Maybe you’re itching to take a wide, full swing to drive the shiny steel of a nice heavy pick deep under the asphalt. You too can leverage up a satisfying big slab of that black, gooey hard stuff. I love destroying asphalt and maybe you’d like to join the party. Here’s a “how to.”

Alas it all begins with land ownership. It all ends with redesigning land uses and rebuilding most of what we’ve built to date, so destructive are today’s cities and towns. It’s useful to divide possible projects into three categories: small, medium and truly satisfying. The last one means BIG-which I haven’t seen yet.

Just to give you a sense of proportion: since 1992 I’ve probably depaved one acre with my various friends. Meantime I guess between 100 and 200 acres of my town, Berkeley, Calif., have been paved for parking lots and freeway expansions, more cars and deeper gasoline addiction. This in a city whose master plan has said, since 1972, that it is already “built out.” Well, always more room for more asphalt-and a few crazies like me who haven’t learned to give up. Now on with the lesson.

Small Depaving Projects
You have to own some existing pavement, or find a sympathizer who does. Obviously there are millions of acres of it around, but surprisingly little is available for destruction. Or at least the owners don’t often think it is.

They say the streets of heaven are paved with gold. Hell, with the sanctity people give to the streets of suburbia they might as well be paved with gold.

Some pavement, like the ubiquitous driveway, functions in a way that owners believe is essential to their life sustenance, security, image or sexual virility. But some can be convinced that two thin strips of concrete could work as well for off-street parking, or that a “turf block” that allows water to soak around the driveway car-supporting surface is okay. Often in residential areas the surface between the sidewalk and curb is paved, and usually there is no law requiring it to be. Here then are two places to begin. I have managed to talk six or seven owners into depaving in these small spaces and have depaved the sidewalk-to-curb space-the “planting strip”-of the house I once owned. In the case of the driveway, unless the owner is in a tightly controlled housing development or condominium association, the owner can just do it. In the case of the planter strip, in my town you should first call up USA-Underground Services Alert-or find a similar service in your area, to ascertain where the buried pipes and wires are located. The service is free here. They come out and spray colorful lines on your concrete telling you where gas, water and electricity lie beneath the surface. Do not dig there!

It used to be that you could then cut the concrete with a big, circular, rented mechanical saw and start to dig. But no, now you’re supposed to go down to City Hall in Berkeley and get a permit for $50 and pay more for every foot you cut with a masonry saw.

This additional disincentive to depaving, which is added to the cost of renting a masonry saw, that may or may not be a law in your town, is imbecilic in a city like mine that claims to be environmentalist. I’d recommend ignoring it.

I’ve never been stopped and if I had been it would have been a good educational fight. If you are up to it, and willing to take the risk, it could be fun. Otherwise you can pay the money and waste the time so the bureaucrats can feel important.

Speaking of which, depaving isn’t cheap. If you want a smooth edge, you can’t just sledge hammer out the unwanted stuff up to a public street or sidewalk. Using a chisel to refine such an edge doesn’t help much, unless you come up against an expansion joint or a crack that is actually an edge created originally by pouring a separate slab of concrete. Ragged edges are bad press and alienate people we need to communicate with about depaving. So rent a concrete saw from one of the thousands of construction-rental-equipment places around the world. The machine rental is modest-usually about $30 a day-but the circular blade encrusted with industrial diamonds gets worn down a few microns that they measure. A depaving project with about 80 feet of concrete cutting (a typical planter strip removal) costs about an additional $l20. If removing asphalt, a softer material than concrete, the blade wears out at about half that rate. Hence half that cost, plus of course the $30 per day and the idiot city permit fee, if you pay it.

Then, what to do with the old pavement? It adds up faster than you think. Three to four inches of concrete slab, in our town, figuring the above typical planter strip depaving, adds up to about $35 in dump fees.

An alternative is to turn the material, if concrete, into benches in your garden, by cutting the slabs into sections about eighteen inches by two to three feet.

Asphalt, by contrast, will fall apart over the ensuing months. Give up on it, just like you should give up on gasoline, as soon as possible.

This extra cutting so that you can use the concrete may actually be more expensive than taking it to a dump or transfer station, because of the added wear on the expensive diamond blade. Diamonds to cut those streets of gold! Are we living in suburban heaven or what? Old pavement taken to the transfer station is usually “recycled” as clean fill in some kind of larger construction site or highway building project. It’s hard to be pure and do something good at the same time in this bizarrely mis-built world.

Once the lines are cut in the pavement, the fun begins! Sledge hammers, picks, crow bars, digging bars and shovels are the tools of choice. First, with your sledge hammer, smash down on a portion of the material to be removed fairly close to one of the cut lines or an edge of the slab as defined by its original construction.

After the material is pulverized, with cracks leading out from the center of the slab, dig out the crushed material with pick and shovel. Now you have a point to enter the surface with a crowbar. Put the tip of the bar under the slab you want to remove, while using the edge of the saw cut that you want to save (or a wooden block) as a fulcrum. Then press down hard on the outward-bound end of the crow bar.

The longer the crow bar or digging bar, the better. And the greater the distance from the fulcrum to your hands relative to the distance from the fulcrum to the concrete or asphalt, the more upward force you are able to exert on the material you want to remove, and the easier it pops up and away. Danger! Do not immediately throw all your weight into pressing down on the crow bar. Get used to it a little at a time. It may suddenly snap upward at the business end and it can crash down catching your fingers between the old pavement surface and the metal of the crow bar. You can actually break fingers this way.

By cracking with sledge hammers and prying with bars and picks you can now happily work across the area to be removed, allowing the earth to again breathe free.

