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Ecocities emerging
Kirstin Miller, Ecocity Builders
Greetings,
Welcome to the September edition of Ecocities Emerging, an initiative of Ecocity Builders and the International Ecocity Conference Series.
The Ecozoic Era refers to a vision, first promoted by cosmologist Thomas Berry, of an emerging epoch when humanity lives in a mutually enriching relationship with the larger community of life on Earth.
Will we be able to make the transition in time to retain a biosphere healthy enough to regenerate living systems now under extreme stress? There is no way to be certain, but our position is that there’s no time to sit around and wonder about it: now is time for action.
Thank you for all that you are doing to help accelerate progress toward a civilization in balance with living systems. Maybe one day all cities will be ecocities.
Kirstin Miller, Ecocity Builders
Oakland, California, September 2008
Contents
Ecocity World Summit 2009 Istanbul Turkey
West Coast Green Charrette September 26th in San Jose CA
Work begins on Tianjin eco-city in China
Ecopolis: Architecture and Cities for a Changing Climate (book review)
So how much eco is enough for your city?
Kenya’s “Hacienda”
South Korea Trades Dirty Expressway for Amazing 6km Greenway
The Bridge Between Thomas Berry and the Ecozoic is the Ecocity
Car-Free Journey
(September 2008 issue)
For more, see the Ecocity Builders website.
For good neighbours, live in a quiet, car-free street
John Vidal, The Guardian
Mrs A lives in Dovercourt Road in north Bristol and considers five people on her street as friends. But Mrs B, who is roughly the same age and lives round the corner in a very similar house in Muller Street, has only one friend.
The difference, says a study, has nothing to do with personality, but is because of the weight of traffic. Fewer than 150 vehicles a day pass down Dovercourt Road, compared with more than 21,130 a day on Muller Street.
New research, based on interviews with households on three Bristol streets, has found that people who live with high levels of motor traffic are far more likely to be socially disconnected and even ill than people who live in quiet, clean streets.
It confirms a study done by a British academic in San Francisco in 1969. This found the weight of traffic in urban areas largely determined people’s quality of life and also identified a major erosion of community on busy streets. The Bristol study is the first time that research has been conducted in Britain…
(19 September 2008)
Rejoice! It’s time to reclaim the car park
Bibi van der Zee, The Guardian
Hooray, one of my favourite days of the year: International Park(ing) day. This glorious anti-car festival only started in 2005, when a San Francisco-based group called REBAR decided that they would take over a parking space for a day and turn it into a park. So they did.
They brought along some astroturf and a bench and a tree and fed the metre all day long and had a lovely day with people asking what they were doing and why. As one of their members explained, they re-interpreted a parking space as a potential inexpensive short-term lease, and decided that it didn’t just have to be for cars: the day was a success.
But it didn’t stop there. People wanted to know how they could do it for themselves. REBAR explained the basic principle (don’t forget to feed the metre – that’s it really) and set up a website where people could post up pix. By the following year REBAR had a partner (the agreeable Trust for Public Land) and every year since then it’s just got bigger and bigger, spreading all the way around the world, to Italy, Germany and Australia (in the YouTube clip above)…
(19 September 2008)
