawl development seen as the only sane way forward in the magnificent recent book "Mannahatta." It produces a vision for the greater New York that looks like the product of my "Ecocity Map" of Berkeley drawn in 1982. The New York image is on the back cover of "Mannahatta" and also facing a present-day satellite image of the same area on page 241. ("Mannahatta - A Natural History of New York City" by Eric W. Sanderson, illustrated by Markley Boyer, Abrams, New York City, 2009).   

Ecocity zoning map for Oakland, California by Ecocity Builders

Many good things are dawning on design and planning processes everywhere. All the above ideas and many more, like building out transit lines and transit oriented developments, called by people calling themselves New Urbanists, TODs, and supplying the reduced-demand city with energy from wind and solar technologies. All these were grist for the ecocity mill in the ecocity movement starting more than three decades ago and struggling to be heard. These design ideas backed by many drawings, layout plans and maps came fully clothed in ecocity architectural detailing, nature restoration projects like creek daylighting projects, community and rooftop gardens, vastly improving pedestrian spaces and public plazas and on and on all very consciously created, details ordered well together and promoted in the early and on-going work of the ecocity movement. And now in disconnected bits and pieces all over the world it is starting to be built and might, just might, take over from the world of cars, paving the planet and wrecking the Earth's climate and biological system. Cities are that big and so are their differences enormous, the car city compared to the ecocity.

READ ON 

First, here is some basic information you need to know that was included last month.

Getting Here

The best transportation choice is air. Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport is served by the METRO Blue Line, nearly 24 hours every day. Free service is available between Terminals 1 (Air Canada, Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Continental Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Frontier Airlines, United Airlines and US Airlines) and Terminal 2 (Air Tran Airlines, Icelandair, Southwest Airlines and Sun Country Airlines.  Travelers who need to transfer from one terminal to the other use the light rail transit service.  

Trains operate 24 hours a day between terminals. No fare is required between airport stations. There is no pedestrian access between the buildings.Take the METRO Blue Line from the Airport to Mall of America, downtown Minneapolis, and a wealth of popular neighborhoods and attractions. A Day Pass (good for 24 hours after you first use it) is $6, and isgood for unlimited rides on local buses and the Metro Blue Line.

READ ON  

Around Arcosanti when we talk about consumption and the existing culture that was designed to induce it, we point to a lean model for remedying it that we are trying to create with this project. The argument is about creating a global equity and how we can design it by shrinking our urban - and thus our ecological - footprint, as in: "Look, here in the US 5% of the world's population consumes 20% of Earth's resources. If we expect the whole world to live equitably at that same frenetic level of consumption, we will need 4 earths to support us."  It's a useful image that utilizes third grade math to make a point about the future.

There are difficulties.  First, we won't be gifted with four Earth's to support us anytime soon. And beyond that, how many Americans want to alter our high-consumption lifestyles? At Arcosanti we are actively working toward a lean alternative, and we are very much the exception.  

And so we see wars for scarce resources, read about global economic collapse, the 1% vs 99%, and of 47 million Americans on food stamps, more than a billion people worldwide living in urban squatters' settlements, more than two billion lacking access to the resources required to meet their basic needs.  

The four Earths image is about the future, which as Paolo Soleri liked to point out, never really does exist. You can plan for a future, work toward it, but it cannot be predicted, and besides, whatever happens, the future will be some other generation's present, not ours. So far that's the response globally.

This brings us to our present and the annual Earth Overshoot. For a few years now the Global Footprint Network along with the New EconomicsFoundation, has been marking Earth Overshoot Day. As of August 20, "humanity has exhausted nature's budget for the year and is now operating in overdraft," say spokespersons for these organizations. Global Footprint Network tracks humanity's demand on the planet's ecological resources (such as food provisions, raw materials and carbon dioxide absorption) - its Ecological Footprint - against nature's ability to replenish those resources and absorb waste. Global Footprint Network's data show that, in less than eight months, we have used as much nature as our planet can regenerate this entire year.

The rest of the year corresponds to "overshoot." Through this fall and winter we will keep-up an ecological deficit by continuing to deplete stocks of fish, trees and other resources, and accumulate waste such as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and oceans. As the Global Footprint Network puts it, "As our level of consumption, or resource budget, grows, the interest we are paying on this mounting ecological debt - shrinking forests, biodiversity loss, fisheries collapse, food shortages, degraded land productivity and the build-up of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere and oceans - not only burdens the environment but also undermines our economies. Climate change - a result of greenhouse gases being emitted faster than they can be absorbed by forests and oceans - is the most widespread impact of ecological overspending."

We cannot pretend to produce "qualitative easing" to replicate the resources of the Earth.  Resources - life support - provided by the Earth are neither expendable nor made of paper.  This deficit cannot be "written off" or hidden. 

So here we are. We are not looking toward some future Earth overshoot; we are in the midst of it; not looking ahead to the largest species die-off in earth's history; we are in the midst of it. By not preparing for global warming and the changes it brings to land and water and patterns of inhabitation, we are adrift and in the midst of them.

We might be able to design our way out of some of this. Paolo Soleri's message on a hand-lettered sign at his Corcoran Museum ARCOLOGY exhibition in 1970 still holds true: "If you are truly concerned about the problems of pollution, waste, energy depletion, land, water, air and biological conservation, poverty, segregation, intolerance, population containment, fear and disillusionment," the poster began, "Join us."  Please do join us by building at Arcosanti, thinking clearly about the issues in your own community, helping your neighbors alter an American Dream that no longer quite works for the world.

Arcosanti is an experimental town in the desert of Arizona, built to embody Paolo Soleri's concept of arcology - the fusion of architecture with ecology. www.arcosanti.org

 

Jeff Stein is former Dean of Architecture at the Boston Architecture College and before that a professor at Wentworth Institute of Technology. He also taught at Technicum Winterthur, Zurich, and Ecole d'Architecture Languedoc-Rousillon, Montpellier, France. Mr. Stein is currently President of the Cosanti Foundation, building Arcosanti, Arizona, and keeper of Paolo Soleri's architectural and philosophical legacy. Jeff lives and works at Arcosanti.