by Richard Register, President, Ecocity BuildersSeems like a long time. The last time I seriously thought we might make a breakthrough for ecocities was back in the mid 1970s. Other than that it’s been gradualism, long hard slogging along, one advance at a time, mixed with occasional reversals. But back then Jerry Brown had been elected Governor of California and instituted the Office of Appropriate Technology and people I actually knew were running it, like Sim Van Der Ryn, then newly appointed State Architect and Ty Cashman, in charge of studying and promoting wind energy in OAT. Huey Johnson, founder of Trust for Public Land was appointed State Secretary of Resources. Ty even put on his wall in his Sacramento office a copy of the “Integral Neighborhood” poster you see here above that I drew in 1977 and printed up as a poster almost two by three feet in 1978.[caption id="attachment_3165" align="alignleft" width="640"]
My drawing for an Integral Neighborhood in 1977 for an actual site in West Berkeley. Bridges between buildings, rooftop uses including two gardens and a large restaurant and interior small pedestrian street on the right are evident in the drawing.[/caption] The “Integral House” had been built, or more accurately, radically remodeled, by Sim and Bill and Helga Olkowski. Next step up toward an ecocity – with integral parts based on what I call these days “the anatomy analogy” – would be the “integral neighborhood.” If the integral house had an attached solar greenhouse and solar hot water system, Clivus Multrum composting toilet and kitchen waste system, organic food garden, food fish pond and bee hive for honey, plus first rate recycling, the integral neighborhood would have in addition living, working, commercial, big gardening both private and community, an internal to the block pedestrian street system like a narrow European lane, café/restaurant, small shops, use of elevated terraces, brides between blocks of buildings and so on, as in the illustration, at the neighborhood scale. As some immediately caught on and said, “It would be like a whole village in the city.” Plus, I’d add, “But also in a new ecologically integrated design.”
