The International Ecocity Conference Series
In 1990, the City of Berkeley hosted a conference convened by Richard Register and nonprofit Urban Ecology on cities that changed hearts and minds, as well a fair number of careers. The message was simple. “Cities and towns are the largest things humans build and the way we’re building them is destroying the planet. Why not, instead, build cities in balance with nature?” Since then the International Ecocity Conference Series, now convened by Ecocity Builders, the organization Register founded in 1992, has been convened in five other countries: Adelaide, Australia, 1992; Dakar/Yoff, Senegal, 1996; Curitiba, Brazil, 2000; Shenzhen, China, 2002; Bangalore, India, 2006; and San Francisco, Calfornia, USA, 2008.
In April 2008, Ecocity Builders is brought the conference back to the Bay Area. The 7th International Ecocity Conference, (Ecocity World Summit) was held April 22-26, 2008 in San Francisco. The focus was on how cities and citizens can stop and reverse global climate change, biodiversity collapse, loss of wilderness habitat, agricultural lands and open space, and severe social and environmental injustices. Please visit the Ecocity World Summit Website for all the details on this very successful conference.
Past International Ecocity Conferences
ECOCITY 1 Berkeley, California, 1990
Host organization: Urban Ecology
Convener: Richard Register
An enthusiasm born of fresh innovation and hands-on talent permeated the First International Ecocity Conference. Several testimonials came back from the participants in following years: “Your conference changed my life.” The basic ideas of ecological city design and planning and the very particular means of building, living in and operating such cities were expressed in dozens of ways accessible at many levels. It was a great launch.
Having great local talent provided a solid foundation and leading speakers from the US and 12 foreign countries made the event representative of the some of the best of what has since become known as “green” and “sustainable” design, technology, lifestyle and even philosophy.
Among the “stars” of this event one came from as far away as the moon: astronaut Edgar Mitchell relating the profound vulnerability of his home planet Earth, small enough to disappear behind his raised thumb while standing on the surface of the moon. Architect Paolo Soleri with his ideas for three-dimensional cities as compared to sprawling two-dimensional, car dependent cities was there. Then there was Huey Johnson, State of California Secretary of Resources in Jerry Brown’s administration that was two decades ahead of its time in relation to “appropriate technology” as we called it in those days, Loni Hancock, Mayor of Berkeley, Sylvia McLaughlin who co-founded Save the San Francisco Bay Association — and proceeded to save the bay from filling, 1960 to today.
Other luminaries included environmentalist David Brower, once called the Archdruid of the movement, Ernest Callenbach, author of Ecotopia, Fritjof Capra, philosopher and author speaking on paradigm shifts, Vernon Masayesva, Hopi Tribal Chairman and American Indian city building, Paul Downton, Australian architect and co-founder of Urban Ecology Australia, Chappell Hayes, early social justice and environmental design leader, Melanie Taylor, architect speaking on “new traditional towns” which at the time were morphing into the New Urbanism, also represented by architect Peter Calthorpe, Isabel Wade, Executive Director of San Francisco Neighborhood Parks Council on urban gardens around the world, Patricia Gonzalez of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico speaking of community environmental protection and development working with the NGO Tierra Madre, Katie McCamant and Chuck Durrett of the CoHousing Company on their international work on that particular type of cooperative housing, Floyd Stein of Copenhagen and Peter Beck of Berlin on their efforts for ecological community and city planning pioneering and many more.
ECOCITY 2 Adelaide, Australia, 1992
Host organization: Urban Ecology Australia
Conveners: Paul Downton and Cherie Hoyle
When cultivating a new idea, first adopters and those who extend, refine and rededicate efforts on its behalf are crucial. In the case of the International Ecocity Conferences, Urban Ecology Australia, founded and lead by Paul Downton and Cherie Hoyle took the single International Ecocity Conference into a series of events. In so doing they advanced a growing intellectual, social and political movement for ecocities.
Ecocity 2 was characterized by the passionate desire of our hosts in Adelaide to build a real project — A.S.A.P. Their chief effort was to use the conference to organize action for securing community support for a project for downtown Adelaide, Australia. Years after, they called the project an “urban fractal” – a fraction of the whole city made up of the crucial elements of housing, jobs, commerce, learning, food and public transport all held together in a design so that all the parts of the project best complement one another’s roles, just like the whole city is supposed to do and thus a potentially powerful example. The conference produced a declaration calling for cities for people instead of cars and laying out the basic parameters of such a place.
