POTENTIAL ‘URBAN FRACTALS” ABOUND
by Richard Register

A little explanation first. Paul Downton attended and spoke at the International Ecopolis Development Forum in Ningbo, China in October. At that event he was using the term “urban fractal” – the first I’d heard it. Brilliant, I thought!

A fractal, as many of you will know from “chaos theory,” is part of a whole system that holds within it all the essentials and patterns of the larger system. The larger system, may in fact be a fractal of a yet larger system.

Fractal systems may be “nested” into one another, like Russian dolls, into the almost infinitely small and large. In our little world of ecocity theory, building and promotion, one thinks of traditional villages, integral neighborhoods and projects like our proposed “Heart of the City Project” and the fact that, if built, they would embody all the major systems of a city, including the basic arrangement of relationship of parts. It’s all there in the fractal – the smaller versions – as it is also in the larger thing, the city. Thus, a traditional village with plaza, housing, shops, government offices, schools, open spaces, places of worship, entertainment, sports, elements of nature celebrated and so on is a fractal of an ecocity. So too for the “integral neighborhood,” a neighborhood center with unusually high diversity of functions and renewable energy technology and passive energy design supported by bicycles and so on.

I have to say these are exceedingly rare, and beyond the whole system of a traditional village, which usually lacks much in the way of “appropriate technology” such as solar and wind energy systems, simply not available for subject matter in my slide presentations. That’s one of the reasons why Ecocity Builders works so hard promoting not just recording ecological elements of cities but works to build them, or as Paul Downtown says, build “fractals” of the whole ecocity.

With that rather long-winded introduction, probably wholly inappropriate to this shot article, I can go on to say there are some very interesting possibilities before us in supporting the building of such urban fractals.

They are, without much elaboration because this is trying to be brief and just a hint toward further study, the following:

1.) Our downtown Berkeley Heart of the City Project, aka these days, “Strawberry Creek Plaza”

2.) A notion by Yu Jian De, my industrialist host in Ningbo last year, who is hoping to build a ecotown conference center hotel and resort that focuses on ecological solutions in the built and technological community

3.) An outline plan for a small footprint ecological city in the DMZ
(DeMilitarized Zone) between North and South Korea, where, as I learned while visiting in October, an enormous number of native plants and animals have returned due to the long absence of people there

4.) Yellow Springs, Ohio where the intentional community organization that hosted the First U.S. Conference on “Peak Oil” and Community Soulutions, early in November, is contemplating something other and more ecological than the threatening new sprawl proposed by developers in their corn fields – maybe an eco-town core

5.) Davenport, California on the coast north of Santa Cruz, where Mia Hanak and her supporters are contemplating a site for their Natural World Museum (of art and nature) as possibly the heart of a small ecotown linked to Santa Cruz by the railroad that is already there

6.) Williams, California, which is fighting sprawl development and where a city council member and our old Ecocity Builders friend Dixie LaGrande is looking for alternatives embodying ecological insights

7.) Then there is the possibility, nibbled at but not taken hook, line and sinker by Chinese officials, for experimental pedestrian, bicycle and streetcar cities in China.

8.) Mills College, for which we wrote a Green Plan finished early in the year, could become such an ecocity fractal if their trustees decide to take the plan seriously

9.) And perhaps other locations in Oakland (a lot of us in Ecocity Builders do live here after all) before Jerry Brown loses forever his opportunity to achieve an ecocity great leap forward

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