Next, move the pavement out of there-by hand, wheelbarrow, car, pick-up truck or big truck. If you’re making garden furniture of it, carry it or use a wheelbarrow. Otherwise it’s gotta be just a little fossil fuels and driving to balance our society’s paving karma.

Next, prepare the soil. The surface under pavement is generally highly compacted and needs a lot of digging with pick and shovel. Don’t try a rototiller unless you know something I don’t know-like explosives. Someone brought a rototiller to a depaving project once, and he just drove it around on its blades, bouncing off the compacted substrate like a bronco. The rental place would’ve killed him if they’d known.

Then you need to condition the soil, adding humus, perhaps soil amendments and fertilizer-I’d recommend organic of course-appropriate to whatever you want to plant. Dig it all in, then water. Next it’s time to plant. Find typical instructions copiously available elsewhere. I’m partial to food plants, especially fruit trees, which are not on my city’s list of acceptable street trees. I plant them anyway in planter strips, just spoiling for a chance to talk about ecology and growing food in the public realm. Once again, you decide what level of risk you want to take.

Medium-Sized Depaving Projects
The medium-sized project-such as actually removing a parking lot, part of one or part of a street, or getting rid of a driveway entirely-requires considerably more preparation and work. First you have to find a likely place, where use of such a surface is low, or where pressure for non-automotive uses is great.

In Berkeley, University Avenue (UA) Homes had an under-utilized parking lot. Only three of its 75 residents had cars and one didn’t even run.

But that was a rare low-use situation. The city has a requirement to provide off-street parking for every unit of housing in most parts of town so the nonprofit owners of UA Homes had real difficulty persuading City Hall to allow us to depave about six places for a garden. The regulations said every square inch of the entire lot besides the building had to be paved for parking-not an inch for a garden, chair or barbecue. Because of the extreme situation, the city relented and we depaved those few parking places.

Ultimately, we need to change those city zoning ordinances. Meantime we crawl around under the legal rocks and pop up once in a while to get away with anything to make the place healthier. Some people might be entertained by this sort of thing, and its often the only way to get any depaving done. But I think it’s the very definition of pathetic.

The medium-sized depaving project itself requires a lot of muscle power and more gasoline than I’d like to admit. Thus more importance in the idea of a paving moratorium. We’ve built an edifice that’s destructive to remove, but it’s so destructive in the first place that we need to remove it. Again, rectitude and purity escape us.

Call up all your friends. Have them bring sledge hammers, picks, digging bars, shovels, lunch-don’t forget the gloves. And line up the trucks. It’s a bit horrifying how many truck loads come out of a modest number of parking places.

At UA Homes, for depaving five or six parking places we took about four pick-up loads and two (donated) dump-truck loads (holding as much as four pick-up loads each) to take the material to the closest land fill. That’s twelve pick-up loads. It was so many loads partially because compacted gravel was used under the asphalt, and we dug out about two inches of asphalt-contaminated soil-it smelled oily. With medium-sized projects, and even small ones, organizing big group efforts makes the job much easier and, by passing the hat, makes a high total price low per person. If you do pay your city fees, by the way, and have some time to converse with them over the months, you can sometimes get permission to dump for free.

As for soil contamination, I don’t know much about it. Maybe an expert should be brought in if you are suspicious. At UA Homes, the soil didn’t seem quite clean of oils but we were at the end of our rope-time, energy and money wise-while piles of manure and yummy soil amendments, seeds, plants and volunteers were waiting around for the gardening part of the project. So we plunged on into that. I suspect that a small residual of toxics is slowly disintegrating chemically while doing minor damage to some of the plants. Almost all of them look great, however. and I and others have eaten a lot from the garden and seem healthy enough. Here too, with limited resources, results are very good but perfection eludes us.

Depaving for the Ambitious
We’ve had one depaving project somewhere between medium and big in Berkeley recently. About 80 feet of 9th Street at the Berkeley-Albany border and a section of a parking lot-enough space for about ten cars-was removed.

Urban Creeks Council secured permission to restore one block of Codornices Creek from the land owners, a private company on the south side of the land in question, and from the University of California on the north. California State Department of Water Resources gave $25,000 to hire a landscape architect and bulldozer operator. (You might smell a rat; it takes a pretty well established and respected institution like Urban Creeks Council to line up such a project. Maybe you have such an environmental organization in your town…?)

The landscape architect designed a new small canyon for the creek to replace a stretch where it was underground at the time in a concrete pipe-the creek had been buried for about fifty years-and the heavy equipment operator, my friend Pete VanValkenburgh, cut a rough trench for the new canyon. Over the next two years on Saturdays, through my organization Ecocity Builders, over 320 volunteers took part in digging and wheeling dirt about so that the trench shaped up into a canyon that looks quite natural. To do that, the telephone was the most important tool, and letting prospective volunteers know by putting information into our newsletter.

Crews were seldom larger than a dozen, but it went on weekend after weekend. The old curbs and sidewalks were laid into the steeper slopes of the canyon and covered by grasses and wildflowers. Now they help prevent erosion when the creek rises in the rainy season. We are planting native trees and bushes, and a small orchard of 20 fruit trees is growing away on one of the new hills we created. All sorts of birds and insects are coming now, small fish and crawdads and frogs. For better or worse, egrets and herons are eating them now. The project will be completed soon.

The Big Picture
So now you know a little about hands-on depaving. But here’s the big one: getting rid of suburbia and replacing it with pedestrian towns and villages and cities of much more modest “footprint” than today’s sprawling behemoths.

