Cities for a Greenhouse World
by Paul F Downton
(Note: Cities for a Greenhouse World was first published as a series of four articles in Greenhouse Living.)
1 What is an ecocity?
What is an ecocity? The shortest definition I know is by Richard Register who says it’s ‘an ecologically healthy city’. He also says no such city exists. What’s it got to do with greenhouse? If the latest reports are true, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that turning our cities into ‘sustainable communities’ is a key response to the social and environmental challenges of adapting to a greenhouse world.
Ten years ago in California, Register convened the first international conference
devoted to the idea that ‘ecocities’ could and should exist. The
second such conference, EcoCity 2, was run by Urban Ecology Australia in Adelaide
and introduced ‘ecocities’ to the Australian environment; Ecocity
3 was in Senegal and put the developing world firmly on the agenda. The Fourth
International Ecocity Conference was held in April this year in Curitiba, Brazil
- the first place in the world to officially proclaim itself ‘an ecological
city’.
Curitiba – Ecocity?
Is Curitiba living up to its claim? I was invited to the conference and keen to find out. The short answer is ‘no’, even though Curitiba has pedestrianised many inner-city streets, has a trend-setting public transport system that makes buses almost as effective as trams, has controlled sanitation and drainage problems by creating magnificent parks, and has recycling programs where the urban poor can trade garbage for food.
In ‘developing’ countries’, ecological development is a means
of providing infrastructure, improving the basic conditions of life and redressing
economic injustice. Because it has tried to do these things, Curitiba lays
claim to the ‘ecocity’ tag, with social and environmental education
programs spearheaded by ‘Unilivre’, an open university for the environment.
So the slightly longer answer is, ‘maybe, if they stay on track’,
but one of the biggest challenges facing Curitiba is the rising tide of car
ownership, pollution, and population growth pushing the city limits.
Enemy Number One
Like Richard and others who have studied the way cities function, I see the car as ecocity enemy number one. Australian researchers Peter Newman and Jeff Kenworthy produce hard facts about ‘automobile dependence’, proving the enormous energy and resource cost of road vehicles. In famously violent America, cars kill more than twice as many people as murders. Australia’s statistics won’t be much different. Pollution from car exhausts makes some city air almost unbreathable. Carbon monoxide spewed from every car, every day, could kill its occupants several times over. We’ve learned to think of streets as roads rather than places for people. Kenworthy calls these deadly, networks ‘traffic sewers’ and they feed urban sprawl, that curious phenomenon which enables people to live in the countryside by destroying it!
We seem to have lost the plot with cities. Cities are where people come together for mutual shelter and sustenance. We need our cities to be ‘sustainable’. They are economic engines and cultural generators for civilisation. I defy you to name one thing that you value, in your home, or your neighbourhood, that isn’t a result of urban civilisation – and if you picked the fruit tree in your backyard, consider that if it wasn’t for city-making, it wouldn’t be there!
Cities should be beautiful. It’s hard to think of any that are. They’ve
gone growth crazy. Like a federal treasurer on heat their creed is growth for
its own sake. In the process of growing they have consumed the living environments
that support them.
Limits to Growth
Healthy cities are contained, with limits to growth. Some cities, like Portland, Oregon, and Waitakere, New Zealand, have instituted urban growth boundaries and anti-sprawl policies, but it’s still a new idea for planners who are used to rolling with the punches and administer planning policies that accept and encourage sprawl.
Land clearance for urbanisation has outpaced agricultural clearance in Queensland where more trees were felled in the last ten years than were planted during Bob Hawke’s Billion Trees program. And agriculture is part of city-making. You can’t have cities without agriculture and you don’t really need agriculture without cities. Ecocities are about recognising this interdependence and planning city-regions to work as one healthy place, fitting in with the demands of nature.
