| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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feature Emerald Cities In the old environmental mythology, modern cities were the guys who would usher in Armageddon. As the offspring of industrialization, civilization's big environmental sin, cities would be the hell in which our descendants would pay for our ecological screwups. Then the green cities movement turned this myth on its head. In March 1990 over seven hundred people from around the world attended the First International Ecocity Conference in Berkeley, California. Since then, dozens of similar conferences have convened and hundreds of smaller ones. Suddenly, mainstream architects and city planners are celebrated for designs implementing basic green city concepts. And the expression "sustainable development," a central theme at the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, is everywhere. Yes, the new mythology says, cities are at the root of a lot of the world's environmental problems. That's not because they are cities, but because they are Bad cities. If we could create Good ones, or transform our Bad cities into Good cities, not only would they stop destroying nature, they could aid in her recovery. Furthermore they could bring about a human recovery, too. Australian architect and urban ecologist Paul Downton even claims, "The city can save the world." Cities use between two-thirds and three-quarters of the global consumption of fossil fuels. Acid rain and global warming are caused for the most part by the fuel-consumption patterns of modern cities. They require a constant flow of raw resources from forests, fishing grounds, mines, rivers, aquifers, and farmlands. In payment for these, cities pump back poisons and wastes and create mountains of garbage. Cities are also crucibles of human misery. Eight-hundred- and-fifty-million urban people worldwide are homeless or squatters. Half of Third World city-dwellers have no plumbing or electricity. Disease, prostitution, violent crime, and drug abuse all flourish in cities. What's more, between 1950 and 1990 the number of urbanites soared from 200 million to over two billion. And as cities expand they devour everything in their path. Three billion people are expected to live in cities by 2025. Three- quarters of North Americans now live in cities, and by the century's end, most of the world's citizens will, too. We have become an urban species, and as Earth's most influential creature, the future of our cities is inextricably tied to the fate of the entire natural world. There are models for successful green urban planning. Late in the last century, American designer Frederick Law Olmsted believed that weaving the natural world into the urban web would have physical and emotional health benefits, and his City Beautiful movement resulted in such urban triumphs as New York's Central Park. In the first two decades of this century, English architect and city planner Ebenezer Howard designed two "Garden Cities" employing many green city principles. Lechworth and Welwyn, in England, were designed to be as self-supporting and efficient as possible; their outward growth was limited by greenbelts of parklands and farms, which supplied them with food and were fertilized by the city's wastes. Today, both cities remain beautiful, culturally lively, and they have the top two public health ratings in the country. Howard also stressed another modern green city staple, the importance of locating work, home, and play close together. This trend in urban planning was interrupted by the explosion in popularity of the car. Suddenly, America was about transportation, about going somewhere rather than being somewhere. If you wanted nature, you could drive to it. No need to bring it near or into the city. To French architect Le Corbusier--who felt he was complimenting the city when he called it an "assault on nature"--and other modernists, "green" was little more than a decorative element in the urban "machine," certainly not an intrinsically valuable ingredient. Since World War II, new towns and cities, designed explicitly with the car in mind, have sprawled over miles, paving wild areas and farmland with generic, single-family houses surrounded by exotic landscaping and punctuated by gigantic malls. Not only was Le Corbusier's machine metaphor inadequate for describing the basic human needs in an urban environment, it also proved a tragic irony, as cars, the individualist's machine par excellence, turned the modernist utopian dream into a banal nightmare. Architect and sculptor Paolo Soleri resurrected the green city notion in 1970 with the ground breaking at Arcosanti, a model ecocity in the high Arizona desert. Soleri, then in his early fifties, laid down most of the basic principles of what was to become the green city movement, coining the term "arcology" to describe urban architecture and ecology working as one integrated process. Arcosanti is a prototype arcology designed for five thousand residents, combining compact buildings with huge solar greenhouses on a four- thousand-acre preserve about 60 miles north of Phoenix. With help from a small army of interns and students, Soleri has been building his "city" from the ground up. Still