Luminaries included California Assembly Member Tom Bates who traveled to Adelaide representing his Berkeley and North Oakland district and his wife Loni Hancock, mayor of Berkeley at the time. Rusong Wang from China, later to host Ecocity 5, spoke about ecocity theory going back thousands of years in his country and Mark Roseland of Vancouver, British Columbia, who went on to edit “Ecocity Dimensions” and co-found an ecocity organization in Canada were both there. Peter Newman of Perth, Australia spoke of his research with partner Jeff Kenworthy representing some of the world’s best scholarship on the form and design of cities in relation to environmental, economic and social vitality. Iouri Mourzine and Vitali Lepsky came from Russia with case studies of architectural preservation and expansion of natural areas in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. David Engwicht introduced his just-published book, “Towards an Eco-City,” thus launching his own career as an urban design and community process consultant.
There were lasting impressions of warm red sand, kangaroos and koalas and the determined dedication of Urban Ecology Australia to revitalize nature around and in Adelaide while rearranging the city for sustainability. It has taken all those intervening years but the organizers have now built a leading ecocity project in Adelaide called Christie Walk, a multi-use, mainly housing project around a small pedestrian street, complete with solar, wind and rooftop garden features.
ECOCITY 3 Yoff, Senegal, 1996
Host organization: City of Yoff
Conveners: Joan Bokaer and Serigne Mbaye Diene
It was an adventure deep into another culture and a rare perspective, this conference on the edge of hot desert and the thundering cold North Atlantic. Many considered it the most exciting conference they had ever attended, thanks in large measure to the generous hospitality of the village of Yoff which provided foreign conferees with lodging and a fair portion of their fish catch, drumming and dance, and to the hospitality of the city of Dakar, which provided the National Conference Center.
Besides the very moving cultural experience of living in a traditional village and studying it and the adjacent big city of Dakar, another particularly powerful aspect of the conference was its attention to both city and village problems and solutions. It was a black African, mainly Moslem, French and Walof speaking community, friendly, open and clearly communicating across innumerable distances – all reduced to face-to-face.
Presenters there came from throughout Africa: Senegal, Mali, Egypt, Guinea Bissau, Swaziland and South Africa, the Indian Ocean – Comoros – and the broadest array of countries among the conferences to that date. The other countries represented included Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Spain, Italy, Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, Chile, Brazil, Sarawak, Malaysia, Australia and the United States.
Highlights included the first presentation to our conference series of Curitiba, Brazil by Cleon Ricardo dos Santos, Director of the city’s Open University for the Environment. Curitiba was then seen as the world leader in ecocity policy and projects – and probably still is regarded to be at the forefront. Peter Newman’s research partner, Jeff Kenworthy of Perth, Australia presented up-dated information on their work. Innovations from village and very personal scale separating toilets for composting and use of diluted urine for fertilizer were discussed by architect Anders Nyquist. Whole community-scale constructed wetlands for treating sewerage and turning waste to biological richness in towns and cities was covered by Harriet Hill for Arcata, California and several other locations. The Planning Department of Bergen, Norway was represented by Bente Florelius who focused on that city’s dedication to historic preservation, enhancing density and diversity in the city center and its dedication to not building freeways. A City Council member of Barcelona, Spain, Josip Puig, spoke of his efforts to capture rainwater run off from the whole city to minimize draw down of regional rivers for the city’s needs. The history of colonial exploitation and subjection of women around the world was related to ecological degradation by Janis Birkeland of Canberra, Australia and the colonial dismemberment and exploitation of Africa itself was covered by Tukumbi Lumumba-Kasango of Nigeria and New York, while the Mayor of Dakar, Mamadou Diop and Yoff village leader Serigne Mbaye Diene described the efforts for ecological and social progress in their communities.
Among other topics covered: land use rearrangements for ecological health of cities, benefits of compact and diverse land use patterns in Europe, the richly productive “kampon” gardens of Indonesia, Native American life ways in close relationship to nature, traditional villages under assault in Africa, nature preserves in Africa, ecovillages the world over, with a focus on Denmark, original home of the Global Ecovillage Network and much more.
The book Village Wisdom / Future Cities was published as the conference report giving all speakers substantially long and thoughtful representation and the support of many photos, maps and drawings. Village Wisdom / Future Cities is still available from Ecocity Builders.