Maybe we don’t like the idea that nature makes demands. After all, we live as if the world can take anything we throw at, in, or on it. But what goes around, comes around. The water gets poisoned, so we poison the water to make it safe again. The seas are so polluted we swim in our own sewage. The air is so dirty it makes us sick. Good soil is buried under concrete and poisoned to stop termites eating our houses. We smother our crops with poison to stop other bugs eating our food supply. We rip energy out of the ground, burn millions of years of geological accumulation, and change the climate of the entire world! And so it goes on.
Ecological cities are about not doing all these things; they are, positively, about providing us with food, water, shelter, energy and materials in a way that supports the life that supports our life.
Of course, our life as humans is not simply about eating, drinking and material goods, or at least we like to think it isn’t! It’s also about things that are intangible. How do you photograph ‘community’ or ‘friendship’? How do you measure love, culture or freedom? Ecocities are about living fully as the social creatures we naturally are, in a way that doesn’t compromise the very conditions of our existence. In every way conceivable, ecocities are about the quality of life.
Demanding Health
For most of us, a high quality of life would be inconceivable in a dictatorship, we value freedom of expression, and don’t like to be told what to think or how to live in our own homes. Yet we have abdicated responsibility for how we live in the shared homes of our cities. Ecocities are about healthy human habitats and require a healthy body politic. I don’t know of any ecocity advocate who doesn’t insist that direct, participatory democracy is essential to making them happen and keeping them working. Like healthy households, healthy cities need the participation of everyone who lives in them.
A high point of the Ecocity 4 conference was the presentation by representatives of a small city in South Africa called Midrand. They have adopted an ‘ecocity’ program to address developmental pressures of poverty and population growth (from 20,000 to 200.000 people within 18 months). This includes community food gardens, eco-friendly construction using local resources, cycling and walking as preferred transport, ‘greening’ of workplaces, and emphasis on advanced and environmentally responsible technologies as the basis of economic development. In Midrand, like Curitiba, they are trying to address fundamental issues of healthy human settlement. And next year, in a sort of ‘coming of age’ for the movement, the Ecocity 5 conference will be in Midrand. South Africans and Brazilians have discovered the creative power of ecocity ideas – and here in Australia the people of Whyalla and Leichhardt have also taken some important first steps, which you can read about in a future article in this series.
2 Getting around – Transport and the shape of cities
In the first article in this series [part 1 above] I identified the car as ecocity enemy number one, but like a lot of people, I own one! In the same issue of Greenhouse Living there was a fascinating piece about the new breed of ‘eco’ cars which create almost no pollution. Changing the motive power might reduce pollution, but it won’t make cars any less of a weapon, after all, the world’s first motor vehicle victim 100 years ago was killed in New York city streets by an electric taxi! And even with ‘green’ cars we will still be ‘auto dependent’.
Don’t get me wrong. I actually like cars! (oops, there goes my green credibility…) But a car is not a transport system, it needs Kenworthy’s ‘traffic sewers’ to get around. It needs a driver, too, so a lot of people simply cannot use it. The very young, old, infirm and those without money to run a car are all dependent on someone else to drive them.
Before Oil (B.O.) there were no cars. Until fossil fuel-ishness swept the world we relied on animal and human energy to carry our bodies from place to place. Mostly we did it by walking. When streets were made for walking cities were much more compact, rarely more than half-an-hour across – by foot.
When trams and railways revolutionised transport, enabling people to move further, faster and more comfortably, they changed the shape of cities from cuddly and roundish to leggy and spread out. Riding the train or tram you could still get across the city in about half-an-hour, but you travelled much further. Wherever the iron horses stopped people got off and walked, so the compact walkable city shape was repeated along the legs of the railway lines.
Then along came cars. And because cars go anywhere and we build roads to ensure it, our flabby cities have begun to lose any discernible shape at all!
A 5 minute walk to get a loaf of bread not only consumes less energy than a 5 minute drive (and helps keep you healthy), it requires less resources altogether because you don’t require all the paraphernalia of wide bitumen roads and car parks, and so on. We measure distance by how long it takes us to travel. Places like Adelaide are referred to as 20 or 30 minute cities by planners, but Adelaide is only a ‘twenty minute city’ if you’ve got a car to yourself. If you had to walk from the one end of the metropolitan sprawl to the other it would take you 3 days!
