Welcome everyone to the Fifth International Ecocity Conference and I want to start by thanking all of you for carrying on the tradition of ecological city conferences. My most special thanks to Rusong Wang who holds the vision so clearly… And to all our other hosts…(The list included the various supporting officials and sponsors and special note of thanks to the organizers of the Second International Ecocity Conference who were in attendance, Paul Downton and Cherie Hoyle, since they were the first to “carry on” what could only become a tradition because the did carry on. They had the faith in the subject, the need and the timeliness of the ecocity enterprise.)

Thanks to all of you who came from all around China and from dozens of countries around the world.

I am very honored, yet saddened to be speaking to you right now. I would rather be listening to Mr. Maurice Strong, our originally scheduled keynote speaker, and learning more about his vision that would connect our work for ecological cities to the his life’s work for the United Nations and the health of the whole Earth’s environment.

Yet I am very honored to have the opportunity to, in some ways, set the tone of our conference and I am honored that my colleagues here in China would want me to speak in this important position in the sequence of speakers at this important event, an event that I believe could well be historic. I believe that because now in the early hours of a new century it is time to face the truth about the effects of what we human beings are doing to our planet by way of building cities that are working very badly. Humanity is presently building cities that are the chief contributor to the changing of climate and to the collapse of the biosphere.

But if we choose to reshape our cities on ecological principles, this moment in history – our moment in history – will be seen by our descendants as the time of the greatest gift to their lives from their ancestors. It will be the Time of the Great Decision, the time when we rescued evolution itself, the time when we human beings decided to build our lives in harmony with the universe we have been born into. I hope some day they can say that of us, generations from now, when all our names will be lost but our deeds have guaranteed the future.

Our planned Keynote speaker, Mr. Maurice Strong, has just undergone open heart surgery. I am delighted to report that he is recovering at his home in Toronto, Canada right now, and his recovery is progressing with his characteristic enthusiasm and speed. He is, as many of you know, a Canadian industrialist and businessman, former head of the United Nations Environmental Program out of Nairobi, Kenya, the convener of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, Sweden in 1972 and the convener of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1992. Our conference was very honored that he agreed to speak here.

I attended both his conferences and so, personally, I was very much looking forward to his presence here at this conference. Though he could not be here today, I would like to praise his career as one of the world’s most inspired visionaries. If he were here, I am sure he would have described the Earth Charter’s relationship with our work in building healthy cities. That document, which he was instrumental in authoring with hundreds of other people from around the world, lays a foundation in environmental values for all humanity.

The Earth Charter is strong enough that some see it as favoring long-term benefit over short-term profit and practicality, as favoring distant beneficiaries over political expediency today. And therefore, it is far from clear that the United Nations delegates who will be gathering at Johannesburg, South Africa in two weeks will endorse it. It is Mr. Strong’s dream that they will eventually, and he would have explained the need for such a clear statement of the agreements in the human family if he were here.

I would like, therefore, to start my talk by reading from the Preamble of the Earth Charter. It represents in full clarity the foundation in values upon which we will need to rebuild our entire civilization if it is to endure. As to how to design that civilization and literally, physically build it – that is what this the Fifth International Ecocity Conference is all about. There could hardly be a better start for this conference than the way the Earth Charter itself begins:

“We stand at a critical moment in Earth’s history, a time when humanity must choose its future. As the world becomes increasingly interdependent and fragile, the future at once holds great peril and great promise. To move forward we must recognize that in the midst of a magnificent diversity of cultures and life forms we are one human family and one Earth community with a common destiny. We must join together to bring forth a sustainable global society founded on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace.

Towards this end, it is imperative that we, the peoples of Earth, declare our responsibility to one another, to the greater community of life, and to future generations. “The resilience of the community of life and the well-being of humanity depend upon preserving a healthy biosphere with all its ecological systems, a rich variety of plants and animals, fertile soils, pure waters, and clean air. The global environment with its finite resources is a common concern of all peoples. The protection of Earth’s vitality, diversity, and beauty is a sacred trust.”

When it comes to sustainability, there are many definitions. I will suggest from a very brief scan of history that the city built for cars and the scattering of human culture over vast mechanized landscapes cannot be made sustainable by simply improving the technologies that are attached to that structure. Instead, we need to change that structure very fundamentally.

