by Richard Register, President, Ecocity BuildersAre 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 our Tenth International Ecocity Conference 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.[caption id="attachment_3488" align="alignnone" width="408"]
From “Mannahatta – A Natural History of New York City” we see a satellite image of the greater New York metropolitan area taken in 2009. It is pretty much the same today.[/caption]