Australia has two of the world’s leading researchers on transport, energy and urban form (Peter Newman and Jeff Kenworthy) but although we suffer rising petrol prices and have some world class urban sprawl, Australians have been dangerously complacent about the issue. In the USA, home of the auto-as-god, the problems of urban sprawl have become central to politics and planning concerns. Al Gore has made the fight against urban sprawl a major part of his presidential campaign whilst James Howard Kunstler’s books on the need to "remake our everyday world for the 21st century" are popular and influential. Kunstler points out that Americans pay premium prices to holiday in towns that have walkable, traditional street patterns yet live in places that are totally automobile dependent. We tend to do the same.
Walking and cycling are the preferred means of getting around in ecocities, they use the least amount of energy and encourage neighbourly interaction. Ecocity mobility is thus about saving energy and encouraging community. Can we make our existing cities more friendly and less like pancakes? Are there any examples?
The answer is yes. Melbourne has a good tram system that helps make the city more workable and walkable than car-dominated Adelaide. Sydney’s Olympic Games put a lot of pressure on the city’s infrastructure and led to calls for people to use public transport - whilst the people are calling for better public transport! Brisbane and Perth have good examples of pedestrianised city centre streets. Some Australian vacation destinations show us that towns and cities can be developed around people rather than machines, places like Noosa in New South Wales come to mind.
Nevertheless, given the proven benefits of ecological development there are surprisingly few examples of projects ‘on the ground’. Vancouver in Canada has encouraged pedestrian-dominated, leafy apartment and townhouse developments along convenient transit routes, making travel to work easy and attractive and reducing the pressure to spread further development into ever-more-distant suburbs. But an extensive global survey by Hugh Barton and Deborah Kleiner from the UK revealed ‘a paucity of really innovative projects at the neighbourhood level’ and many political and practical impediments to their development. Most projects turned out to be in Europe – where you might have thought the constraints against innovation would have been greater than in the USA or Australia – and over two-thirds of the projects surveyed had been initiated by the voluntary sector, not government or industry. It was strong community self-interest that initiated the Ithaca Eco-Village where five small, mostly car-free, neighbourhoods are being constructed around a village green 3 kilometres from the centre of the city of Ithaca in New York state.
In the USA the idea of neighbourhood and the main street focus of traditional small towns is driving a whole new approach to development that is moving away from sprawl and insisting on designs for towns and cities that make it easy to walk to work, to shop, to school and to places of recreation and no longer condemn mums and dads to life as taxi drivers while their kids grow up. One of the earliest, and most influential of such developments is Village Homes in Davis, California, a compact suburb where environmentally sensitive planning has resulted in good property values and a strong community spirit. Compact, pedestrian-scaled neighbourhoods focussed on tram or train stations are known as TODs (transit oriented developments) and are typically more dense and socially diverse than the suburban norm. Originally American concepts, TODs offer lifestyle choices that fit Australian market and political conditions but they are still only a compromise environmentally, with a dependency on car use higher than normal European or Asian standards.
Compact, walkable cities can sound like threatening places to people raised with the freedom and space of quarter-acre blocks, even if they do like to visit them on vacation occasionally. One of the challenges facing architects, planners and developers in Australia is how to convince people that higher density can mean beauty as well as convenience and better energy and resource efficiency. Unfortunately, there are few modern examples here of attractive urban environments, dense or otherwise. The grey, boxy new townhouses in the heart of Adelaide, for instance, do little to impress people with the merits of higher-density living.
Nevertheless, even in downtown Adelaide, with the community-initiated Christie Walk project, and in Melbourne there are efforts being made to create medium-density, car-free developments to show what can be done to integrate the demands of energy and resource efficiency, equity, community, privacy and accessibility.
