The Ecocity Vision
The idea of building Sustainable Cities or Ecocities were one discussion item at the United Nations 1992 Earth Summit. Yet as with many pronouncements at these kinds of events they often don't lead to much practical action. This is especially the case consider the prevailing way in which modern systems operate without consideration to balancing economic growth and long term ecological and quality of life issues. So the result is that as the world becomes increasingly urbanized it is an unchecked urbanization that is pulling people further away from natural cycles and healthy lifestyles.
Cities continue to produce most of the worlds pollution, consume most of its resources and generate most of its wastes. In her paper for Worldwatch Institute, Reinventing Cities for People and the Planet, Molly OMeara writes that while cities cover only 2 percent of the Earths surface, they account for roughly 78 percent of the carbon emissions from human activities, 76 percent of industrial wood use and 60 percent of water use. So achieving a sustainable balance between the Earths resource base and its human energy will be large won or lost in the worlds cities, she writes. OMeara advocates changes in the areas of water, waste, food, energy, transportation and land use. One guiding principle she suggests is to mimic natures ways. Rather than devouring water, food, energy and processed goods, and then belching out the remains as pollutants, writes OMeara, the city could align its consumption with realistic needs, produce more of its own food and energy, and put much more of its waste to use. Powerful economic and political forces prevent such urban innovations from spreading around the world more quickly. A key problem, argues O'Meara, is that national governments curtail the fiscal autonomy of cities. With greater control over their own revenue sources, cities could place higher fees on water, trash collection, and road use; and levy taxes on fossil fuels in order to bring needed funds to city bank accounts and provide incentives for green technologies and jobs.
Richard Register some time ago came up with the idea of a Ecocity and has written several books and held several world class conferences around the world. He also have been influenced by Paolo Soleri and considers him one of his greatest influences. The idea of the ecocity was to consider how the development of the city would change as sustainability took hold in the society. So the development and creation of urban spaces would have to be reconsidered. So Ecocity knowledge development is about how that process develops into fully featured ecocities. One of the challenges is that we are not doing well with consideration to even smaller scale ecovillage models. So many believe that before we can think about ecocities we need to create viable ecovillage models that can be replicated globally and expand within urban areas to scale out the model to a larger scale.
US Competitiveness is about more than Economic Productivity
While the US pioneered many environmental reforms during the countercultural upheaval of the 60s, there was a backlash in the US that led to a slowing of reform measures to make the US economic and society truly environmentally responsible. The result has been that Europe has stolen the mantle of global environmental leadership from the United States. Now the US is far behind Europe, in many important environment measures. Timothy Beatley note for example that the average U.S. citizen produces twice as much carbon dioxide as a European, for example (1).
Ecological design states that ecological principles and understandings must be front and center within the norms and values of the city. To become ecocities, cities will have to confront their environmental unsustainability, says Keith Laughlin, former director of the White House Task Force on Livable Communities. In many urban areas, there is a higher incidence of asthma, and clearly traffic and dirty air from all kinds of pollution are contributors, says Laughlin. One major issue that pushes the USA is that it is transportation and development policies over the years has encouraged unnecessarily high levels of consumption and waste because it was believed that more growth is an unqualified good. The dominant growth pattern for U.S. cities has been that of unsustainable suburban sprawl which has many side effects and has led to higher eco-impacts than would have been the case had their been policies that encouraged more compact building patterns..
In Seattle, traffic and congestion rate among the nations worst. Transit options and better transit connections between city and suburb and between city neighborhoods are whats needed, says Peter Voorhees, a member of Seattles Action Better City group. Sprawl has eaten up precious countryside, generated record traffic congestion, decimated a large part of the urban tree canopy and habitat, and endangered the salmon and other species. While its urban regions rose 35 percent during the last 15 years, the amount of land that was developed and urbanized grew #an astonishing 87 percent in the same period, according to Northwest Environment Watch. A similar sprawl pattern is evident in virtually every city, from Chicago to Houston to San Francisco.