As we have noticed in depaving projects to date, land ownership and consensus about land use, usually enshrined in laws and codes, are crucial. So is some notion of what we are doing and why it is important.

For “why,” we have all the arguments seen quarterly in this magazine. But for “what” we must do, we need a little more clarity.

In reorganizing the city, from its land use foundations on up, we have the solution for turning asphalt and concrete into gardens, creeks, playgrounds, nature corridors, restored forests, etc. In creating the more compact neighborhood, town and city centers, and real ecovillages, we also create the densities of human population to reestablish vital civic community and economy, practical and economical transit, the potential for a bicycle revolution, energy conservation that is otherwise inconceivable and many other things. Let’s do it!

Start small, think big. Think it through, then swing that pick.

by Richard Register

As the founder of the series of events I was assigned a beginning comment. What to say that was important to our growing movement toward healthy cities? I decided that this was something important to say. That is, the conference itself was as important a conversation as can be found and said anywhere in the world today. Its topics must be addressed, and successfully. And, coming from more than 70 countries, those in attendance have an obligation to take this conversation back to and say it out loud and around the world: “These are powerful words that need to be heard, discussed and transformed into action.”

We need a sense of proportion and this conference drew the links between something as large as evolution-changing climate change, Peak Oil, resources depletion and species extinction and the largest things human being build, cities. United Nations statistics point out that more than half of humankind lives in cities now. What is cognizant of proportionality is that “cities” are really just part of, if the larger members among, our built collective environments we call home, namely our towns and villages, too. That number about where we live is more like 95%. Very few of us are still hunting and gathering fruits or herding animals, alone on the range or being hermits in a mountain cave. Our built environments are designed around certain universals for shelter, food security, defense, physical access at close proximity to family, friends, economic partners and so on. Though cities, towns and villages differ with scale, geographic location, climate, ecological context and culture certain principles prevail at all scales.

The impacts of cities is approaching the catastrophic due to their redesign in the last 100 years around very cheap and powerful energy and machines. And yet with the power for positive, creative, artistic, scientific, cultural and economic success at their core, the layout and design of cities are key to the health of the future like little if anything else. And so, I said in my opening talk, nothing could be more important than our deliberations over the five days of Ecocity 9.

Gratitude

My next thought: how grateful I am that these conferences are still going on. When I made the commitment late in 1988 to organizing the First International Ecocity Conference in Berkeley, which was held in 1990, I was stepping out into risky territory trusting that the word “First” would be justified by a second real conference and with luck maybe more into the future, a whole series of conferences. The second step in stepping out was in using the word “ecocity” which at the time was not in common parlance. It was an in-house debate back then (and since 1979 when I started using the word) whether it should be spelled eco-city, EcoCity or ecocity. I went for what looked most like a common language word, as if everyone used it in everyday speech: ecocity. But the spelling was a quibble; what matters is its profound meaning: the ecologically healthy city.

And so my greatest gratitude is to our dear friends Jayne Engle-Warnik and Luc Rabouin of the Urban Ecology Center of Montreal who Kirstin Miller and I got to know in Istanbul and Montreal in several trips well before opening night of Ecocity 9. Those two conveners, backed by their organization, took all the risks that are part of the territory of the difficult and intense work of organizing a major conference, “major” in size – and I’d guess this one to have had approximately 1,500 participants – and major in content and relevance for, let’s face it, doing good for the planet and into the deep future.

I think back to shortly after the First International Ecocity Conference held in Berkeley to when architect Paul Downton and tree-planting activist Cherie Hoyle decided to organize Ecocity 2 in Adelaide, Australia, their home town. Then, we were off and running. I was delighted! Joan Boaker and Serigne Mbaye Diene then followed with another in the village of Yoff, Senegal just outside of Dakar; then Cleon Ricardo dos Santo and Clovis Ultramari in Curitiba, Brazil; followed by Rusong Wang getting up to number five in Shenzhen, China; then Rajiv Kumar in Bangalore, India. The seventh I again launched with the fun job of inviting speakers and organizing the program while Kirstin Miller, who had joined Ecocity Builders in 1997, co-convened by being the main producer of the entire event, Ecocity 7, San Francisco, California. Then Ecocity 8 in Istanbul produced and hosted by Gunez Nukan and Zubeyde Kavaraz. And lastly, just two weeks ago, Ecocity 9 in Montreal. To all of them we all owe a real debt of gratitude for whatever benefits have come from the series, and I believe they are beginning to be many benefits and quite a serious contribution to a better future.

People

There is the truism, partial though it is, that we hear at many of our events and those organized by others that Ecocity Builders people participate in, that “the city is the people.” Well it is the people but it is also their arrangement, the buildings and streets, the energy, transport and food systems from adjacent lands, trade terminus points for route linkages, products and traditions, etc. But with conferences it really is the people. Everything is distilled down to the conversations between people, the meetings, the sometimes depressing often exhilarating exchange of experiences, ideas, commitments and often plans for follow through back in the good old infrastructure we call our home towns. In the case of Montreal’s Ecocity World Summit, we the people came from far and near, Asia, Australia, Africa, Europe and the Americas with sparkling insights, tales of advance and retreat, success and challenge. There were presentations and debate and meeting one another for future reference, all in service to making cities “healthy for people and other living things,” as the peace movement slogan went in the 1960s. A sampling, then some of the highlights from my personal, limited, not-trying-to-be exhaustive perspective.

