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Image: Richard Register
Envisioning Sustainable Cities
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The
Solution to Climate Change, Species Extinctions and the End of Cheap
Energy? Redesign Cities.
Richard Register and
Kirstin Miller
There's an idea
out there that only recently is getting through to people: Cities can save
the earth.
How can that be, when
in fact their impact on the planet, and on our poor lives as we're stuck
in traffic jams and worrying about climate change and "peak oil," is known
to be gigantic? In fact cities are gigantic, being the largest
creations of our species. So why haven't people been drawing the
connections between cities and the largest problems we face? The answer
is probably that people have avoided confronting the difficult solutions
until the showdown is unavoidable. But rather than delving into the
psychology of avoidance let's look instead directly, unflinchingly, at the
solutions.
Times are crying out
for a city that restores, not destroys, the biosphere. A significant step
in the right direction was recently taken when the
Urban Land Institute (ULI) announced that added efficiency of cars
does not solve the problem. In their new book
Growing Cooler: The Evidence on Urban Development and Climate, ULI
warns that "if sprawling development continues to fuel growth in driving,
the projected 59 percent increase in the total miles driven between 2005
and 2030 will overwhelm expected gains from vehicle efficiency and
low-carbon fuels. Even with projected efficiency improvements, vehicle
emissions of carbon dioxide would be 41 percent above today's levels,
rather than well below 1990 levels, as required for climate stabilization
by 2050."
That's a start, but the
more complete answer is to simply redesign and rebuild the city for
people, not cars. It can be done. What we need is a comprehensible
strategy for economic and physical transformation of cities, which we in
Ecocity Builders believe can be accomplished by a fourfold process,
starting with remapping and rezoning, then prioritizing technologies,
businesses and jobs that fit the model; writing legislation, policies,
plans and incentives that support the transition. Throughout the whole
process, it will be necessary to educate and recruit the people who will
carry it out. Those people are you and I. It all begins with an
understanding of the structure of a healthy city.
Built communities, from
the village scale to the large city, have an anatomy. This anatomy
embodies basic land uses and infrastructures. It consists of the buildings
and transportation networks in appropriate arrangement, along with natural
features like urban streams, open spaces, hills, parks, gardens, and
greenways.
We can rebuild cities
to take up one-fifth the land and use one-tenth the energy of today's
American cities, while improving quality of life for everyone at the same
time. This is not only possible but also takes no new savior technologies,
high tech laboratories or rocket science. It's all about building the city
on the measure of the human being. That is what we call the "ecocity."
Cars are, on average,
30 times as heavy as the human body. They hurtle about at 10 times the
speed. Roughly speaking, they require design parameters for cities that
are 300 times as disruptive of land and resources as do people. Why fill
cities with asphalt and concrete parking lots and towering parking
structures, freeway interchanges and other myriad support systems for the
steel, rubber, glass and gas task masters? Why addict ourselves to cheap
energy when it's on its way out and when healthy solar and wind energy
come streaming in dependably with a little more investment? If you need
one-tenth as much energy, expensive becomes cheap.
The healthy built human
habitat is the "walking city," of which some parts of existing cities are
already good examples. Whether small scale or large, it would cover a
small fraction of the land consumed by today's sprawling cities and towns.
The principle here is "access by proximity." We need to design communities
so that instead of having to drive "over there," you can get what you need
or want "just around the corner."
But what about all the
low density, energy-squandering and land-hogging suburbs we've already
built? Using land use tools like transfers of development credits, we can
roll back sprawl development systematically with willing seller deals. We
can bring natural and agricultural environments back into our lives via
creek and shoreline restoration and replication and expansion of community
and commercial gardens and farms, right next to beautiful new
architecture.
Imagine compact, highly
"mixed-use" city, district and neighborhood centers with rooftop gardens,
cafes and shops. These are linked by bridges and a system of pedestrian
streets and ground-level mid-block passageways - from cozy alleys to
splendid gallerias - hallways with dramatic beams of light falling from
skylights to strips of tree fern and moss-lined walkways. Why not have
cascading solar greenhouses attached to taller buildings providing all the
heat and fresh air needed? Why not glass elevators for fun as well as the
cheapest motorized means of getting from where you are to where you want
to be in a diverse and dense city or town center? Why drive when you
could walk, take transit and bike anywhere, including to nearby rural
environments recovered from sprawl?
To build such cities,
the nonprofit Ecocity Builders, founded in 1992, has been exploring what
an ecologically healthy city might look like, with the objective of
helping it come about. It is perhaps more a journey of discovery than
invention, though it has elements of both. There is a basic logic to it:
that two dimensions can't work efficiently in complex systems. Like living
organisms, cities have to be basically three-dimensional, not flat and
scattered. Diversity and density have to be the bywords, or, in their own
terminology, "divensity," the combination of the two. The operant
principle: access by proximity. The shortest distance between two points
is designing them close together.
Ecocity Builders has
been implementing hands-on projects, building solar greenhouses, restoring
creeks, remodeling "slow streets" to give the advantage to pedestrians and
bicyclists, and planting urban orchards. The organization, a non-profit
educational and research corporation, advises developers, prevailing upon
them to build taller buildings with terracing and rooftop gardens.
Members of its staff have taught classes, written books, articles,
newsletter, speeches and planning and research papers. They have traveled
extensively internationally and nationally speaking at small seminars and
large conferences, photographing best examples of "ecocity features" and
drawing pictures of those not yet discovered. Ecocity Builders has advised
cities, campuses and businesses.
They are also the keepers of the International Ecocity Conferences which
have been held in
Berkeley,
California;
Adelaide, Australia; Dakar, Senegal; Curitiba, Brazil; Shenzhen, China;
and Banglore, India. The Seventh International Ecocity Conference will be
held in San Francisco, April 22-26 next spring: Ecocity World Summit.
For information, visit:
http://www.ecocityworldsummit.org).
The planet is crying out for a helpful, not harmful city. Why not join in
to help?
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