3 Food, water and waste
Cars and transport problems bedevil our cities but what do we need transport for? Many trips are to get hold of the stuff we need to live. Food is a form of energy storage and is basic to survival. Most of us don’t chase creatures across the landscape or forage for food any more, we drive to stores to choose processed products provided by a massive industrialised system reliant on a huge consumption of fossil energy! As readers of Greenhouse Living will appreciate, that energy consumption contributes directly to greenhouse gas emissions and global climate change.
If we could cut down on that energy use by getting our food and supplies in some other way we might not only contribute to the health of our climate but also to our individual health and to the health of our cities. But providing them in urban environments is a bit more complex than picking berries, chasing the local wildlife and dipping your hands in a stream for a drink.
In our present urban environments, after we consume we produce waste. Really we are modifying and passing on nutrients and material which should be destined for re-use in a living environment. Waste is pollution. It is material that we have not found a use for or have failed to re-insert into the cycles of nature. There is no such thing as waste in nature. If we are serious about survival in the long-term we have to ensure that there is no such thing as waste in our cities.
Left to their own devices, the planet’s rocks and minerals would simply weather away but the astonishing miracle of life changes those minerals into things that creep, leap, branch, grow, and reproduce. Plants, animals and microbes ensure make nature a persistent and efficient recycler. Water is continually cycled through the environment and living organisms carrying nutrients and oxygen and maintaining ecosystem function. Our blood is mostly water and water is the blood of the biosphere. All life depends on water, its flow, and its cleanliness. To quote Theodor Schwenk from his 1965 book Sensitive Chaos ‘Together earth, plant world and atmosphere form a single great organism, in which water streams like living blood.’
Just as we would have a dead planet of inanimate minerals without the action of living things, so our buildings and cities are lifeless without our presence to bring them into being and keep them running. Our cities and buildings run off fossil fuel and pollute and waste precious water but it doesn’t have to be that way. We are learning how to replicate the cycles of nature in our cities and we must do this if we are to sustain our human habitats beyond the age of waste and fossil fuelishness. There are already a number of projects in cities around the world that show us how this might be done successfully, from people-based waste recycling in Curitiba, Brazil to the creation of sophisticated ecological office buildings in Europe and America.
Construction often begins with mining but it also begins with growing things. Countless Australian homes are built from timber. In effect we grow our houses. The crops we grow to make our own habitat should not damage or destroy the habitat of other living things; sustainable forestry has to be part of any program for eliminating waste from building. Sadly, efforts to create sustainably managed plantations have only just begun in this country.
During construction material is wasted that could be reclaimed for re-use or recycling. Run-off of water from building sites can waste precious soils, clog drains and pollute waterways. Since the mid-1990s more and more councils have followed the lead of Gosford in NSW by encouraging or requiring silt dams during construction. The building industry is also beginning to take notice and change its practices. It is now possible to find building sites with different bins for sorting and saving materials like wood, glass and bricks, and state governments are starting to provide guidelines for ‘waste management’ on construction sites.
Globally, there is a move towards ‘industrial ecology’, meaning production processes in which materials are recycled through the product life cycle. The German government mandated this some years ago, which is why a BMW or Mercedes is designed so that at the end of its life it can be taken apart and easily separated into recyclable components. If you buy an energy efficient AEG appliance in Germany they guarantee that it can be returned to the factory after its useful life is over so that its material can be used to make the next generation of cooker, fridge, or whatever. Architects are just beginning to realise that this can be done with buildings too – they can be designed for ‘deconstruction’ to make it easier for materials reclamation after the building’s life is over.
We think of food as something grown outside of urban centres, but many cities already demonstrate the potential for growing food within urban boundaries. Australian suburbs can be productive places as any permaculturalist will tell you! But the sprawl of our suburbs make them inefficient in other ways and the area of roads and hard surface needed to service a dozen dwellings in a typical ‘traditional’ suburb could service four or five times as many dwellings in the more compact city designs favoured by ecocity advocates - and release more land for productive use.