Our honorary co-presidents were:

• Jan Gehl, renown author, architect, commentator on cities, Copenhagen, Denmark
• Janice Perlman, Founder President of the Mega-cities Project, New York and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Just a few of our prominent speakers in the informal California address book style, first name alphabetical:

• Ahmed Djoghlaf, Exec. Sec., UN Convention of Biological Diversity, UNEP, Algeria
• Alioune Badiane, Technical Cooperation Division and Director, Regional Office for Africa and Arab States, UN-Habitat
• Auan Zhang, Planning Office of Shanghai, China
• Brent Toderian, Planning Director, Vancouver, Canada
• Carole Després, Universite Laval, Quebec, Canada
• Chantal-Line Carpentier, Sustaiable Development Officer, Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations, New York
• Chantal Gagnon, City of Montreal, Montreal, Canada
• Christer Larrson, City Planning Office, Malmo, Sweden
• Dagmar Blume, Bombardier Transportation, Berlin, Germany
• Fabienne Giboudeaux, Deputy Mayor of Paris for Green Spaces, Paris, France
• Fatimata Dia Touré, Institute de L’Energie et de l’Environment de la Francophone, Quebec, Canada
• Gérald Tremblay, Mayor of Montreal
• Hans Tippenhauer, Advisor to the President, Pétionville, Hati
• Hiroaki Suzuki, Eco2 Cities Program, World Bank, Washington, DC
• Howard Frumkin, Dean, School of Public Health, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington
• Jean-Yves Jason, Mayor, Port-au-Prince, Haiti
• Jeff Kenworthy, Author and world’s leading urban form and function scholar, Curtin, University, Perth, Australia
• Jeff Stein, President of the Cosanti Foundation, Arcosanti, Arizona
• Ki-ho Cho, Vice Mayor of Changwon, South Korea
• Louise Roy, President, Public Consultation Office, Montreal, Canada
• Maria Caridad Cruz Hernandez, Antonio Nunez Jimenez Foundation for Nature and Humanity, Havana, Cuba
• Nicolas Michelin, architect and urban planner, Paris, France
• Peter A. Victor, York University, Toronto, Canada
• Ronan Dantéc, Vice President of the Municipality of Nantes, France,
• Thorsten Tonndorf, Senate Department for Urban Development, Berlin, Germany
• Walter Hood, Hood Design, Landscape Architect, Oakland, California
• Yves Cabannes, University College London, London, UK

Brent Toderian, Director of Planning, City of Vancouver; Kirstin Miller, Executive Director, Ecocity Builders; Marco Vangelisti, Slow Money and Ecocity Builders

Jayne tells me that among the dozens of volunteers that made the event possible our newsletter readers might like to know that the Montreal Urban Ecology Centre Board of Directors was involved and most active among its members in the conference organizing were Raquel Penalosa and Ray Tomalty. Key also were Program committee co-chairs: David Brown – more on David and his amazing rooftop garden later – and Louis Drouin. The core, that is most active, members of the planning group’s executive committee were Geoff Garver, Melissa Giguere and Laurence Bherer.

There were five or six times the number of presenters mentioned above, too, plus tour leaders to urban gardens, including the roof of the enormous four block long, two block wide conference center. That garden high in the sky is where the Urban Ecology Center and several restaurants have food production buzzing along but at that only covering about a third of the available rooftop area. We had a press conference up there with television and local papers, while on the other side of the building, that is underneath it, the main freeway of the downtown hurtles below the building carrying tens of thousands of cars, buses and trucks every day without the slightest noise in the conference center meeting rooms and auditoriums, shops, big tree-punctuated interior atriums and entrance to the city’s metro system. One of the liveliest tours was around the city on the Bixi system (bicycle taxi system – inexpensive commuting) and that brings me to my own favorite impressions, cityscape first.

Reflections

I hit the streets and bike paths along the canals – clear water, locks to get boats around the rapids on the main reaches of the St. Lawrence River there, noticing some enormous fish swimming wide arcs through deep waving freshwater seaweed, and off to Atwater Market. This in-door/out-door affair approaches as big, varied and tasty as the fabulous city market off the Rambla in Barcelona, Spain, plus local product such as enormous maple leaf-shaped bottles full of maple syrup. Several pedestrian streets, impressed me, including the one with a few authentic upstairs Chinese restaurants in the small China town only a block from the Palais. Then there were the temporarily closed streets in addition, dozens of blocks of them alive with vendors and thousands of people, fire dancers, music, food – like us conferees – from around the world. One evening Jayne, her husband Jim, their two children and a few friends, namely myself, Kirstin, Architect Bill Mastin, photographer Susan Felter, muscian/writer Sven Eberlin and his partner, professional personal organizer (which led to a very interesting conversation) Deb Badhia settled in at the Tibetan restaurant whose tables had moved out onto the street.

Dining in the street on the “plateau”.

Our Conference Honorary Co-Presidents

Back at the conference itself, near and dear to my heart was Honorary Conference Co-President Jan Gehl’s several talks celebrating the pedestrian environment and the ever progressing take over of the streets by actual human beings in a growing number of European cities. His delightfully anti-car talks made the mild manner points that, for example, designing streets for people meant your children were more likely to actually arrive home from school alive. His “five-mile-per-hour architecture,” that is the relationship of “human scale” buildings, generally no more than five stories, to one another around narrow streets scaled for people, were built arrangements such that nothing could move much faster than that. It reminded me of the work Bill Mastin and I did with a few others in the early 1980s in Berkeley in remodeling a street there as a “Slow Street.” That one used street features such as curbs extending into the street a short distance with trees planted in the new land, in a relatively low density neighborhood, thus by design reducing speeds to a moderate bicycle rate. Why not just enact a slower speed limit in California by law? Because the American Automobile Association and Autodrivers Anonymous have a lockdown on a minimum street speed of 25mph, with the only exceptions being short distance postings for schools, hospitals and old folks homes.  In context, along our Slow Street, there were front yards for the children and top speed on the street, 15 miles per hour. Said architect Gehl, design a city for children and everything else will work out – problems of energy, transport, preservation of nature, you name it. I think he’s right and this was one of my chief impressions from the conference, though a little specific guidance, like ecocity mapping and hints from many other ecocity perspectives available at the conference can help greatly.

