Today Richard Heinberg asked if I could write up what I see as "ecologcical urban design." Might intereste others as well.

Richard Register

ECOLOGICAL URBAN DESIGN - A SHORT SUMMARY

Urban design should start with the realization that cities, towns and villages collectively constitute the largest most energy consuming, nature disrupting creation of humanity. Their normal functioning even outstrips human impacts of outright war. (Oddly, in some places, like the DMZ of Korea, war has actually helped nature regenerate.) Facing peak oil, climate change and species extinctions - gigantic phenomena in their own right - any "solution" that neglects the arrangement of that built community infrastructure is highly unlikely to result in good insights or effective solutions.

A key insight at the core of healthy urban design is that organisms, which are extremely complex, and human-built complex systems need to be well organized or else, in the case of organisms, they die, and in the case of cities, they kill massively - when they could in fact be healthy both for their citizens and reciprocally beneficial with natural systems around them. Cities, towns and villages, if designed like healthy organisms, could function in a healthy manner in their natural environments.

The most important environment to consider for the design and healthy functioning of the city is the bioregion. Another way to think of shifting to a healthy bioregional context for cities is "relocalization" but very specifically with knowledge of ecological dynamics in any particular location and realization that if the city and the bioregion don't work, the whole biosphere is in deep trouble - and it doesn't work and it is in deep trouble. Furthermore, which most people miss: the biosphere is ripping and crashing on a colossal scale very largely BECAUSE of the way we build cities. There is not higher priority enterprise human beings should be engaged in at this time in history and in the life (and death) of the biosphere.

Realization of the nature of what we are dealing with is essential in good urban design: we are building a civilization that is not "like" this or that or "influenced" by this or that, but actually, literally IS cars/sprawl/paving/cheap energy (oil and never to be anything else) and war for maintaining that infrastructure, meaning warships, bombers, tanks, guns, the towns called military basses and so on. That's what all of us but inveterate hermits and lone trappers and farmers live in and that which constitutes the nodes both small and large in the vast network of supply, processing, recycling and disposal that sustains us.

We need to start ecocity design from the realization that we can have extremely energy efficient transport with priorities arranged around the principle of "access by proximity." There are two ways to get from point A to B: to go there or to be there. Design can place the points close enough together you can walk around the corner and get almost anything you need. That's being there. That means we need to build so that a diversity of land uses and activities are located close to one another and in good relation to each other and to such local features as sun angles, local weather, soils, local species and natural features and networks like waterways. That means further that we can have cities based on prioritization that runs like this: first on pedestrian access, then bicycles, then elevators, then streetcars and trains, then buses, and lastly and probably only for emergencies and rental for travel to remote areas far from cities, something that functions something like today's cars. Without the realization that the pedestrian city is possible, design can get tangled in massive contradictions, such as in promoting the energy efficient car - which most efficiently promotes sprawl and the INefficient city. The city based on ecological principles can then be designed as a pedestrian/dense and diverse/renewable energy infrastructure taking up far less land than is the case with the car/sprawl city. For those who think it's impossible, there are Venice, Italy; Zermatt, Switzerland; the Medina at Fez; Gulongyu, China and probably a number of other cities to open up their design imaginations. Anything that exists is possible and those four are all car-free cities that definitely exist. They also thrive.

The land area ratio for the best of ecologically healthy cities compared to car/sprawl cities will probably turn out to be in the neighborhood of 1 to 7. We won't know those ratios until we try to design and actually build such cities. We do know two lines of rail equal sixteen lanes of freeway in delivering passengers or freight. Anyone who designs and plans car/sprawl cities instead of cities for rail and pedestrian access, after hearing those ratios above - around 7 to 1 in land consumption and 8 to 1 in transportation efficiencies - would have to be borderline or over the edge insane.

Design is usually, and probably at its best, a process of seeing the whole end product of the design while putting the pieces together harmoniously. Thus to get ecological city design off to a good start it is also important to realize that humanity is way overpopulated and dispersing people to tens of millions of small villages is a sprawl-style scatterization fantasy in its own right. There's not enough productive surface on the planet for human population that thinly scattered - and we need to leave larger areas to nature too for its own productive purposes. Thus high density is not only needed for "access by proximity" but because of our current state of vast numbers. But even at small scales high density, provides the POTENTIAL for good design, which can only be accomplished if the relationship of the parts is "integral," too, that is, arranged for the maximum mutual benefit of all parts in their interrelationships. Permaculture has thought through many of these proper relationships for the homestead and farm, and these principles can be applied to cities, towns and villages as well. Think for example of sun angles best on one side and therefore solar greenhouses on larger buildings as well as small in temperate climates and shade and breeze structures in hot climates. Think work places and living places close together and strips of nature, such as creeks woven through the city and open for education to the youth and celebrated as important because of their high biodiversity to all citizens.

In the design process that sees the whole while putting the pieces together, broad hints that become standard practice become important guidelines, and so I'll end this short thesis on ecocity design with an image of the metropolis or "megalopolis." It is now designed for cars and oil and asphalt and is massively large and thinly scattered over hundreds of square miles, from Boswash to Los Diego. Natural and agricultural areas and networks like high biodiversity waterways and ridgelines can be opened up in those diffuse and land-and-life suffocating thin sheets. The sprawled metropolis, averaging the height of all buildings with asphalt and concrete surfaces, useless lawns, useful parks and gardens and bodies of water and intrusions of meaninglessness and ecological dysfunction like golf courses, would probably produce a shell on the Earth, with voids in it representing the proportion of building interiors, of only a foot or two in height. There are millions of acres yearning to breath free under such thin, suffocating surfaces. We can roll back sprawl development while concentrating preserved and new, higher density structures in clusters of buildings relating optimally to transit. There would be far more natural and agriculturally productive close in to the community. Pedestrian/transit centers, as we roll back sprawl, would in every megalopolis, transform eventually into a galaxy of smaller cities where central business districts used to be, Ecotowns where sizeable districts used to be and ecovillages where neighborhood centers used to be. All these communities of different scale would be linked with transit, bicycle and pedestrian networks, some along side the natural networks of waterway and shoreline. The whole metro region thus takes on far more cultural and ecological diversity. Such cities, where people put design effort into restoring native species as well, through reforestation, creek daylighting and restoration, planting native trees, bushes and flowers in the streets and parks and even on rooftops and in window boxes, can actually enrich biodiversity.

Thus the end point of ecological design, the living continuity that is the end "point," is actually not just the city that isn't as bad as the city we have now, but an instrument to enhance both human creativity and health and nature's creativity and health. It's the city that improves the lives of people and nature at the same time.