Food is a form of energy storage. The landscape of cities can be designed to grow food as well as look pretty. Trees can be chosen for their capacity to bear fruit, for instance. Would you eat fruit from a street tree? Not in the many polluted environments of today, perhaps, but air quality and pollution levels are an indicator of the health of our urban habitats and so one measure off whether a city was ‘ecological’ might be whether you could eat the fruit straight off its street trees! Food can also be grown in pots, small courtyards, on balconies and roofgardens and there is a growing movement to promote the use of roof gardens for recreation, aesthetic delight, and food production.
Roof gardens have been around for thousands of years – since the Hanging Gardens of Babylon - but in Australia more recent work on this has been done by City of Port Phillip Rooftop Greening project in Victoria and they point to places as diverse as Toronto, Moscow and Switzerland for further examples of modern roof garden research. Roof gardens can be used to modify the local climate, filter the air, provide shade, and assist in the thermal performance of buildings. They can also be used to detain and filter stormwater run-off, reducing the strain on the urban infrastructure of stormwater drains and keeping precious, clean water for use in our buildings – and grow food.
A number of cities have developed wetlands to treat ‘waste water’ and use natural processes to make urban systems work better. These range from the acclaimed wetlands of Davis, California, to the extensive wetlands around Calcutta that treat effluent and support fish farming and vegetable production for one of the world’s largest concentrations of humanity. In South Australia the Salisbury Council hosts Australia’s largest, constructed wetland, and, of course, there are the well publicised wetlands constructed for Homebush Bay.
As American planner Anne Whiston Spirn put it ‘Buildings are mini ecosystems. Pipes and wires link every building to the city’s water supply, utilities, and sewage system. Water and energy flow in, sewage flows out, and waste heat radiates to the surrounding environment. The building interacts not only with the urban infrastructure, but also with the surrounding air, land, and water.’ Every time we can make those mini ecosystems work better we make our cities more ecologically viable – and improve our quality of life. If you can imagine careful environmental design and management operating in every aspect of making and maintaining our built environment, growing food, cleaning water and eliminating waste, you might begin to get a sense of how a fully ‘ecological’ city might work.
4 Community and ecology
That we live in cities at all is one of the most interesting things about us humans. Cities are complex social structures. Without the foundation of that underlying social structure there could be no physical structure. As well as the energy and resources that are drawn from the ecology of the physical environment, there is a social ecology that sustains cities. We more commonly call that ‘community’, and it is fundamental to human life, health and happiness. Ecocities are to do with keeping that community active and alive and at the same time maintaining the vitality and viability of the natural environment.
When we try and envisage ‘community’ we tend to hark back to pre-industrial images of living like the villages of yesteryear. Modern Australian cities are not much like those villages of old. People are used to living at a distance from one another. They are used to moving from one house to another, even one town or city to another, every few years, and there is little time in which to get to know neighbours well. Families are often distributed across the country and in Australia many people accept the normality of having ‘close’ family living half a planet distant! How then, can community mean anything in an environment of such mobility and stretched channels of communication?
Community and participation
Community is about mutual support. If you want a regular water and power supply and food on the table you’ll need a whole bunch of people to provide it. The relationships between all the providers of goods and services set the main patterns of community. Friendships and kin relationships add closer textures to that pattern. It all comes together as a cohesive pattern of support in which we have individual responsibilities. And we really must take responsibility for the state of our cities. Global 500 award winner Herbert Girardet wrote that ‘Cities must become socially, economically, and ecologically sustainable, fulfilling basic human needs for shelter, subsistence, and social cohesion. For this to work the active participation of people in shaping their urban environment is crucial.’ I wrote before in Greenhouse Living (GHL6) that, like healthy households, healthy cities need the participation of everyone who lives in them, but how do you translate that idea to action?