Jan Gehl, Honorary Conference Co-Chair

Stunning I’d call the career of our other Honorary Co-President of the Conference, Janice Perlman. In fact after her talk about the history of the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which for her started with living there for a year and a half in four of them back in 1968 and 1969, I went to the Exhibition Hall and bought one of her books: “Favela – Four Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro.” (If you don’t know, a favela is, somewhat imperfectly described, a “shanty town,” a “slum,” an “informal settlement” with little or no official ownership or legal renting of the land by those living on it.) Fevelas, named for a species of bush in Brazil that clings to rough barren slopes, began with the influx of rural poor people into the cities of Brazil in the late 1800s. These people were not as many would assume, the least capable and resourceful people around but rather those from the country curious about the outside world and courageous and imaginative enough to take the plunge and try to build a better more interesting and prosperous life where many more opportunities prevailed, I read much of her book on the airplane home to Oakland and finished it shortly after arrival. Janice’s tale started with the young sociologist’s visit, prior to her arrival as a Rio favela resident, to a fishing village so remote the people there couldn’t believe there was any other language in the world. Tuning up her less than perfect Portuguese at the village got giggles from the children who asked why she spoke like a parrot. Alternately, was she actually a bit retarded to be only able to speak as well as a four year old?

The world of cities has become largely a “Planet of Slums,” as says the title of a book by Mike Davis, and Janice’s bold live-in-and-return studies spanning three generations while sharing her knowledge between meagcities around the world gives us both hope and worry. Hope because the resourcefulness of the people in the Favelas, many working there way up and out of poverty, is inspiring and encouraging as they have not, just because of poverty, but with serious recycling and practical creativity provided insights for all of us contemplating low-impact, small ecological footprint cities for a healthy future. Worry because democracy delivered very little improvement if any over the dictatorship in the lives of the very poor in Brazil, with class distinctions being extraordinarily rigid, and more recently, with drug gang violence and associated corruption and disempowerment achieving levels of fear even terror to replace, and in many places, exceed that of the years of the dictatorship. It isn’t so much that we need to give more to the poor, it’s that we need to take less from them in labor than returned in pay for their contributions. Far from being separate from the city, even if segregated out, the favela residents are the ones commuting into the wealthier areas daily, building and running the city as carpenters, masons, maids and care givers, service providers at the bottom of the list of desirable, “better” meaning higher paid and less actually physically dirty jobs. The solution is largely just to provide good wages for work and a social cultural context that has real respect and fairness at its core. Without that expect not ecocities any time sooner or later. Design for children and making the poor, poor no longer.

Janice Perlman, Honorary Co-Chair, Founder of the Megacities Project

Another insight has to be added here though. Many speakers gave numerous and convincing details of what to actually build to solve multiple intractable problems. That is they showed us what to build. Interestingly this isn’t much of a discussion in society at large. We build more of what’s been built before, and perhaps especially in the “Great Downturn” since the Financial Crisis of 2008, we are seeing “shovel-ready” jobs in building the same old highways, with little sense that rails are far, far better, almost to the degree of some kind of salvation from real disasters. Dig a little deeper and see that the thing to build is not the better car but the city that doesn’t need them, that what to build is not solar to sprawl but solar to the ecocity, and so on. The encapsulated lesson here is that we have to know what to build as a plumber needs to know which pipe to connect to which. Yes we need to be fair to the vulnerable and the victims of past and on-going injustices, but knowing what to build is an equally important theme needing focus and dedication to application of lessons learned there from, the built manifestation being, should it all work out, Ecocities. And here are some details about that.

More speakers

Speaking of rails being far better than streets for cars when it comes to motor transport, Jeff Kenworthy, veteran of four or five earlier International Ecocity Conferences (I’m losing count), demonstrated from massive data from major cities around the world that they work far better than busses on streets as well. Short and medium term bus solutions such as Curitiba’s “Bus Rapid Transit” (BRT) system can run a close second, but in the long run the added investment if a city can afford it or structure financing to accomplish the task, rail systems work even better.

The two powerful talks looking into the teeth of the dragon were delivered by our friends from Vancouver, David Cadman, Vice Mayor and City Councilor of Vancouver, aka President of ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability, and Bill Rees, University of British Columbia professor and co-author with Mathis Wackernagle of the book and whole idea of the ecological footprint. David’s talk was an introduction to three other talks by Brent Toderian, Planning Director of Vancouver and Christer Larsson and Thorston Tonndorf both with corresponding positions in Malmo, Sweden and Berlin Germany respectively and Zhjang Quan, Director of the Environmental Protection Bureau, Shanghai, China. David painted a dire picture of sea rise and climate change, so dire in fact – easily three feet with such current rapidly developing commitments as accelerating petroleum production from Canada’s tar sands despite government words of concern for climate change – that the stage was set for really radical proposals. Solid ones followed but I admit some disappointment that none of the talks in that session addressed what to do about the current sprawl development that exists, what, in other words to do about actually removing the damaging infrastructure that even with the addition of good transit oriented development, better recycling, energy conservation etc., careens on as the chief engine of destruction that already exists and is running full speed. Bill Ress on the other hand, as he always does, stressed that sheer consumption levels are so intensely high in the cities of the wealthy countries, and rising rapidly in places like China, India and Brazil, that we need to find much more radical solutions than are presently seen anywhere in the mainstream list of supposed solutions to climate, energy and species extinctions problems. He, like Richard Heinberg, sometimes called the Dark Prince of Peak Oil, a keynote speaker with Jerry Brown at Ecocity Builders’ 2005 World Environment Day conference in Oakland called “Green City Visions”, exudes a kind of weary expectation of impending catastrophe yet renews constantly a battling spirit to warn people – and Bill in addition pins at least some hope on people waking up to ecocities as part of a solution conceived on a scale to match the problem. He is with us not only at our conferences but also as a Core Advisor to the International Ecocity Framework and Standards project that Kirstin Miller is heading up.

