Strategic Development for Restoration - From New Urbanism to Ecocity Building

Excerpt from Ecocities Emerging newsletter, June 2009

'A lesson for the world: neither today's incarnation of environmentalism nor what's usually taken to be "smart growth" is right. Or rather, both are partially right and partially wrong. Here's the story; its lesson applies not only on the edge of the ocean near sea level, as in San Francisco Bay, but everywhere people build cities, towns and villages. Ecocities: one stop shopping for all your solutions!

Architect and New Urbanist Peter Calthorpe...is a well-known champion of New Urbanism and transit-oriented development. His designs are taken from the general arrangements of small towns in that era when towns were still cozy, say the 1940s, and there weren't enough cars or sprawl to give cars and sprawl the bad rap they get these days, as well they should for addicting us to oil and destroying the Earth's climate balance. They had the very temporary delusion in those days when almost everyone could own a car in the US yet nice towns were still with us that cars and cities could be development partners with mutual benefit. Calthorpe says growth is projected at 1.6 million new jobs by 2035 in the Bay Area assuming a healthy economy. It's far better, he says, to build his mildly compact New Urbanist kind of community to prevent the workers from settling 30 to 70 miles away in the Central Valley pushing out farmland and commuting enormous distances. He's right as far as that goes but he offers a very limited list of options: two.

There are a few problems with his proposal. The first is called Peak Oil and the relationship of sprawl to the real estate debacle we've seen practically destroying the banking world, almost the world as we know it...

Wait until gasoline gets even more expensive as petroleum runs short in the near future and people discover the replacement fuels take far more money and energy to provide than the cheap energy that built the suburbs...

Another problem with his proposal from the ecocity point of view is that the densities proposed are not that great, not really that urban and balanced in the sense that you can get around the proposed community in anything like the way real urban centers work to provide housing, jobs and great diversity of products and services at close proximity. Their objectiveis getting people out of their cars some of the time, not getting rid of their cars. Moreover there is something a little wasteful about encouraging people to own cars and not drive very much. Spend $35,000 then not do much about it? The New Urbanists are famous for what I call transit optional development but only the wealthier can afford the luxury to have a seriously polluting item and just not use it much - then feel righteously green in the deal...

But might they not - and Calthorpe too - promote the next step up from New Urbanism, which would be ecocity building? New Urbanism was a step in the right direction but they took it 25 years ago and are still stuck with the same line. With today's multiple crises maybe now is the time for a little more thorough and imaginative thinking on the subject - and some promotion (which developers always do anyway) for a much better yet project...

Another variable that's changed is climate change. There is close to universal agreement among scientists in the field that we are well into a period of global heating and rising seas...

Does rising water also then mean we can actually afford to build on, say, one half or one quarter of the land that will be newly covered by water in the not so distant future and come out way ahead in restoration of both wetlands and bay surface and volume while building too? Not only does ecology suggest we need to study more variables than we used to take for granted but climatology suggests yet even more variables into the future. One would think, then, we really should start taking a very broad perspective if we hope to develop in a way that is genuinely sustainable for this ever faster moving target called the future.

My very modest proposal is this: Given rising seas, why not take the opportunity to solve coastline development problems in a way that solves kindred design problems for all cities and towns everywhere? Maybe there are principles that prevail throughout. (There are!) One stop shopping for all your solutions you might call it, just one of many is the solution for development on low coastlines. That might sound overly ambitious but in fact makes sense, as you will see.

At the same time why not get systematic about slowing global heating and even opening up the discussion about cooling the planet back down a bit. Most scientists say it can't be done - give up. Roll over and play dead. But, nobody has tried yet. Absurdly ambitious? Well, cities are absurdly big, flat and damaging right now so maybe it's not so absurd as it seems at first glance. We need some gigantic thinking for a gigantic set of problems.

Interestingly the starting point in solving these problems is where cities started. In Mesopotamia in the Civilization of Sumer, the city of Ur in present day Iraq, first seriously large city in history, 50,000 to 65,000 variously estimated at its peak, was build on artificial fill. That was around 4,800 years ago. When the Euphrates flooded the city must have been a fantastic place to be, with a vast sea of water flowing past, as if the city were a great ship. That was a "compact" city, a pedestrian city and it simply rose above the flood. With the millions of acres dedicated to cars today, there is no way to raise cities designed for cars on fill, or Calthorpe's transit-optional cities designed to lull car drivers into a kind of 10% consciousness on the subject...

...we don't have a clear idea of what to build. Peter Calthorpe is better than negative or neutral on the subject but got stuck 25 years ago. He's stuck on the ever so bor-ing architecture seen coast to coast with his low to mid rise four story height limit missing the really exciting potential of ecocity architecture. Check out the DMB website for the Saltworks project and see the ever so comfortable and casual architects' upper middle class figures strolling about admiring several different views of green and bay without any imagery of a vital town center or building with any imagination in it featured: life as passive recreation. Calthorpe is missing the ecocity's radical pedestrian accessibility in three dimensions.

Where are the multi-story solar greenhouses, tall buildings terraced for public accessibility so that citizens and visitors can look out to the beautiful views from the buildings instead of always where the animals should be on the shoreline only? Where are the rooftop gardens justified in their relative expense by many users' pleasures? Where are the bridges between buildings, grand pedestrian alleys, gallerias and interior hallways like the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul with beams of light falling through skylights into dramatic interiors buzzing with life, interior streets without stress, noise, poison and threat of physical harm from cars?...

If by accident of historical disastrous miscalculation, which was the building of suburbia and the burning of enough oil to keep it going, we have wrecked the climate system of a whole planet, we are now at a point where we need models of how to develop to reverse the phenomenon. The answer is to always restore much more land and waters than we consume in the development process. For every infill there must be a more than equal and opposite unfill development...

Here in the San Francisco Bay Area we could be showing the way to run cities on one-tenth the energy and one fifth the land the US behemoths now consume and leading the way in multiplying vastly the land and waters restored for not just biodiversity but farming too.

Such strategic thinking also enters the realm of rethinking climate change solutions. If we can roll back sprawl to small dense areas of ecocity development then the city can leave room for massive tree planting inconceivable without such change. How about radically reducing deaths in car accidents? How about pleasant streets where the smells, noises and threat of injury and death is non-existent because cars simply aren't there? How about cities that just rise up and let the waters rise around them, that provide enough housing, jobs and everything else that we can just withdraw from sprawl, car and oil addiction and just get on with being healthy? One stop shopping for all your solutions. We can do it if we just think about it but haven't yet. There's no time like the present.'