We need to go back to beginnings, to basic principles and realize all over again that the city must be designed for people. We can support people with some various machines, the machines to build the city, the elevators, bicycles, streetcars and trains – and some cars in specialized uses, no doubt. But to build according to the dictates of the automobile, the freeway, low-density sprawl and cheap energy can never be healthy for society or nature. Many people will disagree with this, but I see a future so beautiful, should we actually design cities on the measure of the human body and spirit, that we can in fact coexist on this planet and thrive deep into the future.

And we can do this with almost all of the creatures we now share this wonderful planet. Cities began as pedestrian environments, of course – we are born into this life on Earth well equipped for moving about on our feet. A few hundred million years of evolution has provided us with these wonderful transportation devices.

But cities, over their history, experienced both inward and outward development pressures, shaping their physical structure – and thus their potential for sustainability. From Çatal Huyuk in Turkey almost 9,000 years ago to the cities of the Mesopotamia area 5,500 years ago, cities were relatively small, relatively peaceful and held together by the logic of complexity working well in short distances. They were “walkable.” Or as Jeff Kenworthy, who spoke at two earlier Ecocity Conferences, likes to say, they were “walking” cities.

Then, in the era of the Mesopotamian Cities and for hundreds of years after, the pressures of chronic war contracted the city even more compactly behind high walls. In the time of early nation states in Europe the defensive walls of cities were pushed out to border frontiers. In China’s case, the city wall moved out hundreds of miles away from the city and became the national wall – and one of the largest works in all of humanity’s history. At the same time the military reason for compacting cities was dissolving, wider use of animals and wheeled vehicles for transport, mainly horses and horse drawn vehicles, also tended to spread the cities into a flatter more scattered form.

In the 1800s, in England and then America, Europe and other parts of the world, trains amplified the pattern of physical scattering by seeding compact suburbs like small satellite towns a modest distance from their main cities. Class divisions also conspired to scatter the more affluent out and away from workers’ districts. In the late 1800s, the use of steel and concrete and the invention of the elevator allowed buildings to grow taller while the invention of the electric light bulb and electric fans for ventilation made it possible to construct much more massive buildings.

Cities responded by growing ever larger, ever taller, ever wider. Then, with the mass production of automobiles, gasoline and paving in the early 1900s the form of the city began to change in an even more fundamental way. From a generally compact structure designed to bring people close together for economic, social and cultural interaction, the city began to transform into an enormously widely scattered structure. With the construction of wide streets, fast highways and millions of acres of parking lots in the wealthier countries from the middle of the 20th century on, cities spread to such enormous areas of land that in many parts of the world their citizens became virtually doomed to exclusion from most urban activities if they didn’t own a car – in most cities in the United States today we are almost completely automobile dependent.

Things have become so bad in many places now, that even people who do have cars can’t get anywhere: they are stuck in traffic jams! But this principle remains throughout history and into the future: the closer cities are to compact, diverse pedestrian structures, the more sustainable they will be. Conversely, the more scattered and dependent upon high-speed transportation, the more unsustainable they will be. The principle in its most basic and simple formulation is universally true: living organisms of any complexity organize themselves three-dimensionally, not in two-dimensional flat sheets like a piece of paper.

There have been respected critics of cars and sprawl capable of seeing the impending disasters of that kind of city, like the American scholar and author Lewis Mumford writing from the 1920s into the 1960s. But in the history of understanding cities, it was Italian immigrant to the United States Paolo Soleri who most clearly said it: cities are living complex systems that must be essentially three-dimensional, not two-dimensional, not flat. Just a word or two has to be said about the level of damage of the automobile and its associated infrastructure. Not everywhere, but certainly in California where I come from, sprawl is the main destroyer of natural species.

The National Wildlife Federation, America’s largest environmental group with over 3,000,000 members, researched and published a report last year called “Paving Paradise.” In it they reported that a full 66% of all the species on the endangered and threatened species lists in California were there specifically because of habitat destruction due to sprawl. That’s not including the effects of contaminated water run off, air pollution and the fact that cars and their support systems contribute to more carbon dioxide build up in the atmosphere than any other cause. If climate change becomes acute, we can expect a collapse of species diversity on this planet more severe than by any other human caused source to date.

Of the many other problems of the automobile/sprawl city – fragmenting of the economic and social functions of the city, sheer expense that makes the car dominated city inherently unfair to lower income people, waste of time in traffic jams and so on – one needs special emphasis: the one half million people who die in violent accidents every year and the three million people who die prematurely because of air pollution’s effects on lung, heart and other diseases.