While sprawl is nothing new, the severity of the problem has forced a rethinking of old assumptions. Cities, once regarded as sources of the worst pollution, are being seen as far more inherently sustainable in many ways. Compactly built, they allow for greater building energy efficiency and more creative use of space, such as greater diversity among housing types and income levels. Older cities were designed with shops, parks and offices within walking distance, rather than with shopping and residential zones segregated from each other # once thought to be healthier. Designed to a human scale, theyre walkable. And, as many city dwellers are discovering, they are fallow ground for food gardens that can be nourished with urban organic waste and waste water and used to feed local communities. Urban parks and trees, are essential not only for environmental health and psychological health (as a restorative tonic), but practical for the natural #services they provide. City creeks, once buried in underground pipes, are being brought above ground (through #daylighting) and restored to a natural state to better filter pollutants and prevent against flooding (Green City, USA Francesca Lyman MSNBC march 19 2000).
Currents Models for Ecocity Development:
Curtiba Brazil The eco-community movement with its focus on commercializing emerging appropriate technologies such as bio-remediation, composting, recycling, renewable energies, organic/health foods and healing/therapy is the practical agent of social, economic political change within the society. Such techniques are being tried in cities throughout the world, from Curitiba, Brazil, where the citys bus system revolutionized traffic and cut pollution, to Chattanooga, Tenn., home of electric buses and a proposed #zero-waste industrial park. Curitiba, Brazil has coordinated transportation and land use to support efficient public buses. Although the city has one car for every three people, two thirds of all trips in the city are made by bus. Curitiba also has devised a unique way to promote sanitation while boosting nutrition. Since 1991, the city has taken the money it would otherwise pay waste collectors to fetch garbage from slums, and has spent it on food from local farms. For every bag of waste brought to a waste collection site, a low-income family gets a bag of locally grown vegetables and fruits.
Copenhagen, Denmark has taken a lead in turning waste into resource. "Gray water" from kitchens and compost from household waste nourish food-producing gardens, while hot water left over from power generation heats nearly 70 percent of the city's buildings. Also a leader in low-energy transport, Copenhagen maintains a fleet of bikes for public use financed through advertising on the wheel surfaces and bicycle frames.
Chattanooga, Tennessee, a leader in recycling and electric buses, has transformed itself from the most polluted city in the United States to one of the most livable in less than three decades. A proposed zero-waste park, which would include factories, retail stores, and residences, would expand the city's metamorphosis. Underground tunnels would link some 30 buildings, 10 of which exist already, to share heating, cooling, wastes, and industrial water supplies.
Boston, Massachusetts has reduced total water demand by 24 percent since 1987 through a conservation strategy that has included higher prices. Today, the city has the water it needs for a third to half the cost of diverting two large rivers. Similarly, when Bogor, Indonesia installed water meters and raised fees in 1988, households began to conserve, allowing the utility to connect more families to the system without increasing the amount of water used.