ECOCITY 4 Curitiba, Brazil, 2000
Host organization: Open University for the Environment
Conveners: Clean Ricardo dos Santos and Clovis Ultrimari
Curitiba, Brazil was already famous world wide as the city closest to an ecocity. Clovis Ultramari, Convener, and the Director of The Open University for the Environment, Cleon Ricardo dos Santos, hosted Ecocity 4. They had already been host to many other conferences and ours went smoothly and featured explorations of such features in Curitiba as we outsiders could until then only dream about. Twenty-seven blocks of pedestrian streets, dozens of parks and plazas and a transit system co-developed with five arms of high-density residential and commercial development along streets reserved for buses – all these became objects of study and envy. Waterways were restored and open landscapes created to harmlessly inflate, then subside, with storm runoff where formerly hundreds of houses were flooded. Educational programs incorporating ecological lifestyle changes along with basic skills for life in the city were provided in old recycled buses that became classrooms for a community of sparse economic means.
Thus the city of Curitiba itself became the supreme topic for Ecocity 4, though as always, international guests told tales of problems and solutions everywhere. Twenty-four-year mayor of Erlangen, Germany Dietmar Halvig told of his city’s rejection of the car-centered redevelopment patterns prevalent after the Second World War and the prosperity of a place designed mainly for the pleasure and convenience of enterprising and energy-conscious citizens. Juan Antonio Zapatel presented the case study of a Roman Aqueduct preservation project in the District of Malagueira, Portugal in which a modernized version augmented the old, both providing strategic urban shade in a hot, sunny region as well as water conveyance – and in the case of the modern version – conveyance of electric, gas and phone lines. One particularly engaging presentation was on innovative architecture in Egypt, Bolivia and Jamaica by a young student from Toronto, Canada named Nadia Lawrence. Peter Berg, leader in the theory of bioregionalism and instigator of its promulgation spoke of his work from San Francsico to Bahia de Caraquez and progress of the concept around the world. Past Ecocity Conference conveners Paul Downtown and Joan Bokaer, co-founder of Ecovillage at Ithaca, Ithaca, New York were there, Downton relating Urban Ecology Australia’s current efforts in Adelaide and Bokaer making a progress report right in the middle of fast development of her largest of American ecovillages, a place, like Curitiba, designed as much as possible around the pedestrian and pushing further down that (foot and bicycle) road. Renowned architect and planner Ruben Pesci described several of his urban layout designs for South American cities.
Other reports covered the Midrand (South Africa) Ecocity Project and similar efforts in Mexico, developments at Arcosanti, Paolo Soleri’s experimental town in Arizona and a great deal of detail concerning the design and building of Curitiba itself delivered by the public representative of the Planning and Research Institute of Curitiba (IPPUC), Maria Rosario.
The gem in the crown of Ecocity 4 there was the keynote by architect and past Mayor of Curitiba, then Governor of the State of Parana, Jaime Lerner. He was the inventor/-leader of much that is Curitiba’s contribution to its own citizens and to the world. We’d come to the destination of our pilgrimage, saw and knew it was good! But perhaps more importantly, we saw that it was something that could be done around the world. Said Lerner, “very major changes can come about in as little as two years.” Implication: “Get moving!”
ECOCITY 5 Shenzhen, China, 2002
Host organization: City of Shenznhen
Convener: Rusong Wang
Co-convener: Richard Register
Garden City Shenzhen enthusiastically hosted Ecocity 5, which was organized by Rusong Wang, director of the Center for Environmental and Ecological Sciences at the Chinese Academy of Science. Since then Rusong has become a member of the People’s Congress of China. Shenzhen had just won a national prize as a garden city for its natural restoration efforts in strips and patches of natural and agricultural areas, in mangrove forests on the coast and agricultural allotments adjacent and inside its rapidly expanding boundaries. In Shenzhen, ecocity practitioners from around the world were a little worried to see that a “greenbelt” was a strip of green hedges and colorful flowers along a new freeway rather than a large zone of land legally precluded from development surrounding the city. Cars were the passion of the prosperous and prosperity the goal of everyone. Enormous new buildings, rising everywhere almost from horizon to horizon under a forest of cranes, were separated by double-wide streets and separated further yet with golf courses dividing the city into distances well beyond the walkable or even bikable. And yet there were busses zipping about full of people looking as satisfied with things as people anywhere else. There were below-street pedestrian and bicycle passageways that were wide, high, roomy and so pleasantly shady as to be a new environment for small street-side businesses like food stands and bicycle repair stations. Buildings often had rooftop gardens alternating with hovering shade structures to cool the buildings in the hot climate of south China. The gardeners on these rooftops were saturating the lawns, flowers, bushes and trees with insecticide but at the same time, somehow, thousands of colorful dragonflies patrolled the skies with aerobatic impunity and the towering monsoon thunderheads breathed down waves of cool breezes then hot then cool, refreshing then stifling then refreshing.