International Ecocity Framework and Standards

For the last year Kirstin Miller has led a project hosted by Ecocity Builders developing a framework and set of standards by which to more clearly understand what exactly an ecocity is and how to best get there. In fact in the middle of writing this article for our newsletter, just last night, I gave a talk about the present state of ecocities for the Berkeley Ecology Center. Stephen Kelly, who was at the conference in Montreal, from the audience asked my best strategy idea for bringing ecocity awareness to the public and promoting them into existence as rapidly as possible. I said I wasn’t sure what would work after so many years of only small successes scattered about while the automobile city swelled ever more relentlessly larger and more damaging. Kirstin, there and co-presenting with me, spoke of our best shot: the International Ecocity Framework and Standards (IEFS), which she also addressed at the Montreal Conference itself. The notion that ecologically healthy cities could be built has gained a foothold in many places around, she mentioned. But how to tell the difference, how to best promote and educate about, launch and develop? The answer was to develop a set of criteria for conditions any city might create in moving in that direction, as measured in terms of healthy indicators, and to lay out the effort to evolve the city in that direction.

To get to higher levels of ecocity accomplishment the “framework” is organized in four categories where progress toward systematic improvement can be clearly seen.

• The first is called “Urban Design – Access by Proximity” which if pursued lead to the city designed around the reach of the human rather than the machine, in practice these days, mainly cars and trucks.
• The second category is called “Bio-Geo-Physical Conditions” and addresses quality air, water, material, food and energy.
• The third is “Ecological Imperatives” — biodiversity, carrying capacity, ecological integrity
• And the fourth category is called “Social-Cultural Features” — culture, community capacity, economy, education, well being

At Ecocity 9 in Montreal Kirstin organized a panel of short presentations by members of our international team drafting the IEFS. She introduced the subject as she did again just last night at the Ecology Center, but in addition described the history of the project and progress that has brought us to a point were we now have a solid set of core authors and supporting advisors including Bill McKibben author and major leader in climate change education and policy action, Mathis Wackernagle, co-author of the ecological foot print concept and President of the Global Footprint Network, Warren Karlenzig, President, Current, a city policy consulting company, Rusong Wang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Member Chinese Peoples Congress and Ecocity 5 Converner, Peter Gleick, President of the Pacific Institute, a water policy think tank, Ian Douglas President of the International Council on Ecopolis Development and President of the Society of Human Ecology, and other expert advisors. She also laid out the initiatives strategy for involving Early Partner Cities, of which several are on board with commitments to gather data about their own conditions and help refine the strategy to develop a framework and set of standards by which many different kinds of cities in very different circumstances of size, wealth, geography and culture could be assessed and assisted in the journey toward their role in an ecologically healthy, socially just urban world in the future. Kirstin mentioned that among the Early Partner Cities, we are now working with Vancouver and Montreal Canada and Kirtipur, Nepal and in communication with people from and exploring working with enthusiastic potential partners in Pafos, Cypress; Durban, South Africa and Dakar, Senegal.

Several of those in our core committee drafting the IEFS took the stage after Kirstin’s introduction in Montreal.

Marco Vangelisti, artist and financial strategist and investment consultant working on the IEFS with Ecocity Builders out of his hometown of Berkeley, California further elaborated the Early Partner Cities program and what it hopes to accomplish. As one of our delegation to Nepal last fall he was important in developing the connection with the ancient more than 95% car free town of Kirtipur built on a rock outcrop that rises from the Kathmandu valley looking all the way up the Himalaya range from Ganesh Himal (24,350 feet) to Mt Everest (29,029 feet). Rick Smith, working with us from his position as professor at Wane State University in the town of recent vast open spaces called Detroit, Michigan and earlier as a sometimes employee and sometimes volunteer with Ecocity Builders in Oakland, reported on his survey of various sets of standards from LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) to ICLEI’s STAR Community Sustainability Index that have been designed to measure building energy consumption, city contribution to green house gas reduction and so on. Our idea was to go beyond the existing standards and measures to provide a tool for transforming cities more thoroughly and more rapidly than we are currently seeing.