incomplete, it remains a formative model and an inspiration to the movement. Soleri wants to amplify population densities to super-high levels, conserving energy and space, and thus maximizing the wildlands beyond the city's borders. He wants densities at Arcosanti as high as 215 people per acre. (New York City's average is 33 per acre, Delhi's 72 per acre.) Soleri's designs pack people into buildings that grow upward, rather than outward; at Arcosanti the buildings will rise 250 feet and extend about a quarter of a mile in length, but some of Soleri's designs rise hundreds of stories into the sky. For Soleri, high density is more than a practical and efficient way to package people. It is a vital way to reconnect them to each other, enriching family life and social ties. No one in Arcosanti lives more than a few minutes from anyone else. People will travel within the city by foot, bicycle, or elevator, rather than by car. Children will live within walking distance of their grandparents, as well as day-care centers, schools, and recreation. "The city," Soleri says, "is a crowding phenomenon. . .a life maker. . . .When the hyper-organism, the city, surrenders its makers and dwellers to the dimly alive pseudo-organism called suburbia, death is dancing." Richard Register, perhaps Soleri's most articulate and influential student, agrees. "The essential thing," says Register, "is to create more and more diversity closer together so you don't have to travel so far to put your life together--your economy, your social life, cultural life." Author of Ecocity Berkeley: Building Cities for a Healthy Future, published in 1987, Register founded Berkeley's Urban Ecology in 1975 and is now president of Ecocity Builders. Like Soleri, Register envisions the ecocity (he prefers "ecocity" to "green city," arguing that "a city may be green, while its underlying structure may still be ecologically unhealthy") achieving high population densities. "Cities, instead of being flat like a tortilla, should be three-dimensional--much more like the old cities of Europe, though not necessarily as three-dimensional as Manhattan. . . . Instituting mixed-use zoning and zoning that concentrates development rather than scattering it is an important part of the solution." To make high density more attractive, Register says, urban buildings would have plenty of terraces and balconies, rooftop gardens, and bridges linking different buildings. Also, everyone would live just a short walk from the relative solitude and consolation of surrounding wildlands. "For higher densities to work, they also have to be combined with mixed uses," says Register. For instance, a good ecocity would never have a high-density area devoted entirely to office work like San Francisco's downtown or to tenement housing, which excludes everything but residential housing. Rather, ecocity inhabitants would live near to, maybe in the same building as, their office. Register's Ecocity Berkeley portrays the city after undergoing its own ecotopian revolution. As Berkeley expands, it grows toward the sky and shrinks horizontally back toward its neighborhood center. Tall buildings of various shapes are connected by elevated walkways and surrounded and covered by gardens and fruit trees; restored creeks meander through downtown. Register's "restoration development" approach to rebuilding cities links the creation of green sanctuaries with increasing human densities elsewhere. When a developer commits to a project in a residence and business center, he or she also adopts responsibility for restoring or preserving a plot in one of the low-density sections of the city: demolishing a building, say, or restoring a creek, or replanting native grasses in a field left vacant by the removal of a parking lot. In this way the ecological infrastructure would improve with age, rather than merely expand. To see a transformation of a city like Berkeley will take a long time, says Register. "Some of the cathedrals took six or seven lifetimes to build. Ecological cities are like that--they're not going to come to culmination till several generations from now." Register's restoration development program requires a basic shift in values among city dwellers, which raises an important chicken-and-egg dilemma: people won't make ecologically healthy cities till they've undergone a transformation of values. But today's cities, so insulated from most of the natural world, are inimical to the formation of those values. About 20 years ago, Peter Berg, founder of the Planet Drum Foundation in San Francisco, coined the expression "bioregion" to describe an area, usually defined by a watershed boundary, occupied by a community of plants and animals. Bioregionalism, his philosophy of living attentively and responsibly within that community, caught on among back-to-the-landers in the early 1970s. In the mid- 1980s, however, Berg focused his bioregional philosophy on city life, creating the Green City Program. Rather than treating cities as "placeless" human creations that erase the landscapes over which they are built, Berg suggests honoring the natural limits set by a place. "Cities must identify with and put themselves in balanced reciprocity with natural systems," he writes. Berg's bioregional philosophy, which