The other side of the coin, though, is the positive side. And that side, that possibility, anyway, is the city built for people. I for one believe the positive alternative is, in fact, the ecological city, or the “ecocity.” Looking at contemporary history, we see many inspiring examples.

Curitiba, Barzil – I will feature that city in my slide show and we have one of its best spokespeople here with us for a more detailed examination, the information officer of the city’s urban research and planning institute, Maria do Rocio Quandt. Curitiba, starting around 1972, coordinated the development of its bus system on a “dedicated street” – that is, a street dedicated for buses only – with higher density housing and centers of community services and activities built along that street. There were also 27 blocks of pedestrian street when I visited, dozens of beautiful squares and plazas, enormous parkland and semi-natural open spaces graced by preserved rivers and streams.

In Europe many cities have expanding car-free areas. Plazas, where people were kicked out, that were turned into parking lots in the 1940s through 1970s, are now being restored to their pedestrian-friendly designs and functions. Bicycle paths are being created totalling thousands of miles in many cities, and streetcar lines are being established or re-established in many cities.

Dietmar Halweg, mayor of Erlangen, Germany for 24 years will be telling us about such changes going on recently and increasing today. In the United States we have a movement called the “New Urbanists” who are really supporters of a type of design and planning that is actually an old suburban way of building: more compactly than the usual new American suburb and based on corridors and centers that work well with transit, but while permitting the automobile to be present in typical American numbers.

Many of the New Urbanists are architects and what they propose and design – and their developer clients build – are projects of three and four story buildings within about a quarter mile of regional rail line stations. Their approach is, in the words of some of the movement’s adherents, a “bridge strategy,” they acknowledge, a strategy that moves in the right direction. But a bridge to what?

I’d say, a bridge to the ecocity, the city thought through much more thoroughly yet, the city of buildings in many cases considerably taller than four stories. And if we use terracing, stepping back as we build up, if we plant rooftop gardens and invite in native birds and provide for high places for the citizens to visit, work or live, why can’t we imagine really beautiful taller cities full of life and inspiration? Such buildings and cities made up largely of such buildings would be part of an ecologically and socially healthy whole living organism: the ecological city.

The city could be seen, then, as a living system analogous to other living systems, like biological organisms, and subject to the rules of ecology. Complex, healthy organisms are essentially three-dimensional structures with overlapping organ systems connected to one another over short distances for the benefit of the whole organism. This is the core idea Paolo Soleri had for us: short distances of connection yield high levels of efficiency, low levels of waste.

This requires a three-dimensional arrangement of the whole organism. Cities can be designed similarly and built like this. By intuition, by necessity, by some means, cities were complex, compact, well articulated physical structures for most of their long history. By “well articulated” I mean the various parts, or districts of the city, were arranged so that the whole structure was easily accessible by foot.

The essentially flat structure of a sheet of paper would require proportionally much longer lines of connection for both a living organism and for a city – an organism spread across a surface in this manner would be largely veins and arteries and would dedicate a gigantic portion of its efforts to simply sending nutrients and messages about its body. Such grotesque “sprawled out” organisms would be so inefficient and wasteful if they existed, they simply don’t exist!

Cities, however, can be designed, organized and built like this as long as we are willing to pay the price in expense, gasoline, paving, pollution, accidents and so on. Certainly most of them in America are designed like this – with the result being vast destruction of the planet’s biological and material resources. Considerable evidence indicates that even climate has begun to change, and mainly because of the way we build cities.

One of the most important choices humanity can make at this early morning of the 21st century, then, is for compact complexity in city-building rather than for sprawled areas of relatively uniform land uses and activities: commerce here, housing there, education way out there and relaxation and nature a long vacation far, far away. But this diversity of activities can be designed close together.

I call it “access by proximity,” the key principle of design of healthy biological organisms and villages, towns and cities. “Access” is what transportation is usually assumed to provide for people. But you can get “access” by simply designing and building the things people need in their lives so that those things are close together. Today many countries are following my country’s lead in the destructive direction towards sprawl. China seems to be headed down that path, too.