A dirty word
One step is to recognise that we are political creatures. Politics is a dirty word to many Australians but if you have any interest in what happens beyond the threshold of your own front door you have an interest in politics. Traditionally, local government is dismissed as being about roads, rates and rubbish. Think of that in terms of transport, land-use planning, recycling and sustainable economics and you can see that major decisions affecting your environmental future take place at this level of politics – and it’s also the level at which ordinary people can most easily get involved. You can still have a chance to get elected and have an effective voice on council without being a cog in a party political machine. Healthy human habitats require a healthy body politic. Participate in local democracy while there’s still a chance!
Planning transportation?
Walking and cycling use the least amount of energy and encourage neighbourly interaction. The most effective transport policy of all is to build things close together so that the need for transport is minimised (that’s also land use planning). Take a leaf from Australia’s best known pedestrian advocate, David Engwicht, and don’t let roads ruin your neighbourhood!
Fed up with rubbish?
Make sure you have an efficient and effective recycling service! Worried that your rates are not being spent on projects and programs with long-term benefits for the community? Get yourself on council and introduce the idea of long-range planning and investment in sewage recycling, or renewable energy generation infrastructure, or energy efficiency programs as sustainable economics!
Community and vision
Communities are too often on the back foot in the process of development. Typically, designs for new buildings are put together, funded and approved for development with very little input from the community that is ultimately effected by them. Rather than be stuck with the problem of fighting rear-guard actions on inappropriate development when it’s too late, our communities should be in the front line of proposing positive change, promoting appropriate development that answers community needs and expectations. If we want more attractive, affordable, safer, healthier, sustainable development we can hardly expect it to come from the same people and adversarial processes that have delivered the unsustainable environment that now surrounds us.
So, another step along the path to regaining control of our city homes is to become an active advocate for the kind of place you want that home to be. Don’t just shop around for a nice neighbourhood as a passive consumer, create the neighbourhood you want to live in as an active citizen!
Although overseas studies have shown that there are still relatively few examples of innovation at the neighbourhood level, over two-thirds of the projects they surveyed had been initiated by the voluntary sector, not government or industry. That means community. It is community initiative that has produced the pedestrian scale, energy efficient, healthy home environments being constructed at Ithaca Eco-Village in New York and the Christie Walk Project in South Australia. There is nothing to stop local community initiatives for ecological development taking place anywhere in Australia.
Good information about neighbourly, environmentally responsible building is more readily available these days, helping us to make informed decisions as consumers and citizens. A very good new information source that brings together all the key issues for making a healthy, environmentally responsible home for Australian lifestyles is just about to be released by the Australian Greenhouse Office. Called ‘Your Home’ it consists of an attractive magazine that sets out the main ideas and it’s supported by a set of over 60 fact sheets - all available on the net for free. |
Snails and creativity
Possums and eucalypts fit the flows of this amazing country without having to think about it. They have evolved here to have that perfect fit. For us to fit even half as well we need to consciously design our place in Australia’s nature. Possums and eucalypts live in natural ecological communities, our human communities are not so natural any more and we have to work hard to replicate the cycles of nature in our cities. Snails grow their shelter whilst we have to build ours but where the snail has no choice about the form and material of its shelter, we have countless choices..
The snail carries its home around on its back but we carry our homes within us, as visions of how we want our lives to be and ideas of what might be done to achieve them. If you can imagine a healthy future of greenhouse living you have begun the task of creating it, you can see the path forward – now, take those first steps, and don’t allow planners and to lead you off the track! Enjoy the journey! Ecocities are, most of all, about making healthy, happy places to live. As ecocity pioneer Richard Register put it back in 1987 "…there is room for everybody in the ecocity effort. It is not vicarious but participatory, not to be dictated, but to be created in a million ways simultaneously from the grassroots to the highest levels of planning and back down again, with a role for each of us."
There are an increasing number of examples of where real, practical projects are putting all these principles into practice and in future issues of GH Living I will be introducing you to some of them. As well as descriptions of the developments you’ll meet some of the people involved and learn about the paths they took in realising their ecocity visions.projects are putting all these principles into practice and in future issues of GH Living I will be introducing you to some of them. As well as descriptions of the developments you’ll meet some of the people involved and learn about the paths they took in realising their ecocity visions.
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