adopts the metaphor of evolution, is central to the green city ethic. The city is a creation of nature, but a rebellious one in need of reconciliation with its surrounding natural community. Making the city hospitable toward native plants and animals, and respecting the natural features of the landscape it occupies are seen as the most elementary steps in such good citizenship, steps that will keep inhabitants aware of their place in nature. Today, the kind of urban habitat most celebrated and targeted for restoration is the urban creek. To bioregionalists, there is something almost sacred about the flow of water through a place. To know where you live, poet and bioregionalist Gary Snyder says, you must know where your water comes from and how it journeys through. That most urban creeks have been forced underground is symptomatic of the city's alienation from nature; but that creeks continue to flow beneath our cities represents hope. In addition to the symbolism and the aesthetics, there is another good reason to restore creeks. Water attracts and sustains life. City streams are ideal wildlife corridors, supporting a high density and diversity of plants and animals. Where cities have opted against burying their creeks, they become favorite features. A wide creek banded by trees and parkland winds through Christchurch, New Zealand, for instance, and water birds, songbirds, insects, fish, amphibians, people, and all kinds of plants cluster around it, winding biological vitality through downtown. Austin, Texas, is famous for its urban stream, and where San Luis Obispo, California, has restored a downtown creek, property values and business activity were enlivened. Register was one of the urban creek movement's pioneers, but he warns that though urban creeks, parks, and gardens would be eloquent expressions of a society that took its responsibility to the natural world seriously, overlaying them on cities that are pillaging nature may only mollify urbanites into complacency. In the early 1970s Soleri's other-worldly designs set a fantastic tone for the green cities movement, but there was another bit of seductive fantasy that fueled it, too. Ernest Callenbach's book, Ecotopia, was first published in 1975. The novel is set in an indeterminate time 20 years after the secession of northern California from the Union. The new nation, Ecotopia, is based on strict bioregional and green city principles. Wind, solar, and hydro are the energy sources. The narrator, the first American reporter to enter Ecotopia since the revolution, arrives skeptical. He describes downtown San Francisco: Market Street has become a mall planted with thousands of trees. . . . The street itself, on which electric taxis, minibuses, and delivery carts purr along, has shrunk to a two-lane affair. The remaining space, which is huge, is occupied by bicycle lanes, fountains, sculptures, kiosks, and absurd little gardens surrounded by benches. Over it all hangs the almost sinister quiet punctuated by the whir of bicycles and cries of children... even the occasional song of a bird, unbelievable as that may seem on a capital city's crowded mainstreet. . . . Down Market Street and some other streets, creeks now run. The men in Ecotopia are sensitive (anticipating Iron John) though they vent their testosteral aggressions in war games. Hot tubs are plentiful. Unemployment has been erased by a 20-hour work week. People wear sensible clothes, which they repair rather than discard. Everything is recycled again and again. Biodegradable soybean plastics are the trendy packaging material. Ecotopia is low-tech, for the most part, but certain technologies (e.g. communications) are more advanced than their American counterparts. Education stresses bioregional knowledge and practical work experience. People spend less time accumulating wealth and more time engaged in community activities, in their gardens, in the wilderness. Back in the real world, Florida architect and city planner Andres Duany is the leader of a burgeoning architectural movement known as the new urbanism. Duany and his wife, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, have designed master plans for 76 new towns, city centers, and neighborhoods. In 1982, their new town of Seaside, in Florida, won Time magazine's Best of the Decade Award. The new urbanists, like the ecocity advocates, are strong believers in mixed-use zoning. At a recent talk to the planning commission of Palo Alto, Duany recommended altering the zoning codes so that "neighborhood centers" could be established within residential areas. "The corner store (with a place to sit down and hang out) is my vote for the center of the neighborhood," Duany says. "Ideally, it would also include a day-care center, a bank machine, a dry cleaner pickup, a public transportation stop [in the store], and a small room with a desk and phone in it for the local cop." Though the details of Duany's neighborhood deviate from Callenbach's and Register's (Register isn't sure he's ever used a dry cleaner), there are overlaps, perhaps the most salient being their stress on creating conditions conducive to forming and sustaining local communities. But whereas Register's sketches of Ecocity Berkeley are futuristic, Duany's new towns look