Ken Yeang, architect of “bio-climatic” buildings adapting cooling and air freshening design to larger buildings was one of our key speakers in a country building cities at a withering rate. His three or four story “sky courts” carved into the sides of tall buildings for dense hot climate cities laid down the challenge for innovation for transit oriented dense cities. Richard Register gave the keynote, following the history of evolving urban form leading up to the enormous problems and potential for healthy change. He didn’t candy coat the car culture leadership of the United States in the wrong, energy squandering, climate-distorting direction. Ecocities, he said, are a large part of the solution. Leadership can come from anywhere.
Using art and historic preservation in transforming aging port facilities into a wildlife refuge, presented by Chinese landscape artist You Kongjian, preserving migratory bird sanctuaries on the Chinese coast discussed by Vice Mayor of Shenzhen Zho Qinruji, biological treatment and recycling of human waste in the slums of Egypt, India ad the Philippines by Mayling Simpson, and the ecological costs of the stampede into materialism in Southeast Asia related by Fong Wai Fong were among the many topics. From Vancouver, British Columbia to Auroville, India city designs were compared by planners Ian Smith and Lalit Bhati. English waterways restoration and economic redesign of whole industrial cities for reversing decline was a powerful case study related by Ian Douglas. Progress in Adelaide, Australia for Urban Ecology Australia’s ecological downtown project was reported by Paul Downton, latest news from Curitiba and the latest and coming public transportation news from the European Union were presented by Maria Rosario and Belgian architect and planner Pierre Laconte.
With a whole new cultural experience following on conferences in Brazil, Senegal, Australia and the US, delegates left Ecocity 5 with the sense of excitement and foreboding that a serious peek into a healthy future on a development juggernaut provides. Those of us from the US were particularly concerned that our country was setting a poor example for developing countries with hundreds of millions of people following, or even celebrating the “stampede.” It was evident that even if our country changed its course to provide a better example most would insist on their turn at the wheel and feel successful and even righteous in their driving. But with stronger theory and experience shared at Ecocity 5, the conferees returned home with a clearer mission and stronger set of tales and tools for change.
ECOCITY 6 Bangalore, India, 2006
Host organization: Project Agastaya
Convener: Rajeev Kumar
The capital of high tech, the Silicon Valley of India, busy Bangalore provided Ecocity 6 with another spotlight illuminating problems and opportunities on ecocity front lines, this time hosted by an NGO called Project Agastya and Raja Rajeev Kumar. Bangalore is famously prosperous as the Garden City of India, but equally renowned for frantic, titanic traffic congestion. It’s a city of sprawl of a very different sort, not a suburb but a whole big city scattered into inefficiency. Large playing fields for soccer, cricket, polo and other games, military marching fields, great government buildings, botanical gardens, small lake-sized reservoirs called “tanks,” temples and shrines, colleges and corporate campuses scatter the city and demand long connecting streets. Then, where they connect to one another and the zones of commercial buildings, where the streets converge there is another big void: the traffic circle so wide the buildings on the other side look small and distant. People give directions by traffic circles there. The temptation is to widen the roads but the walls around gardens, private and institutional property cinch them in. In their pristine separateness, the British with their visions country manor and colonial privilege had a lot to do with this and the high walls that turn the streets into virtual tunnels of noise and swirling exhaust with the looming trees from spacious gardens beyond the walls contrasting pleasantly and confusingly. For a movement that studies urban form as a primary armature for energy and land conservation or squandering, civic enjoyment or alienation, contacting or segregating nature from the urban experience, to experience this pattern of development was something quite unusual and informative. For Bangalore citizens to host a conference on ecocities there, was an act of courage and high commitment.
Highlights of the conference itself included Dr. Rusong Wang’s new work on land use pattern transformation concepts for Beijing and other large cities, shifting the growing car-based ring road and radial pattern to one of strong centers connected by transit, surrounded by agriculture and nature. Delegate Iris Se Young from Hong Kong described the suburban cul-de-sac pattern as the dead ends at the vertical heights of tall urban towers – a wholly novel perspective for most of the participants. Iranian architect M. R. Poujafar described development recently starting to mar the oasis-like valleys leading to the 18,000 foot snow capped peaks north of Tehran – and the potential to stop that kind of development and fineness over into a revived local agriculture with a small core of tourism for beleaguered urbanites showed fresh possibilities. A successful campaign to stop a shoe-in bill to get bicycle rickshaws off the streets of Dhaka, Bangladesh was related by Debra Efroymson, head of the campaign. She and her colleagues from the NGO Working for a Better Bangladesh saved 20,000 rickshaw driver’s jobs and prevented the total takeover of that city’s streets by the elite in cars. Progress on behalf of education for sustainable cities was reported from Canada by Jennie Moore of Vancouver and from Maine, Harry Cabot proposed some new ideas of schools in sync with local calendars. Vasiliy Filin, a Russian laboratory psychologist/design critic laid out a theory of actual neurological damage and associated mood pathology caused by the assault to the eyes of severely repetitive pattern or blankness of the visual field created by a large fraction of modernist urban buildings. A presentation from South Africa by J. J. Steyn recounted a small rural community for Afrikaners seeking the virtues of ecological life in a small intentionally insular village and one from Kenya by architect Bernard Moirongo showed how redesign of public plazas can help stem crime, with case studies from Nairobi. Waxing very real for developing world people, papers on ecological sanitation systems by Christine Werner and others described solutions developed by German and Swiss authors working in several developing countries and applicable almost anywhere on village and town scale.