Integrated Models for Sustainable Urban Development
Built on abandoned coal fields in Sodingen, Germany, the Mont-Cenis Academy complex consists of a village like cluster of buildings enclosed by a 123,200-square-foot clear-glass greenhouse. Designed by French architects Jourda & Perraudin and German architects Hegger Hegger Schleiff, the complex includes a community center, government offices, a civil-service training center, a library and a hotel. The glass envelope creates a mild microclimate more in line with the south of France than northern Germany, resulting in lower construction costs for the buildings within the shell and less energy use. In winter, concrete and gravel floors serve as a heat sink, while heat-recovery units pull warm exhaust air from the conditioned spaces. In summer, louvered openings in the glass structure's lower quadrants bring in cool air, while warm air is expelled through roof vents. There is no air conditioning. Rainwater collected from the roof is used to clean the roof, flush toilets and water lawns. Photovoltaic panels produce two and a half times the energy that the complex needs, about 750,000 KW/year, representing the largest use of PVs in Germany. Two cogeneration plant modules use methane gas released from former mining shafts on site to create additional electricity and heat. Surplus electricity is fed back to the utility grid. ( Claire Downey and Wendy Talarico GREENHOUSE ENVELOPE TRANSFORMS FORMER INDUSTRIAL SITE Architectural Record, Dec 99, p 199, http://www.archrecord.com)
Innovative developers are using existing cultural and social events to create more ecological sustainable developments. The Australian Olympic Coordination Authority's Jo Moss says the OCA is using "the Olympic games to help promote the growing philosophy that we must look after our environment better than we have in the past." Homebush Bay was ground zero for the Sydney 2000 Olympics, an 1,900-acre industrial area that was converted a green Olympics showplace. Both the 15,000-person Olympic Village and the 20,000-seat Sydney SuperDome use solar power. The SuperDome's grid-tied 70-kilowatt system is billed as Australia's largest rooftop system. At Stadium Australia, the 100,000-seat Olympic stadium, four 750,000-liter holding tanks collect water for irrigating the field from the stadium roof. The project also reflects the notion that urban areas should increasingly be integrated with natural areas. 1,100 of 1900 acres of the project were remediated in a process that involved the removal of 9 million cubic meters of waste as industrial and residental waste, to create a 1,100-acre park for environmental education, bird watching, and nature research ( Bradley C. Grogan "HOMEBUSH BAY: SYDNEY 2000'S GREEN SHOWPLACE" Urban Land May 99, p 29 http://www.oca.nsw.gov.au/Homebushbay.htm)
Freiburg Germany Promotes Car Free Living
Freiburg received the Cities of Vision Award at the International Making Cities Livable Conference in 1993, and has been been a model for environmentally friendly living for the past 20 years. The number of cars on the streets has went down while the number of bikes has gone up. A former NATO base that was abandoned and turned over to the city after the end of the Cold War, Vauban is a ten minute drive 10-minute bus ride from the city center offers an alternative to young families and others who want to enjoy life in an urban community. A major goal of the project was to reduce the number of cars to create more space for families (Andy Eckardt "Germanys city of the future" 3/28/00 MSNBC).
"We hope that at least 50 percent of the Vauban inhabitants will not have a car at all in the future," said Mayor Matthias Schmelas. While residents can drive up and unload goods at their doors, they are not permitted to park their cars in front of the buildings. Parking spaces do exist at which is not more than 1,300 feet away from each home, but they must be purchased and cost a hefty $17,500. It is no surprise that given such an incentive not to own a car, that forty-two percent of the people who have moved into Vauban so far have already sold their cars and now ride bicycles, use public transportation or carpool with neighbors. There are No real estate agents, no exorbitant prices, said Roland Veith, the Vauban project manager. Infrastructure planning and property sales remain entirely in the hands of the city council, not developers and speculators.
Ecocities in the Making
The eco-cities movement is a larger scale urban approach to sustainable development, focusing on commercializing emerging appropriate technologies such as bio-remediation, composting, recycling, renewable energies, organic/health foods and healing/therapy seeing these as the practical agent of social, economic political change within the society. Such techniques are being tried in cities throughout the world.
Kirsten Miller of Ecocity Builders says many scientists and environmentalists –those who should be examining the built infrastructure from a whole systems ecological perspective – have become hypnotized and fascinated with technology and their own theories of doom. In San Francisco, she and the President of Ecocity Builders, Richard Register attended a City Arts & Lectures program for the California Academy of Sciences featuring primatologist Russell Mittermeier and science writer David Quammen. While able to speak about the decline of species and the need to find ways to “conserve what’s left, she says both went silent when asked how the built environment impacts the biosphere and what we could do to reverse the damage”. Still others gravitate towards the sustainable development and technologies approach missing the need to create healing inspirational spaces for human beings addressing the disconnect we have with each other and nature.
What’s needed is a multi-dimensional to create healing architectures that use terracing and other approaches constructing natural human environments that include rooftop gardens, water forms and landscapes purify the air and the water as they grow and provide an aesthetically pleasing space. What is needed to make medium to high density development so that people's need for private space is balanced with an inspiring public commons that includes mass transit, bike paths, neighborhood businesses, and beltway parks. Key to all this is seeing the built environment as an integral part of the living matrix of systems that sustain life on earth.