old-fashioned, like New England neighborhoods from the 1910s and 20s. He views these decades, before the automobile became the planner's preoccupation, as the heyday of American city planning. But by the 1970s suburbanization became the rule and mega-malls were springing up across the country like weeds. Unlike the ecocity theorists, who deal mostly in futures, Duany is rebuilding neighborhoods and cities in the present. So it's not surprising that he employs a less radical version of ecocity philosophies. For one thing, whereas the green city ideal is thoroughly integrated cities accommodating both wealthy and poor, virtually all of Duany and Plater-Zyberk's towns are extremely expensive, elite communities. Though they pay homage to the ideal of economic and ethnic diversity, they offer no solutions to the fundamental realities of poverty and homelessness. And it is these problems that may finally stand between green fantasies and real, socially just green cities. Some green city activists also criticize Duany and the new urbanists for their willingness to build new towns beyond current city boundaries. Tasteful new urbanist development is still development, they say. Calling it green and community-oriented is little consolation to the plants and animals who lose to it what remains of their shredded habitats. If there is one thing all urban environmentalists share, it is a hatred of the car. Register writes: "Without question the most destructive agent of social disintegration, ecological contamination, poisoning of people and environment, waste of energy, and even homicide (outstripping violent crime by more than two to one) is the automobile." And yet cars remain at the center of the modern urban economy and lifestyle. Perhaps the most notable difference between the Berkeley of today and the one in Register's futuristic drawings is that the latter is carless. So is Paolo Soleri's Arcosanti. Another hot new urbanist is architect Peter Calthorpe, whose transit-oriented developments (TODs) are making waves around the world. Again, the idea of TODs, centering high density, mixed-use neighborhoods around public transportation facilities, isn't striking for its novelty. But in the last 40 years it has seldom been accomplished. Calthorpe has recently completed designs for TODs in San Diego, Sacramento, and Portland. Berg says that cars negate the unique features of a place by insulating people from them--in addition to squashing them (the unique features, and the people). And they take up a huge amount of urban space. "If you could eliminate half of the cars in San Francisco, you'd liberate a third of the street space for parks and gardens and creeks." And, Soleri would add, individual living space. Despite his plan to pack people into small areas, he sees personal living spaces increasing in average size partly through the reclamation of urban areas now devoted to cars: street lanes, garages, parking places, and freeway ramps. Within existing city limits, cars demand all unclaimed space. What could be urban gardens and parks become parking lots and garages. What could be green corridors connecting parks become boulevards. What could, in Olmsted's vision, have been rows of fruit trees become streetside parking spaces. Some cities are taking the transportation bull by the horns. Oslo and Singapore tax cars entering downtown areas with high fees. The people of Amsterdam are taking an even more radical approach to downtown auto traffic; in 1992, 53 percent of the city voted to ban it. Already they have reduced the amount of parking by half and lowered speed limits in many places to 18 miles per hour. Parking fees are exorbitant, and parking violations cost up to 210 dollars in fines and towing fees. Eventually, almost all cars will be banned from a three-square-mile area of the city's center. Amsterdam is expanding its tram lines and plans to build garages near the terminals on the city periphery and more and safer locations to park and repair bikes. The smaller cities of Maastricht, Enschede, Leiden, and Groningen have adopted similar policies, and about 30 other Dutch communities are waiting to see the effects of these changes on the urban economies. Europe is ahead of the United States in implementing many green city concepts, partly because many European cities, such as Amsterdam, were planned prior to today's destructive habits and technologies, and partly because the environmental crisis is felt more acutely in Europe, where there is so much less remaining wilderness. In Vienna, where an airport has recently been decommissioned, a green city is being planned on strict energy efficiency, high density, multi-use planning principles. In downtown Adelaide, Australia, Paul Downton and his group of urban environmentalists are breaking ground on their Halifax Project, an "ecocity" for one thousand people to be built on a six-acre city block, once the site of Adelaide's incinerator plant. Halifax will put passive solar cooling and heating into rammed-earth buildings connected by pedestrian streets, courtyards, and gardens. At least two and a half acres of Halifax will be revegetated and restored.
Gordy Slack is Associate Editor of California Wild. |
Spring 1994
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