I don’t know your country well enough to know if you are also destroying your rail system as Americans destroyed much of ours since the 1950s. But in a sentence, I am here to warn you that great damage to nature and society lies down that road of automobile and sprawl development and that the positive alternative of the city designed mainly around the lives and needs of pedestrians, and based on ecological principles, offers wonderful prospects for thriving economy, ecology and equity all at the same time.

I will speak of the transformation of cities over time in very broad terms momentarily and show images of ecological city examples – large projects and small details, ancient, current and futuristic, if only a few of each since our time is limited. I will present a few directions in urban design that I believe are very promising and show you tools for visualizing and moving toward ecologically healthy cities, truly sustainable cities. But first a special note should be made of the potential role of China in reshaping cities for the health of the planet.

China has a deep history of respect for nature and philosophical systems grounded in working in constant dialog with nature. The West, as many have called the cultural, economic and militaristic stream pouring out of Europe and later North America, has for at least two thousand years been more exploitive of nature and oblivious to its complexities and subtleties.

That was the case, at least, until rather recently when science stumbled upon “the subversive science” of ecology, that is, the science that got out of the laboratory and very respectfully into the field of living things, environments, the biosphere, evolution and natural resources. Now the cultures of East and West are coming together though business, trade, tourism, deep curiosity, and frequently real sympathy and compassion – and sometimes because of the common destiny we all share on our beautiful but ailing planet. And now the time is with us to decide if we are going to transform cities into environments for people or cars. That’s a fundamental and crucial choice. In my slide presentation I will suggest ways we can design and plan cities for people.

1. Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA, a typical sprawling American city. It takes enormous amounts of energy to travel about in this city and lots of energy for heating and cooling the buildings. In larger buildings, people in different apartments or offices share heat through shared walls. In the smaller separate buildings of suburbia, heat and cooling energy is lost to the atmosphere after one use. This city is essentially two-dimensional, its form is, proportionally speaking, almost flat.

2. A traffic jam in Paris. Cars and sprawl, highways and cheap energy constitute the whole system we have created as the city of high mobility. I think of it as “over-mobility,” too much running around. Far better to move more slowly between a variety of things placed close together than fast between things placed very far apart.

3. The World Trade Center towers were very three-dimensional, but had little variety, serving one purpose only: space for working – and almost only one kind of work at that, office work. They were not, as planners say, “mixed-use” buildings. When fully rented, more than 25,000 people worked in each tower.

4. I’m convinced the traditional village structure should be a model for much larger cities. This village is Illara, Turkey. Like most traditional villages it is a structure that has considerable functional variety all within an easy walking distance: homes, work places, markets, administrative offices, nature and agriculture visible near by, the religious center clearly visible and marked by a tall minaret at the town’s central mosque. Of course, as population increases, distances inside the community increase, but if cities, towns and villages can be relatively compact, buildings relatively tall, then people can walk, bicycle and take transit everywhere. Illara is functionally far more complex than the World Trade Center towers.

5. Cumra is a small town not too far from Illara, with about 20 times the population. Here we can see delivery vehicles, first floor shops and offices, second, third and fourth floor residences and rooftop solar hot water panels and tanks. At this modest scale, this may not be too far from a genuine very small ecocity.

6. Now Curitiba, Brazil is the leading city in the world for applying a wide variety of ecological principles, policies and projects. From the observation platform of the television transmission tower we can see one of the city’s five arms of high-density development reaching out from the center of the city. The city government built streets reserved for busses only – cars excluded – down the centers of those five arms of high density. Around the high-density corridors only a limited amount of low-density development is allowed, along with large areas of parks and natural open space. Thus Curitiba built a good land use and transportation foundation for many other great things about the city. The transportation system worked so efficiently that the city enjoyed enormous savings which it used to buy up the banks of the rivers to create parks and solve flooding problems. Because there are no buildings in those flood plains, the floods just come and go harmlessly, leaving a little silt to fertilize the parks. The compact development pattern leaves lots of room for planting trees, building bicycle and pedestrian paths. Recycling works better here than in sprawling suburbs where trucking materials about a gigantic surface is expensive and time consuming.

7. With higher density comes higher potential for investment in the public realm. Curitiba has 27 blocks of pedestrian streets, which often have beautiful patterns worked into the paving. The city celebrates its public space and is very pedestrian-friendly.

8. One of the big parks with an arm of high density housing in the background.

9. The bus system of Curitiba is famous around the world. It works almost as efficiently as a subway system and Curitiba government officials tell us it cost only 1/300th as much as a subway system. Saving federal money that would have paid for much of a subway system, had one been built, meant that the city had much more money left over for social programs and buying land for natural preservation and parks.

