Tag Archives: planning
More exciting developments on the 2013 Ecocity Summit!
Ecocity World Summit
is the international forum…
for innovators and pioneers, designers and planners, policy makers and administrators, professionals and business people, environmentalists and developers, teachers and students;
of sustainable cities, towns and villages of the future;
from theory to the application of all things related to the ecological city
After culling from over 500 proposals from 48 different countries, the Summit organizers have unveiled their final program selections. September 25-27 will be packed with 100 diverse, thought provoking and enlightening lectures, workshops and presentations.
A bit about the Ecocity Summit Program:
The program organizers have used a novel grouping system to select the presenters and organize the program information. Firstly, each presentation or workshop at the summit addresses one or more of the five main themes:
A Talking Head Dreams of a Perfect City
Osaka’s robot-run parking lots mixed with the Minneapolis lakefront; a musician’s fantasy metropolis
By DAVID BYRNE
Originally published in the Wall Street Journal
New Orleans on a rainy day. National Geographic Stock
There’s an old joke that you know you’re in heaven if the cooks are Italian and the engineering is German. If it’s the other way around you’re in hell. In an attempt to conjure up a perfect city, I imagine a place that is a mash-up of the best qualities of a host of cities. The permutations are endless. Maybe I’d take the nightlife of New York in a setting like Sydney’s with bars like those in Barcelona and cuisine from Singapore served in outdoor restaurants like those READ MORE
We need a New Science of Physical Economics
by RICHARD REGISTER
It’s time we put economics into some sort of physical scientific context that makes sense. Economists have drifted off into a disconnected world where, blinded by massive amounts of money and mystery, they see themselves as a kind of high priesthood calling the shots for practically everything, then saying they were blindsided by the debacle in the real estate world and the up-trading in wildly irresponsible and, strictly honest to say, greedy derivatives.
Futurism, Realistic
I was in Korea recently sharing the stage with futurist Jim Dator. He’s head of the Research Center for Future Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Privately he told me he thought signs were very bad, that we probably would not make it, that is, that humanity and the biosphere would undergo catastrophic collapse taking all his futuristic dreams with it.
Degrowth and Ecocity Design
Richard Register
I have noticed that there were few tools offered in my memory of the Degrowth conference for actually bringing in a new economics that embodies degrowth. I followed Joan Martinez-Alier’s links and some of the text of the contents of the publication he mentioned, in an issue of the Journal of Cleaner Production, and it seemed to me, as usual among business people, economic theorists and even climate change solutions advocates, the built environment and what its variety of expressions imply was completely omitted. Since various different designs and layouts of cities vary massively in their impacts, this line of investigation seems to me to be crucial.