Bill Rees of the University of British Columbia (UBC), co-author of the ecological footprint concept with Dr. Wackernagle just mentioned above and a part of our team of IEFS co-authors, and Jennie Moore, Director for Sustainability at the British Columbia Institute of Technology in Vancouver working on her doctorate under Bill at UBC spoke of applying the ecological footprint approach to the ecocity framework and standards to reveal the realities of high consumption that claims to be green – not often true. To have a prosperous life in healthy future our ecological footprint – the impact each of us have on society’s resource base and on other life forms of the planet – has to be factored in in relation to our lives in cities. In fact, Bill and Jennie report that present scholars and researchers working with ecological footprint figures for individuals and aggregated national total impacts have yet to gather and assess data for cities. Thus best figures in terms of impacts that could help us guide ecocity design and development are not as readily available as they should be. To gather and access this information, then, becomes one of the most important missions of the IEFS. Ernest Callenbach, who also wrote the underground classic “Ecotopia” about an ecologically tuned, even fanatically healthy country on the Pacific Coast – Northern California, Oregon and Washington – that secedes from the United States and goes its way building what looks suspiciously like ecocities and restored bioregions, wrote another book called “Living Poor with Style.” The goal of ecological cities might turn out to be understanding how to really prosper, both people and nature, at low consumption levels according to ecological footprint assessments of the cities and towns we live in… in style. Cliché green – big houses with solar heated swimming pools and all-around double glazed panoramic windows for example, with low per-person benefit (few people enjoying whatever sort of prosperity that suggests) – would count against its city’s ecocity ecological footprint in a very different way of assessing “quality of life” and “standard of living” which tends to claim high points for high consumption activities, facilities and habits.

Ray Tomalty, professor at McGill School of Urban Planning, further elaborated on our process and spoke about the “step-wise process” by which cities could be assessed or assess themselves for their position on the road to high ecocity levels of accomplishment. In that session I spoke about an “ecocity toolbox” that could be used to help move cities in an ecocity direction, in theory building from basic principles and land use patterns up, adding particular policies, technologies and practices to attain highest possible ecocity functioning. In particular, to get to the condition of easy access by proximity, we can use the concept of developing vitality centers in our metropolitan areas and by utilizing Ecocity Builder’s tool we call the Ecocity Mapping System, a future-oriented, whole-systems design approach to mapping a city to help guide transition to lively compact, functionally diverse centers with restoration of natural areas and waterways and agricultural landscapes returning to areas now paved over in asphalt, concrete, lawns, tar and gravel and asphaltic shingle roofs and submerged in air pollution with increasing CO2 content.

Really Getting There

One of the delights of a good conference is the new surprise. Mayor of Munster, Germany, Markus Lewe provided one of the best. I was almost stunned how close to our ecocity mapping system maps his city maps for Munster looks like, which is an awkward sentence but says it pretty well anyway.

Ecocity zoning from Munster, Germany

Check out the pattern of development I’ve been suggesting as the destination of the reshaping of an “ecotropolis,” the NASA shot of the San Francisco Bay Area from space and my “ecocity centers” Photoshop rendition based on the NASA photo and the third image that represents those centers and nature and agriculture coming back to replace former sprawl development and you get something dangerously close to what we were seeing projected on the big screen next to mayor Lewe’s lectern. There on his map you will notice the almost circular spots of development that constitute centers surrounded by green, the exact nature we of course don’t know because that would take more detail than a 20 minute presentation can provide. We’d need to be on the ground or have a few hours to explore, essentially interviewing Mr. Lewe. And he mentioned many of the smaller details of life, lifestyle, recycling, conservation, etc. in Munster and “green” policies and initiatives, the usual good stuff of our ecocity conferences. But here in addition we were seeing one of the best patterns of overall urban organization I remember from nine International Ecocity Conferences. Brent Toderian, Planning director of Vancouver showed us a map of the larger Vancouver metropolis and centers of higher density development were identified in a similar pattern of focused spots of built up infrastructure around major transit stations. But surrounding these spots in Vancouver was, rather than green, the gray of thousands of acres of asphalt, concrete and rooftops of buildings one and two stories high.

1. Metropolis Region

Which brings us to the kind of side meetings, often during lunch or dinner, hanging out in the halls or over chatting, often with quite a few laughs and drinks at receptions. I had the opportunity in this manner to sit down with both Brent Toderian and David Cadman – reminder: Planning Director and Vice Mayor of Vancouver respectively. Neither of them could imagine a systematic framework in policy or even in the mind politic of the people there that could continence systematic removal of low-density, car-dependent development in the larger metropolitan area, that is, an area that could transform into an ecologically healthy metropolis, an ecotropolis. The public might be able to tolerate higher density coming along with more services and prosperity but to imagine removing anything, as if placing it there might have been a mistake in the first place – wouldn’t play well in Boston, as they say of new ideas. But it is proving to be exactly that: not just a mistake but one of the worst mistakes of humanity in the 20^th century continuing on into the 21^st: car and cheap energy dependent sprawl development.

2. Metropolis to Ecotropolis

I actually agreed with Brent and David that the prospects of heading toward something that looked something like Munster’s actual layout or the outcomes of a transformation you could imagine utilizing Ecocity Builders’ Ecocity Mapping System wouldn’t be embraced broadly at this point – no point in polling the people as to whether or not they would like it. The results would be negative. Naturally! They haven’t heard of it before! But we could at least begin developing the language and planting the ideas as multiple wins. Not just win-win, or win-win-win. But “win” many times over: regarding service to people, restoration of nature and agriculture, climate change benefits, species preservation, cleaner air, fresh food locally grown, no threat to your kids getting killed under the tires of 60 mile per hour architecture, the inverse of Jan Gehl’s 5 mile per hour architecture and so on.

3. Final transformation: Ecotropolis with Nature and Agriculture Returned

In the long term though, the climate and resources problems David portrayed powerfully in the session where he set the introductory tone imply that something finally has to be done about the destructive infrastructure itself even if it is 50 or more years in the future. Why fail to think about it now? If there are too many people consuming too many resources, covering too much land, producing too many deleterious effects we have to face up to removing some of that sprawl some day. My theory is that only if people can see the transformation from both sides, what we need to add in some specific places and what we need to subtract from others, will be to understand the whole pattern and be empowered to do something healthy about it.