10. “Tube stations” were an invention of Jaime Lerner, the mayor of Curtiba in the days when its ecological policies were launched, starting in 1972. The bus rider enters through a turn-style, pays for the ride there, and waits for the bus inside a stylish shelter, which the people there are very proud of. When the bus arrives, a ramp drops down from the bus to join the tube station and people exit and enter the bus three side by side. The unloading and loading goes almost as fast as in a subway system. The system made it possible for the people using it to have easy, inexpensive and fast access to all part of the city. It is widely regarded to be one of the reasons Curitiba is also an economic success story as well as an ecological success story.

11. There are very modern-looking buildings in Curitba…

12. ...but if you get close in you will find interesting details, for example, this building has windows that can be opened for ventilation and cooling. Almost all buildings in America, which look similar, have permanently sealed windows and very big energy bills for ventilation and cooling.

13. Some of the buildings in Curitiba have wonderful details celebrating the environment, such as the Memorial Building where we held the 4th International Ecocity Conference. In the lobby of this building there is a small artificial creek. In the United States this would not be possible because people might twist an ankle and sue the building owners. Individuals in the United States will have to take more personal responsibility if such graceful ecological features are to be created there.

14. In Freiburg, Germany, these water features called “bachle” go back hundreds of years. They are simple shallow trenches that carry refreshing water through the city streets.

15. Water purifying projects can be very attractive like those designed by German artist Herbert Dreiseitl from Uberlingen.

16. Another of Mr. Dreiseitl’s works is this beautiful staircase waterfall that combines natural flow and urban features – our cities could have many such places where both nature and culture are celebrated.

17. Also in Germany, architect Jochim Eble is designing fairly tall and dense structures with greenhouses and trellis systems for heating and for plants.

18. Rooftops are greatly neglected in the city of cars, parking lots, sprawl and speeding from place to place. If you slow down to pedestrian speeds, it becomes obvious that rooftops are an enormous resource. In Kathmandu, Nepal we see a man relaxing and carrying a baby, a woman gazing into the pedestrian street below, picnic tables and chairs, solar hot water panels, black rubber cold water tanks, steel hot water tanks, prayer flags, laundry – rooftops are full of life and very useful there.

19. In Darjeeling, India, the third tallest mountain in the world, Kangchenjunga, rises over popular rooftop restaurants and private balconies.

20. Not far from where I live, in Oakland, California, is one of the world’s largest rooftop gardens. It looks like an ordinary public park with a small lake, but in fact it is the roof of a five story parking garage that covers three quarters of a city block. From the ecological point of view a train station would be better than a parking structure, but the rooftop park is a clearly a success.

21. Architect Ken Yeang, who is with us at this conference, designs “bio-climatic” architecture and “green skyscrapers,” buildings with spaces carved into them for plants, ventilation and shade. Shading structures, sometimes moving, are often attached to his buildings. Green skyscrapers cost more to build initially than many modern buildings the same size but end up saving energy and money – and helping minimize damage to nature.

22. Architect Michael Timchula is also here with us. In his new Citizens Center here in Shenzhen an enormous roof sweeps over the next City Hall building and Conference Center. Again, as in Mr. Yeang’s buildings, enormous amounts of energy are saved simply by creating shade and breezes – in this case, with the largest roof in the world. This roof is the architectural equivalent of a massive mechanical system for cooling.

23. Now a few words about bridges and bridge buildings. Some think of them as fanciful, but many exist and function quite well and if we are to create cities that are intimately accessible to pedestrians, very convenient and friendly, then they are one of our more important design options. Here we see a small bridge between two buildings in Darjeeling. I saw women hanging out laundry to dry on both buildings cross back and forth to talk with one another. Meantime, beneath the bridge, people took the small passageway at ground level from one side of the block to the next street over: pedestrians can easily go almost everywhere.

24. The bridge in this photograph is close to a town it its own right. As depicted in this drawing of a boat race on the river Seine in Paris, the 18th century bridge linked both sides of the river with a highly “mixed use” structure constituting an enormous degree of urban variety and intensity.

25. In Seattle, Washington, USA there is a park that is a bridge, called Freeway Park. It is both a great place to have lunch and relax and also a quite link between one side of the freeway and the other.