Ecocity 6, like earlier conferences, was a window on the world like a magnifying glass aimed directly at problems and solutions for cities, towns and villages. Again participants came away awash in new insights, with friendship created or renewed and lessons ready for application back home all over the world.
Speakers at Past International Ecocity Conferences
Past conferences have featured a wide range of leaders and innovators, including those listed below and many others, some of them listed in the past conference summaries.
• Sharif Abdullah, President of the Commonway Institute, propoent for inclusive social, cultural and spiritual transformation
• Peter Beck, Architect, coordinator of Research project for Ecological Development in the Kruzberg neighborhood Berlin, Germany
• Janis Birkeland, of Canberra, Australia, city planner
• Joan Bokaer, co-founder of Ecovillage at Ithaca, largest ecovillage in the United States
• David Brower, prominent American environmentalist and the founder of many environmentalist organizations, including the Sierra Club Foundation, the John Muir Institute for Environmental Studies, Friends of the Earth (1969), the League of Conservation Voters, and Earth Island Institute (1982)
• Earnest Callenbach, visionary author of the environmental classic “Ecotopia”
• Peter Calthorpe, Architect and planner, Calthorpe Associates
• Fritjof Capra, Physicist, author of The Tao of Physics, The Turning Point, Uncommon Wisdom and founder of the Center for Ecoliteracy
• Serigne Mbaye Diene, youth leader of the Village of Yoff, Senegal
• Ian Douglas, Professor, School of Geography, University of Manchester, England
• Paul Downton and Cherie Hoyle, founders of Urban Ecology Australia
• Charles Durrett and Kathyrn McCamant, co-founders of the CoHousing Company
• Vasily Filin, of Russia, perception psychologist
• Herb Greene architect, artist
• Claire Greensfelder, peace and environmental activist and organizer
• Hazel Henderson, renowned futurist and economist
• Denis Hayes, Director, Earth Day 1970, former director of the US Solar Energy Research institute, Executive Director of the Bullitt Foundation
• Freeman House, co-founder of the Mattole River Restoration Foundation, author, Totem Salmon
• Huey Johnson, international green plan leader, past Director of Resources for the State of California and founder of Trust for Public Land and the Resources Renewal Institute
• Jeff Kenworthy, Perth, Australia. Mr. Kenworthy is a world expert on urban land use and transportation patterns, pedestrian areas and sustainable city design
• Pierre Laconte, Founder, Foundation for the Urban Environment, President, International Society of City and Regional Planners, Belgium
• Jaime Lerner, Governor of Parana, Brazil and former Mayor of Curitiba. Governor Lerner was the leading team member in launching Curitiba's ecological innovations from the late 1960s through today
• Karl Linn, landscape architect, educator, psychotherapist
• Jerry Mander, director of the International Forum on Globalization and the program director for Megatechnology and Globalization at the Foundation for Deep Ecology
• Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut, founder of the Institute for Noetic Sciences
• Richard Register, ecocity originator, visionary, activist author (Ecocities, Rebuilding Cities in Balance with Nature), illustrator, founder of the International Ecocity Conference Series, Urban Ecology and Ecocity Builders
• Maria do Rocio Rosario, Senior Architect and Planner, PADCO/AECOM
• Sim Van der Ryn, Architect planner, professor, author
• Cleon Ricardo dos Santos, head of the Open University for the Environment, Curitiba. Brazil
• Paolo Soleri, author, visionary, architect, and pioneer of new human spaces
• Mayor Cassio Taniguchi, Curitiba, Brazil
• Isabel Wade, Executive Director of the Neighborhood Parks Council of San Francisco
• Rusong Wang, member of the Chinese Peoples Congress and head of the environmental sciences division of the Chinese Academy of Science
• Ken Yeang, international ecological skyscraper architect, Malaysia
For more information, please contact Kirstin Miller.
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