Ecotropolis

To look a little more carefully at this getting-over-the-threshold notion, here’s how our thinking went. Kirstin Miller has been trying lately to better understand the relationship of the ecocity to its bioregion and how such understanding could be worked into the framework and standards that are a major focus of her efforts recently. The very sad death of our friend and colleague Peter Berg, pioneer in bioregional thinking, has riveted her attention even more on his powerful conceptualization of that living landscape our cities have to understand far, far better if we are to have a better future. (I met Peter back in 1972 after correspondence even before then and he spoke for us at Ecocity 1 in Berkeley, Ecocity 4 in Curitiba and Ecocity 7 in San Francisco.)

Thinking of our ecocity mapping system Kirstin began seeing the pattern of change we were encouraging to be one of a transforming metropolis, not described so well as a city, but as an almost undifferentiated urban aglomeration like a continuous mattress of streets, freeways, buildings with residuals of green parks and gardens here and there. Transformed into what? An ecologically healthy metropolis.

In this vision, downtowns become more functionally diverse and perhaps yet more dense turning into real pedestrian ecocities in their own right with a very small even tiny physical footprint compared to metropolitan development limits. Major district centers become vital ecotowns of a smaller scale and neighborhood centers become real ecovillages. In between all these centers of vitality of culture and economy, waterways are exhumed from their underground grave yards to flow again under sun, moon and stars, parks and community gardens are expanded, in some cases into serious commercial farmland, and native species return in many areas. The linkages are with foot, bicycle and rail, of which bike enthusiasts and Jeff Kenworthy would be in hearty approval. My thought: Why wait? Why not just call that pattern, that transformation like stars gathering up the thin infrastructure of interstellar gasses to burst into the life of sparkling galaxies, an ecotropolis? Another generic term like ecocity itself. The “sequence” you might say then, like the sequence of different types of stars in a galaxy, would see small ecovillages, ecotowns and ecocities and where they are gathered together in a location like the San Francisco Bay Area or any other metropolitan area today, they would constitute an ecotropolis. And this in turn would be embraced by the living landscape of its bioregion, as Peter Berg would say, or hinterlands as the somewhat more resources-oriented term Jane Jacobs used in her thinking about economic health of cities in their larger geographic context. I think the concept might be a breakthrough.

Well you can’t cover everything in a conference like this in a newsletter, and even the ponderous books that are academic proceedings don’t do justice to conferences for other reasons. This has to be a glancing encounter, like a Jupiter fly by peaking down at a whole lot more action than can be encapsulated in a few paragraphs beamed out through space (and by the way that’s exactly how this newsletter gets to many of you: via actual space satellites), and as said at the outset, I can’t help but miss a lot. Debra Efroymson with her tales of ecocity work in the Asian Subcontinent and Jeff Stein’s report from Paolo Soleri’s earliest to start and still struggling thorough-going ecocity project, Arcosanti, Arizona, launched in 1970 I don’t have time or space to cover. Landscape Architect Walter Hood’s beautiful designs from Oakland, San Francisco and Los Angeles to Buffalo, Pittsburg, and Atlanta that lay the patterns of utilized space and movement on the natural landscape such that life emerges as if from a deeper layer to create something new and uniquely human and natural simultaneously. Vice Mayor of Changwon, South Korea was there and spoke for his city and expressed an interest in possibly hosting future ecocity conference in his town, and Ronan Dontac, Vice Président of Nantes Métropole (early to be an ecotropolis?) with all due fanfare, accepted the baton and announced that his city would take on organizing our next, the International Ecocity Conference. Tenth International Ecocity Conference, coming up in September of 2013. And so much more happened.

But I would like to end like this. Kirstin and I met with Sharon Christians, a vice president of Bombardier, the maker of streetcars and trains and Chantal Line Carpentier, of the Division for Sustainable Development at the United Nations who is working on “major organizations” participation in the 2012 Rio + 20 environmental conference of the United Nations. (I was there at Rio in 1992 – and at Stockholm at the first in the series in 1972.) The four of us decided we needed to establish a much stronger financial basis for ecological city work and we had to make sure the upcoming UN Conference made ecocities one of it’s primary issues of concern and action. So off Kirstin went less than a week later to Bonn, Germany to join the NGO’s working on input to Rio + 20. No moss growing on her suitcase…

And something very personal: David Brown invited me and Kirstin to join himself and Ginette Lamontagne for dinner in their rooftop garden. Personal because David had run across my book “Ecocity Berkeley – Building Cities for a Healthy Future” back around 1988, found it inspiring and required it for his planning students at McGill University there in Montreal, so inspiring in fact that he just had to try building a staircase, tiny room for relaxing, whatever season, sun or snow, up on the roof, plus garden. Surrounded by flowers four feet high and vines with the brightest pink beans I’ve even seen, he and Ginette served up Kirstin and I, Jayne Engle-Warnick and her two children Max and Ester one wonderful meal exactly where I’d drawn a few pictures in our imaginations on a piece of paper around 1985. It had all come full circle to a beautiful place, high in the sky, he’d made with his own hands.

David Brown’s rooftop garden patio

— Richard Register is President of Ecocity Builders and founder of the International Ecocity Conference Series. He can be reached at: ecocity@igc.org

Post script: Complete listing at www.ecocity2011.com under “program” for more detailed information on conference speakers and topics. We’d all – both Ecocity 9 organizers and those of us past ecocity conference conveners on the conference series Relay Committee – like to thank the sponsors who made this even possible with special gratitude to the four principal sponsors, Bombardier, the TD Group, City of Montreal, and Government of Quebec. A full list of sponsors is available on the website.