26. Then there is always Venice, Italy, the only sizeable city in the world that is car-free. To critics who say cities can’t operate without cars or that bridges in cities are romantic extras that don’t mean much, the intimacy and beauty of Venice proves them wrong: the city thrives economically.

27. Hagata Canal City, is a shopping center with surrounding residential and commercial buildings designed by Architect Jon Jerde of Venice, California. As in Venice, Italy, this set of structures, the largest private development project in Japan, features very popular water canals and bridges, if in a very different esthetic.

28. One of the most interesting and celebrated of artists advocating for bringing plants and native birds and insects into city architecture is Hundertwasser of Vienna, Austria. Hundertwasser Haus, is a subsidized housing project for lower income Vienna citizens – who love it, but find it’s main problem to be too many tourists. It is one of the three or four most popular tourist destinations in Vienna.

29. As seasons change, because it is covered in life…

30. ...so does the Hundertwasser Haus. We see it here transforming from summer to fall attire.

31. I mentioned Paolo Soleri earlier. Here we see a model of an ecological town that is in essence a town in a single building, something like the traditional Indian pueblos of the southwestern United States. This town would accommodate about 5,000 people. The solar greenhouse on the lower slope of the sunny side of the town delivers warm are in cold weather and when it is hot, its glass panels simply open up so that the air rises up out of the structure without entering the building.

32. This is Soleri’s experimental town of Arcosanti that he is building in the high desert north of Phoenix, Arizona. Started in 1970, the town is only about 5% built at this time. If ever constructed, it would house around 7,000 people and occupy approximately one tenth the area of automobile-oriented towns of its population, rise twenty or thirty stories over the landscape and have no cars whatsoever. Elevator will be its only motorized transportation.

33. Back in Vienna again, there is perhaps the closest approximation to Soleri’s single structure cities to be found anywhere: Alterla, a set of six 26 and 27 story buildings with housing, shops, schools, recreation areas, grocery stores, churches, interior and rooftop swimming pools – and a transit line to downtown Vienna.

34. This is one of my own drawings of a single structure town in a very hot climate, a town with trees arching overhead and lots of shaded open space for the breezes to blow through.

35. Now if we imagine comparing modern single use towers or slab buildings with the highly complex mix of uses of an ecologically diverse town we might portray the comparison in a pair of cross sections. On top we see the single use buildings. In the structure below we can see that warehousing, instead of being built far from the center of town accessible only by truck, freeway and millions of gallons of gasoline every year, is in the lower portions of the structure, raising other activities up into the sun. Movie theaters, photo labs and other uses that don’t need natural light are also in the lower areas. Higher up we have living and public spaces, views, solar angels taken into consideration and a system of small pedestrian streets and rooftop gardens.

36. Similar to Soleri’s single structure city, I’d also propose a structure that is somewhat more spread out and linked by foot and bicycle bridges, but still very three-dimensional. This town might be for about 20,000 on hilly slopes angled slightly toward the sun in an area similar to where I live, with orchards, vineyards and forest products as a possible sustainable economy.

37. The town center is over-arched with pedestrian and bicycle bridges making the whole town easily accessible with no motorized traffic, creating sheltered interior open spaces like human-made canyons with their own special climate.

38. Gene Zellmer, a California developer with a talent for drawing, has been proposing small cities that look like hills rising from the landscape.

39. Looking into the interior of one such city, we can see pedestrian streetscapes with housing sloping inward to create sheltered public plazas and approaches to shops, offices and other urban public spaces.

40. Now let’s look at a series of basic shapes. Here, a building something like one of Ken Yeang’s green skyscrapers rises in a city with its carved out “skycourts,” that is, courtyards high in the building, creating shade, breezes and places for plants.

41. This drawing represents some of the features we see in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Relatively thin towers rise from the city and rise above a pedestals two or three stories high. From down in the streets, with a row of trees on the sides of the streets and another row of trees on the pedestals, the towers are barely seen. The pleasant close-in views of the street are, then, the opposite of the vast views of the mountains and ocean that are seen from the towers. The people there like both kinds of views, and the density and complexity of mixes means transit works well and people can walk to many places they might like to go.

42. Then if we imagine fusing the towers and pedestals into a unified design we would have even more density and more variety of experience.

