How People Trying to Improve Things Can Make Them Worse

In the world of people attempting work to make human society more
sustainable there are two very large generally unexamined problems:

1. Making small counterproductive “improvements” without understanding the whole system – thus failing to understand the dynamics of longer range failure.

2. Failing to address the built infrastructure of city, town and village as the foundation for arrangement of many technologies, including such crucial ones as energy,transportation and food production – all severely impacted by sprawl cities.

Examples:

New Orleans people helping put people back in dangers’ way by helping rebuild in car-dependent, low-density housing below sea level surrounded by 350 miles of levees.

Alternative: Build a pedestrian streetcar city of compact diversity on artificial mounds. Such development elevated above the floods is easily accomplished physically for neighborhoods or whole cities designed around pedestrians, bicycles and streetcars but impossible in the case of car-dependent sprawl because of the massive amount of land and fill that would be required. Such elevated development on artificial mounds is done in may parts of the world, including in New Orleans at New Orleans University.

Creek fans in Berkeley preventing the opening of creeks into the foreseeable future by refusing to consider land use shifting strategies fearing any kind of serious change, even through willing seller deals, that could remove some development along creeks.

Alt.: Ecocity mapping and transfer of development rights (TDR) strategies or simply spending City money for density shifting to help transit, housing needs and open space. Such strategies are pursued in South Lake Tahoe with a TDR strategy and at Portland’s Johnson Creek with a simple city funded willing seller deal purchase strategy.

Environmentalists driving Priuses so they can continue low density living and driving.

Alt.: Weaning from cars through using transit, bicycling, moving to centers, and supporting zoning and politics for shifting cities to centers oriented development. Happens all the time with people quitting or going lite on car dependence.

Solar on houses promoting low-density living and continued paving, car use and thus more energy use.

Alt.: Solar to apartments and condos from central generating plants and the grid. Solar on buildings not close to urban or rural centers should not be encouraged as the practice encourages NOT changing the disastrous urban structure that presently exists. Solar energy utilizing power plants or “solar electric farms” in sunny locations and “wind farms” exist and should be promoted.

Featured Presenter: Whitney Dotson

Rick Bacigalupi (huge thanks) went for a walk with Whitney Dotson to discuss his work and the upcoming Summit.

Whitney Dotson is an environmentalist and activist. He lives in Richmond, California and is a member of the Board of Directors of Citizens for East Shore Parks. Dotson has worked to restore Breuner Marsh and to protect Parchester Village in Richmond.

Parchester Village was developed after World War II for African Americans who moved to Richmond to work in the shipyards and could not buy houses elsewhere. It was built on the donated land of founder Fred Parr, a white developer. Local residents say that it is the first African American homeowners’ community in the Bay Area. About 1,000 people live in 400 single-family, one-story homes on this small tract sandwiched between two railroad tracks. It has remained mostly black since it was built, though some Latino families have moved in recently.

Whitney Dotson’s father, the late Reverend Richard Daniel Dotson, was one of the early settlers in Parchester in 1950 and became a community leader, organizing to preserve Breuner Marsh and helping to get adjacent Point Pinole turned over to the East Bay Regional Park District. Mr. Dotson will present on Day 2 (http://www.ecocityworldsummit.org/program.htm) of Ecocity’s main conference sessions.

More…

Whitney Dotson was 5 years old when he moved into the brand-new house his father bought on Jenkins Way in Parchester Village. It was the early 1950s, and the planned 420-house development was Richmond’s first subdivision in which an African American… (read article at latimes.com) 

Global Public Media - Ecological City Design

Richard Register discusses the relation of city structure to energy consumption and biodiversity with David Room of Global Public Media.

To stream video (.ram) click here.

To download audio (.mp3) click here.

SAN FRANCISCO TO HOST ECOCITY WORLD SUMMIT 2008

World’s Best and Brightest Will Gather to Design the City in Balance with Nature

San Francisco will host the 7th International Ecocity Conference (Ecocity World Summit), next April 22-26 2008. The event will be convened by nonprofit Ecocity Builders and held at UC Berkeley Extension and Nob Hill Masonic Center/Grace Cathedral.

“Times are crying out for a much larger effort in the direction of the city that restores, not destroys, the biosphere,” says Richard Register, President of Ecocity Builders and author of (New Society Publishers, 2006). The answer to many of our pressing social and environmental problems, he believes, is to redesign and rebuild cities for people and revitalization of nature instead of for cars and sprawl.

The world-renowned series follows the first, held in Berkeley in 1990, and five subsequent conferences in Australia, Senegal, Brazil, China and India. Ecocity World Summit 2008 will take center stage before the highly influential Bay Area community of architects, planners, designers, policy makers, green businesses, political and nonprofit leaders, with the added participation of international experts and delegates.

Speakers include architect and master planner Jaime Lerner, former Mayor of Curitiba Brazil; former Governor of Maryland Parris Glendening, President of Smart Growth America Leadership Institute; Wang Rusong, President of the Ecological Society of China; Fiona Ma, CA State Assemblywoman and Chair of the Congressional High Speed Rail Caucus, Stephen Schneider, Stanford University Climatologist; plus architect and design visionaries like Paolo Soleri and Richard Register, and directors from nonprofits such as Global Footprint Network, who have important sustainability accounts for entire countries.

The conference will also draw high profile journalists and media attention; conference organizers are already signing on media partners and are receiving requests for interviews and articles.  According to proponents of the ecocity approach, the healthy built human habitat is the “walking city,” of which some parts of existing cities are already good examples. Whether small scale or large, it would cover a small fraction of the land consumed by today.s sprawling cities and towns. The guiding principle is “access by proximity.”

“The idea is to design communities so that instead of having to drive “over there,” what you need or want is “just around the corner,” says Register.

Current conference sponsors include SF Environment, UC Berkeley Extension, SF AIA, EDAW, BART, SF Neighborhood Parks Council, SPUR, Ecological Society of China, SF Bicycle Coalition, Ecocity Builders, Green Century Institute and organicARCHITECT.

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For more information or to schedule an interview with Richard Register or other Ecocity World Summit speakers, please call Amy Senn at 312.528.9111 x102 or e-mail Amy at AmySenn@sensiblecity.com.

Good morning.

The Ecocity Media Portal is born. Thanks given.