Ecopolis: Architecture and Cities for a Changing Climate

Ecocity pioneer Richard Register's review of Adelaide based architect and ecocity theorist/practitioner Paul F Downton's magnum opus, 'Ecopolis: Architecture and Cities for a Changing Climate'

'...why it is the climate change scientists, activists, politicians and sympathetic journalist STILL haven't figured out the connection between city design and layout and the disasters they are working so hard to solve. These issues are big. They are connected. And they are about 90% solved right there in his book.'

Excerpt from Ecocities Emerging, September 2009

'If you want to delve into the history of where all these ecocity ideas come from, where they were developed in theory and experience, from the chalk on blackboard kind of working out the essential geometries to the sweaty digging in the dirt, pouring concrete, working with wood, and planting rooftop and solar greenhouse gardens, you can find no better or more compete source.

Perfect for post docs in the field and field workers in the doc's office with blisters and bad sunburns. Perfect for all restless minds probing what's the meaning of building these here cities in the first place. It's a mind-bending book and THE tome to date, at 607 pages, for the ecocity movement. It's stuffed with illustrations, photos, charts and references enough to make one dizzy, with as many as seven scholarly references on some pages...

Our space is limited in this humble newsletter of boundless ambition so a quick list as to highlights of the cast of characters in "Ecopolis" may whet your desire to crack the covers.

They range from the ever famous Garden City pioneers, Kuala Lumpur/London eco-architect Ken Yeang, city re-arranger and first in the field mayor, Jaime Lerner of Curitiba, Brazil and storied architect and would be city annihilator Frank Lloyd Wright to those of us lurking about the grass roots trying to build new foundations such and Paul and myself.

Bucky Fuller is there with his sometimes random, sometimes universally organizing "pattern integrities," brilliance and engineer's single-mindedness (the fore-mentioned not always consistent), Ernest Callenbach of "Ecotopian" reorganization of politics, society and town design for that dig in the soil, watch the hawks circle, shoot your own meat, urban clanhood/neighborhood mix...

And there are many others from Berkeley's out-front Integral Urban House's Sim Van der Ryn to Paul Hawken's theory of nice business people taking the lead. There is Kropotkin, Illich, Caine, Haggarty and Crump (not a law firm). Guadi and Hundertwasser, New Urbanists, and Bateson, Newman and Kenworthy, Chris Alexander and Frampton and Mollison. There is a lot you can cover in 607 pages determined to say it all and hopefully it will stick. We need to change the world and this is a rock-solid attempt at it. The theory is pretty well represented therein too, including a good deal offered by Paul himself based on his decades-long research and the designing of several built partial "urban fractals," notably Christie Walk a five story strawbale apartment structure (maybe the world's tallest) with work at home space, solar rooftop garden, pedestrian walkway, many recycled building materials, fabulous native plant gardens, lively design and bright colors, etc. right in downtown Adelaide, Australia.

Remembering meeting Paul reading his paper in that now-no-doubt-obscure Greenhouse Gas Conference Report of 1988, 21 years later and counting, I ask again why it is the climate change scientists, activists, politicians and sympathetic journalist STILL haven't figured out the connection between city design and layout and the disasters they are working so hard to solve. These issues are big. They are connected. And they are about 90% solved right there in his book.'