The eco-cities movement with its focus on commercializing emerging appropriate technologies such as bio-remediation, composting, recycling, renewable energies, organic/health foods and healing/therapy is the practical agent of social, economic political change within the society. Such techniques are being tried in cities throughout the world:
Curtiba, Brazil - Curtiba has developed innovative process to coordinate transportation and land use to support efficient public buses. Although the city has one car for every three people, two thirds of all trips in the city are made by bus. Curitiba also has devised a unique way to promote sanitation while boosting nutrition. Since 1991, the city has taken the money it would otherwise pay waste collectors to fetch garbage from slums, and has spent it on food from local farms. For every bag of waste brought to a waste collection site, a low-income family gets a bag of locally grown vegetables and fruits. Starting around 1972, then Mayor and now Governor Jaime Lerner coordinated the development of Curitiba’s bus system on "dedicated streets" –that is, streets dedicated for buses only – with higher density housing and centers of community services and activities built along those streets. There are also twenty-seven blocks of pedestrian streets, dozens of beautiful squares and plazas, enormous parkland and semi-natural open spaces graced by rivers and streams. He says every proposal must have behind an optimistic view that changing is possible. As soon as you realize the importance of the change, it has been always, in this city, an educational process and towards making the process understandable to common people instead of as is often the case overwhelming them with sophisticated theories and complicated jargon. He says that “With lots of determination, we can begin to reverse the tragedy and start planning for a future that respects our humanity and the environment. But until we actually demonstrate new ways of creating a human habitat free of enslavement to an oil-based infrastructure, we won’t plan for a better world; we’ll only be playing out the tragedy and projecting bad tendencies.”
Copenhagen, Denmark – Copenhagen has taken a lead in turning waste into resource. "Gray water" from kitchens and compost from household waste nourish food-producing gardens, while hot water left over from power generation heats nearly 70 percent of the city's buildings. Also a leader in low-energy transport, Copenhagen maintains a fleet of bikes for public use that is financed through advertising on the wheel surfaces and bicycle frames.
Chattanooga, Tennessee – Chattanooga, a leader in recycling and electric buses, has transformed itself from the most polluted city in the United States to one of the most livable in less than three decades. A proposed zero-waste park in slated to include factories, retail stores, and residences, would expand the city's metamorphosis. Underground tunnels would link some 30 buildings, 10 of which exist already, to share heating, cooling, wastes, and industrial water supplies.
Sydney, Australia and the Homebush Bay Sustainable Development Project for 2000 Olympics in Australia - Innovative developers are using existing cultural and social events to create more ecological sustainable developments. The Australian Olympic Coordination Authority's Jo Moss says the OCA is using "the Olympic games to help promote the growing philosophy that we must look after our environment better than we have in the past." Homebush Bay was ground zero for the Sydney 2000 Olympics, and not was an 1,900-acre industrial area that was converted to a Olympics showplace but the infrastructure and site planning incorporated ecological design into the construction and design process. While one of the stadiums are powered by one of the country’s largest rooftop grid-tied solar systems, another features four 750,000-liter holding tanks collect water for irrigating the field from the stadium roof. The project also promotes the concept that urban areas should increasingly be integrated with natural areas: 1,100 of 1900 acres of the project were remediated in a process that involved the removal millions of cubic meters of waste as industrial and residental waste, creating a 1,100-acre park (Bradley C. Grogan "Homebush Bay: Sydney 2000's Green Showplace" Urban Land May 99, p 29
Freiburg - Germany’s Eco-Capital - Frieburg received the Cities of Vision Award at the International Making Cities Livable Conference in 1993; a model for environmentally friendly living for the past 20 years. The number of cars on the streets has actually went down while the number of bikes has gone up. One example of this city’s innovative urban planning approach is the redevelopment of former NATO base abandoned and turned over to the city after the end of the Cold War. A 10-minute bus ride from the city center, Vauban offers an alternative to young families and others who want to enjoy life in an urban community. A major goal of the project was to reduce the number of cars to create more space for families (Andy Eckardt "Germany’s city of the future" 3/28/00 MSNBC). Mayor Matthias Schmelas hopes that in the future that half the population of Vauban will not use cars. One strategy to discourage car use involves designing the development so that people to drive up and unload goods at their homes but then have to park their cars a distance from their homes. Parking spaces are about 1,300 feet away from each home, and they must be purchased at $17,500 a stall. Given such an incentive not to own a car, forty-two percent of the people who have moved into Vauban so far have already sold their cars and now ride bicycles, use public transportation or carpool with neighbors. Not only is asphalt construction reduced but existing parking slots are turned into performing assets. In addition the land saving translates into added value for the developer/community, which can be used to increase greenspace or add residential, commercial, entertainment or office facilities to the urban mix. Another important aspect of the project is that overhead is limited as infrastructure planning and property sales remain entirely in the hands of the city council, not developers and speculators.
