In his landscape architecture practice Walter Hood’s interests include the critical examination and development of specific urban landscape typologies for the American city. He likes to reinforce specific cultural, environmental, and physical complexities of the city and neighborhood landscape. He is renown for his much-enjoyed public opens spaces such as “Splash Pad Park” in Oakland. He is currently working on the Ecocity Builders sponsored redesign of the open space where Center Street is now located in downtown Berkeley where his new design will celebrate and help reveal the dynamics of Strawberry Creek and the connection between city and campus.
Ecocity thinking and practices are rising in world consciousness, as evidenced by CNN running two stories today with connections to the Ecocity World Summit.
LONDON, England (CNN) — It’s easy to overlook the impact buildings have on greenhouse gas emissions, but the places where we live and work contribute over 30 percent of global greenhouse emissions.
An artist’s impression of how the Dongtan eco-city will look like when it is completed. The first stage is due to open in 2010.
Although the term “green architecture” was only coined about 20 years ago, architects have been embracing environmental or sustainable design for decades.
Today, architects are transforming our urban landscapes in ways which were previous unimaginable. Aided by cutting edge design and construction techniques, the bold new structures of today owe much to the techniques used by pre and early industrial pioneers. [Read this article]
And Peter Head was given his own profile, talking about his work in Dongtan.
(CNN) — Peter Head is Director of urban design and development at Arup, the global design and business consulting firm.
Peter Head, of global design and business consulting firm Arup, is a noted pioneer of sustainable development.
Head is in charge of planning and development for Dongtan, the eco-city planned for construction on Chongming Island near Shanghai. Head himself describes it as: “the world’s largest sustainable development project.”
It was while he was overseeing the construction of the Second Severn Crossing — a bridge across the Bristol Channel linking England and Wales opened in 1996 — that he first became interested in sustainable development.
SHANGHAI — To the residents of China’s most crowded and populous city, the air on nearby Chongming Island has an unfamiliar quality: It’s fresh.About an hour’s ferry ride from the edge of the city, the island’s farms and fishing villages are a world apart from the pollution that pervades modern life in China — and increasingly spills out beyond it.A steady breeze rustles through lush green marsh grass, the only sound besides the chirping of migrating birds at the mouth of the Yangtze River. Fields of watermelon and cabbage stretch for miles.”It’s the last piece of undeveloped land in Shanghai,” said Yan Yang, who grew up in this city before going to work for Seattle architecture firm Callison. “It’s a treasure.”
The island may be lodged in the past, but it soon could leapfrog into the future. It’s here that Shanghai developers plan to build what they say will be the world’s first sustainable “eco-city” on a plot three-fourths the size of Manhattan.
Called Dongtan, or East Beach, the project attempts to channel China’s voracious demand for housing and energy into a radical new model: a city that eventually supports half a million residents, recycles almost all of its waste, produces its electricity from wind turbines, solar panels and biofuel, and ferries people around in hydrogen fuel-cell buses and solar-powered water taxis. Construction is set to start next year, and city planners hope to complete the first phase by 2010, when visitors flock to Shanghai for the World Expo.
NOTE: This project, brought to us by Jesse Fox at Treehugger is very interesting, with a lot of comparison to be drawn to the Ecovillage at Ithaca. To learn about some of the struggles to get this project off the ground (or in the ground as the case may be) check out this excellent series of short films on Lammas. [ Undercurrents.org ]
After having their plans rejected once by British planning institutions, a small group of families has been granted permission to build a small ecovillage in the Welsh countryside. The tiny village, to be called Lammas, is planned to cover a 74 acre site of pasture and woodland.
Planned to be completely independent of national infrastructures, water would be drawn from springs and rooftop rainwater collection. Electricity would come from local, renewable sources such as small-scale ethanol production and an existing water turbine. All houses would be built out of straw bale, earth and timber, with rammed earth floors and hemp fiber insulation, and would include compost bins and composting toilets.
The Lammas website features incredibly detailed plans regarding every aspect of the community’s existence, including site layout, architectural and transport plans, an ecological footprint assessment and detailed business plans. Closely following Permaculture planning concepts, the “low impact” village concentrates residences and compact, intensive functions in a denser core, with less intensive functions spread out along its edges. A significant portion of the community’s land will be set aside for natural woodlands, containing native plants.
Planning permission for the community became possible when the Pembrokeshire County Council implemented a “low impact development” policy, requiring a high level of self-sufficiency in local households’ use of resources. Pembrokeshire is one of two local authorities in the UK with such a policy regarding local sustainability.
For more detailed information, check out Lammas’ website at www.lammas.org.uk.
This post is part of an ongoing series examining current and future trends in ecological city building ahead of the 2008 Ecocity World Summit during Earth Day Week in San Francisco this April.
We featured Mathis Wackernagel recently, and talked a little about his project, the Global Footprint Network. The Global Footprint calculates a countries Ecological Footprint, similarly to a way that a country might tout its GDP, and the statistic is becoming more and more accepted worldwide. This nifty quiz based on that concept will tell you you’re personal part of the Ecological Footprint. This is the Australian version, and versions for the US and Canada should appear shortly.
Ever wondered what you’re contribution to ecological impact is? The answer might surprise you, so try it out! Then imagine what your impact would be if you lived in an ecocity, and retake the quiz with that in mind.
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Architecture, Land Use, Landscape+Urbanism, San Francisco | Tagged: Ecocity World Summit, landscape, Splash Pad Park, Walter Hood | 
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