43. These designs become something like small pieces of the single structure city inside a more conventional city.

44. I think one of the more important features of the ecocity will eventually be recognized as the “keyhole plaza,” a plaza with one corner open so that the citizens can look out over the plaza and see a treasured view of nature celebrated by being framed by some of the city’s best buildings. Nature and culture are brought together in mutual respect in this arrangement of public open space, buildings and views.

45. Now to get back to Berkeley, where I live, and to look at some of the projects that are within the power of citizens groups to accomplish, such as planting orchards and gardens in the city parks, schools and streets. Here one of our volunteers is planting trees at a junior high school next to the basketball court.

46. As well watch over the years…

47. ...the trees grow up. They are integrated into the school curriculum so that the children learn about orchards and food gardens – the food harvest there becomes part of the school lunches too.

48. Delivery services, like this one in Berkeley, are one of the important aspects of the ecocity, and if they can be pedal powered, all the better for energy conservation and avoiding pollution. We need in addition to land uses working well with transit and bicycles, delivery services so that cars are not needed for heavier loads and bad weather shopping. Another thing that is part of the whole picture of a functioning ecological city is “proximity policies” such as the policy to hire local people whenever possible to minimize commuting. The ecological city needs to get these four elements well coordinated: land use, healthy transport, delivery and proximity policies.

49. One of our activities in Berkeley has been “de-paving,” that is, removing asphalt and concrete where parking can be replaced with gardens, orchards and other ecologically more beneficial features. This de-paving project took part at a low-income housing site.

50. A garden resulted, and has been used for social reasons as well as food production ever since.

51. About ten years ago Ecocity Builders and other people interested in ecology and creeks marked every curb in the city under which the creeks flow, most of them in buried concrete pipes. It was an educational project and involved spray painting 860 places on the curbs with “creek critters,” that is, the animals associated with creeks: fish, dragonflies, turtles, salamanders and so on. Each of our twelve creeks was represented by a particular animal.

52. We have managed to open up and restore three blocks of creeks in Berkeley – not that much, but a start. Here a bulldozer paid for the by the state of California is being directed by Ecocity Builders. The blue line in the foreground is where the creek will appear after two years of volunteer work.

53. Getting ready to excavate a creek valley, one of our volunteer poses with the tools of the trade: shovels, picks, rakes, wheelbarrows.

54. 375 volunteers working in small crews on Saturdays over a year and a half carved out a canyon that was started by the bulldozer and planted hundreds of native plants and a fruit orchard.

55. Four years later it looked like this…

56. ...and native animals like this native crayfish moved in immediately.

57. In this picture, Emily, the daughter of Kirstin Miller who is with us here today, watches a dragonfly. Hundreds of children have taken advantage of the restored creek to learn about nature.

58. There are two ways to create ecologically healthy cities. One is to build such cities on land with no development on it yet, an approach sometimes called “new town” building. Another approach is especially appropriate these days since most appropriate places for cities are already occupied and in the United States in particular, these places are occupied by very low density, automobile dependent development that needs to be removed if we are to have healthy cities. A system for doing that is something I call “ecocity mapping,” or “ecocity zoning.” It starts by understanding what your existing town or city looked like before people arrived. Where I live, it looked like this illustration. There was incredible biodiversity there in the San Francisco Bay Area, with every manner of life in the water, air and land.

59. The first step in ecocity mapping is to map the way it used to be. In this case we see Berkeley represented with its yellow sand beaches, creeks and hills.

60. Now if we take a map of the city today, find the major centers and neighborhood centers and if we want to reinforce those centers with more density and much more diversity so that they can become genuine pedestrian/transit centers with ecological design features, then we can draw concentric circles emphasizing “walkable” distances. The map ends up looking something like this, with the greener areas being places where every opportunity is taken to removed development over many decades, while sending the development toward the higher density pedestrian and transit centers. There are many tools for doing accomplishing this and paying for it but they are too detailed to discuss in this presentation. They will probably be covered in the symposium I will be part of in the next days.

61. If we imagine a town like Berkeley, we could imagine bringing creeks back into the city by removing houses – formerly located where the pink rectangles are in this drawing – and building an increased amount of housing in apartment style buildings, upper right hand corner.

62. Imagining this process on the scale of the whole city over fifty or one hundred years we could imagine rolling back sprawl development and developing an urban landscape in nature that looks more like small, tall cities with satellite villages and small hamlets where there used to be automobile dependent sprawl.