Mont-Cenis Academy in Herne, Germany - Mont-Cenis Academy is an architecturally unique complex constructed underneath a gigantic glass cover with a length of 180 m, a width of 72 m and a height of 16 m is built on abandoned coal fields in Sodingen, Germany. Enclosed within the glass greenhouse like envelope is of a village like cluster of buildings; a community center, government offices, a civil-service training center, a library and a hotel. This 123,200-square-foot clear-glass greenhouse structure creates a mild microclimate more in line with the south of France than northern Germany, reducing construction costs and energy use while turning a polluted former industrial mining site into a new center for working, living and learning[i] Two envelop structure results in lower construction costs for the buildings within the shell and less energy use. In winter, concrete and gravel floors serve as a heat sink, while heat-recovery units pull warm exhaust air from the conditioned spaces. In summer, louvered openings in the glass structure's lower quadrants bring in cool air, while warm air is expelled through roof vents. There is no air conditioning. Heat-recovery units pull warm exhaust air from the conditioned spaces. Rainwater collected from the roof is used to clean the roof, flush toilets and water
lawns. Onsite distribute power energy systems produce two and a half times the energy that the complex needs. Power is all renewable. 750,000 KW/year comes from solar—the largest use of PVs in Germany. Back this system up are two cogeneration plant modules use methane gas released from former mining shafts on site to create additional electricity and heat
Bogota’s Car-Mitigation Campaign - ENRIQUE PEÑALOSA says when he was elected mayor of Bogotá and went to city hall, he was handed a transportation study that said the most important thing the city could do was to build an elevated highway at a cost of $600 million. Instead a comprehensive plan was put in place. Penalosa says “We're telling people, You are important-not because you're rich or because you have a Ph.D., but because you are human. If people are treated as special, as sacred even, they behave that way. This creates a different kind of society (ENRIQUE PEÑALOSA MAKING A HAPPY CITY YES MAGAZINE).” Every Sunday 120 kilometers of roads are closed to motor vehicles for seven hours and a million and a half people of all ages and incomes come out to ride bicycles, jog, and simply gather with others in community. People are getting out of their cars and interacting with people more. Results have included a reduction in crime; a change in attitude toward the city and other people; less air pollution; less time sitting in traffic; and more time for people to be productive and enjoy themselves. Penalosa says that given limited resources of Bogota as a Third World city, they have to invent other ways to measure success, and that could be in terms of happiness. Investing in attractive public spaces that validate the experiences and realities of pedestrians from all walks of life is an important way to lead us to a society that is not only more equal but also much happier. A successful city is not defined by its per capita GDP so much as “how much time children spend with their grandparents, or the ways in which we are able to enjoy our friendships, or how many times people smile during the week,” concludes Mayor Panalosa.
[i] Architectural Record, Dec 99, p 199, by Claire Downey and Wendy Talarico)
References:
Green Urbanism: Learning from European Cities (Island Press, 2000).