ECOCITY INSIGHTS

A Healthy and Equitable Economy in the International Context?

A socio-cultural feature of ecocities is that they support a healthy and equitable economy. The International Ecocity Framework and Standards (IEFS) identifies that the city's economy "consistently favors economic activities that reduce harm and positively benefit the environment and human health and support a high level of local and equitable employment options" (www.ecocitystandards.org).

Whereas many cities focus primarily on economic growth as a means to achieve prosperity, research shows that equity is more strongly correlated with health and social improvement (Wilkinson and Pickett 2009). This is particularly true for developed economies where most of the population's basic needs for food and shelter are already met. Yet, even among developing economies, those that achieve a more equitable distribution of wealth and invest in social services, including education, achieve higher levels of development while simultaneously keeping their demand on nature's services low.

Countries such as Cuba and Ecuador obtain similar longevity and literacy levels as the USA, but at a fraction of energy and materials consumption (Moore and Rees 2013). Germany and Japan surpass the USA in terms of quality of life (e.g., human health and social wellbeing) while simultaneously consuming less (Moore 2013; Moore and Rees 2013; Wilkinson and Pickett 2009). Not only are these countries more efficient in their use of resources, they also have lower per capita ecological footprints. An ecological footprint refers to the amount of land and sea area required to support a specified population at their current levels of affluence and technology (Wackernagel and Rees 1996). Indeed, populations in Cuba and Ecuador live within global ecological carrying capacity as measured by their ecological footprint (WWF 2009).

The World Commission on Environment and Development acknowledges that "rapid growth combined with deteriorating income distribution may be worse than slower growth combined with redistribution in favour of the poor" (WCED 1987, 24). Unfortunately, rapid growth with deteriorating income distribution has been the dominant trend for over forty years, and today many societies are succeeding in terms of material growth and failing in terms of social health (Wilkinson and Pickett 2009).

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

Cities can grow to defy our current perceptions of plausibility. In the future, each spire in a collection of gleaming, vertical towers could harness density through a mixture of use types from working to living to growing food. Not only could each building produce its own renewable energy, but the excess could be pumped back into the city around it to help power the seamless public transit system ranging from lighted bike paths to high speed trains that allowed people to sail from one urban core to the next. Air quality would rise, water use would fall and the cultural affordability would compliment density with diversity. In a word, Oz.

But these will not be the cities of 2030. 

Fifteen years from now most of our cities will bear a remarkable resemblance to those we have now. Not all that surprising given how similar most of today's cities to their likeness at the new millennium. There will be no technological silver bullets waiting for us in fifteen years to redefine humanity's impact on the biosphere. Much of our current cities will still be there, but that doesn't mean progress is beyond our reach. Glitzy tech make smooth the way, but meaningful progress will revolve around better ways to use what we already have.

Our cities will still have buildings tracing back to their origins. For many of our cities, 80% of the buildings we will have in 2030 are already here. Our improvements in the use of energy and water will not rest on the shoulders of new tech towers, but the adaptive renovation of some of our oldest building stock. The creativity brought to existing structures will preserve the latent energy within them rather than the resources expended on their replacement. Affordability and innovation will work together to increase the utility of smaller spaces, leading to the question of why we thought we needed so much space in the first place.