63. Zooming in for a closer look we can see clustered buildings covering a relatively small area, leaving room for restoration of waterways, agriculture and natural landscapes. Neighborhood centers have become whole villages in their own right.

64. In a number of places, some of all these ecocity pieces are coming together. In downtown Oakland, California we can see a new bridge building, the United States Federal Government Building, in fact. Though the creek is artificial here, it is celebrated water, and set in a lively pedestrian environment.

65. In downtown Berkeley we have a place where a one story bank building, two parking lots and a printing press building occupy almost a whole block of the most crucial area of downtown. Thousands of people every day walk from the regional train station to the University of California campus and thousands of people hold office and other jobs here. The City and the University have been interested for years in doing something more interesting with this land. Ecocity Builders now has a proposal called the Heart of the City project before the local planners that would close the street, raise the buried creek, and create a public plaza,

66. It might look something like this. Here we have those features and in addition, buildings that angle toward the sun, rooftop gardens and cafes and shops accessible to the public, a bridge building and set of rooftop “streets,” mid block passageways at street level for pedestrian access and so on. This is our big current project in Berkeley. We are making progress and now believe that we have a fairly good chance of success. If we look closely at the drawing we can see someone sitting at a table at one of the rooftop cafes,

67. She’s a student at the University working on one of her papers and in the background to the west is the city of San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge and the wonderful bay we have there. I am absolutely convinced taller buildings can be made very human and extremely enjoyable.

68. Our first step in that direction is the new Gaia Building, third tallest building in downtown and named after a bookstore on ground floor. It’s the first building in Berkeley with an accessible rooftop, with terracing, trellises and rooftop trees and gardens. It represents a whole new esthetic in which the building almost reaches up into the sky with its trellises and plants, rather than terminating in a hard line.

69. When the vines grow out they will be red trumpet vines like the ones in the foreground. I believe it is an important step in our city in the right direction.

70. Across the bay, San Francisco might look something like this one day, a city held together mainly by people on foot, bicycle, bridges and occasional streetcar rides, instead of cars, asphalt and oil. It could be the city of “access by proximity,” the city in which the architecture and arrangement of buildings, open spaces, natural areas, streets and bridges have created a paradise for pedestrians. Such cities would be friendly to the natural world that should surround us in full vitality and health.

I would like to conclude my talk with one more crucial design principle and then comments on our own work here at Shenzhen. I hope we will endorse a proclamation that helps the rest of society – and ourselves – to reshape cities, transforming them into ecocities. With such a document we hope to carry our influence to the United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development next week.

But that design principle first. Many people in my country are delaying year after year, decade after decade. With the exception of a rare few people in a small number of cities, they are not beginning the redesign of the city on ecological principles. Instead, many of them, and even some of the most conscientious of them, are trying to improve the automobile or other components of the existing city. When a person is not used to thinking of the whole ecological system or the interconnected and interdependent parts of a whole living system, it seem impossible that to improve the automobile might actually make the whole system far worse. It is not just a theory, though, it is fact.

In 1973, for example, the United States underwent an “oil shock” when we experienced gasoline shortages after the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries increases oil prices. Cars were rapidly made more energy efficient, approximately 30% more efficient, within five or six years. That meant people could then travel farther on less gasoline – and they did just that and built housing out farther out into the countryside. Over the next 25 years in California, while cities were expanding 50% in population, the land area of cities expanded 100%. Ultimately, making the car more efficient made sprawl much larger, which promoted more driving, more cars, more pollution, more energy use and so on.

The time has come for us to face the necessity for a more fundamental redesign, the redesign of cities, and nothing, with the possible exception of putting an end to humanity’s ridiculous wars, is more important. To help us in that task, at the second, and later, the third International Ecocity Conferences, in Adelaide, Australia and Yoff, Senegal, respectively, delegates from more than thirty countries drafted a document called “The International Ecological Rebuilding Program.”

It’s objective was to lay out the kind of institutions, policies and particular tools required if we are to actually redesign and rebuild cities for long term sustainability. We will be using this as a starting point here at this conference and will attempt to refine that the International Ecological Rebuilding Program and take it with us to the World Summit on Sustainable Development, and from there to peoples and governments everywhere.

And so again, I welcome all of you to our ambitious conference filled with ideas and talent. I again thank our hosts for their work and vision, and wish us all the wisdom we will need to successfully accomplish our good work here.