Editors Note: In keeping with the goal of creating conversation about the Marinwood Priority Development Area and the expansion of low income housing in Lucas Valley due to the 2012 Housing Element, we will bring you different points of view.  The following interview is with a leading proponent of EcoCities. 

Is this the type of urbanization planners want for Marinwood-Lucas Valley? 

Ecocities of Tomorrow: An Interview with Richard Register

Jesse Fox
Design / Sustainable Product Design
February 14, 2008

Author, theorist and philosopher Richard Register is one of the pioneers of the ecocity movement, with 35 years of experience advocating for cities that facilitate humanity's "creative and compassionate evolution" while contributing to the health of the planet. Richard is the author of several books, including Ecocities: Rebuilding Cities in Balance with Nature, and the founder of two nonprofits - Ecocity Builders and Urban Ecology.
This post is the first in a series of many examining current and future trends in ecological city building ahead of the 2008 Ecocity World Summit during Earth Day Week in San Francisco this April.
TreeHugger: Richard, you are a 35 year veteran in the still-evolving field of ecocity building. What led you to formulate your philosophy on the subject?

Richard Register: Growing up as a young artist (drawing and sculpture) with an architect father in beautiful country (near Santa Fe, New Mexico) with the end of the world perched on the mountain across the Rio Grande Valley, namely Los Alamos - where they designed the atomic bomb. Probably the other biggest influence was running into Paolo Soleri at 21 years of age and seeing his enormous positive energy, commitment to building and clear conceptualization of the problem: two-dimensions bad, three-dimensions good in complex systems such as higher organisms and the city.
Putting the city into context with evolution, given my appreciation and enjoyment of nature in a beautiful place like the US Southwest, was a natural for me and wanting to rescue ourselves from the insanity of war too, inclusive of the war of humans against nature - the shock troops being cities. That Santa Fe was originally a pedestrian city and the best parts of it still are... that probably was of some "ecocity" influence too. They are proud of their solar energy accomplishments in the Santa Fe region, but their history of compact pueblo architecture nearby and the pedestrian origins of the whole thing, the whole city, are far more important than even that. Of course, the two fit intimately with one another and in a very healthy manner — ecocity and solar — and both make sense there in Santa Fe, which is one of the saddest places in the world for me to visit these days. That's because it has spread out into the usual far flung, car-dependent sprawl that infects the present and threatens the future now virtually everywhere.

TreeHugger: How would you define an ecocity?

RR: An ecocity is an ecologically healthy city. That also means the city design is strongly informed by knowledge of ecology and its design principles. The "anatomy analogy" is very instructional in the enterprise of trying to build ecologically healthy cities. As in living organisms with different functions arranged close to one another in an appropriate spatial relationship, so too for cities.

TreeHugger: Do any existing cities fit this definition?

RR: Only pieces exist, though some like Curitiba, Brazil and Portland, Oregon have a fair number of the pieces assembled. Ancient cities have "mixed uses" and spatial relationships based on human dimensions and needs for cultural and creative opportunity, such as Kathmandu, Nepal in its older sections, Indian pueblos, old European city cores and so on. On larger scale and getting into recent times, energy systems like solar and transportation systems like bicycle paths and streetcars enter the formula.

TreeHugger: How does your conception of ecological cities compare with the New Urbanism or Smart Growth movements?

RR: New Urbanism is a small step in the right direction refusing to go further over the "bridge" it claims to be a "strategy" to... to what?! They never say. I say: the ecocity. New Urbanism's proponents' slavish commitment to cars and the cheap energy system, that make cars possible, in denial of the fact that cheap energy is going away forever soon have turned them into urban planning fossils. They speak out of both sides of their mouth saying transit, especially rail is great (it is), and cars have to be accommodated too (they don't).

That's a big contradiction there that needs to be straightened out. "This town (planet) ain't big enough for the two of us!" heard in old western movies is more like it: "cars or car-free cities. Choose."

The New Urbanists' four-story height limit makes no sense in an overpopulated world and shows no love of flamboyant architecture with rooftop gardens, terraces, bridges between buildings, buildings that ARE bridges, etc. as in my writing and drawing.

The "Smart Growth" people, in their embracing of higher than New Urbanist densities and building heights is another step toward ecocities, and they may actually get there someday. Their commitment to higher-density mixed-uses and balanced-development is a kind of cold planners' language way of leading into the sort of flamboyant architecture I imagine investing in, instead of parking structures, freeways, gas stations, garages and wide driveways, etc. etc. Their main problem is in embedding themselves in the infinite-growth-in-a-finite-environment capitalistic nonsense, simply by calling their effort "Smart Growth." There is nothing smart about infinite growth of the sort they embrace.
What they want to build physically is on the way to ecocities, if lacking most of the subtleties. How to jettison the economist's bizarrely ecologically ignorant basic assumptions about human economy being real and nature's incidental, and how to get the people with the money — let's face it — to invest in ecocities, I have no idea! I've been trying for years and it isn't working. Ideas anyone? Maybe saying climate change and Peak Oil are coming to get their children will finally get to them, but I don't have that much confidence in that either. The positive alternative I've been putting forward for 35 years certainly has gathered little favor and support. So far.

TreeHugger: Where are the hot spots of ecocity planning and building in the world today? Where will the next wave of ecocity building come from?

RR: The hot spots of ecocity planning and building are in my head and yours and anyone else's willing to entertain these thoughts. It amazes me how few people will even listen, how people can't string more than two links in a "chain" of causes and effects together, how the idea of a network of interconnections can find no purchase in their minds at all, despite wonderful spider webs in everyone's experience. Pull on one strand and all the others move around the whole web. The science like that is called ecology and it's been around a while already — and almost nobody gets it.
As far as geographic locations, Chicago and London have a lot of good things going. Car-free cities like Venice, Italy and Gulongyu, China have structures that go way back to pedestrian roots in physically constricted island locations and though they are not consciously developing in an ecocity direction, they have a lot to exemplify. Arcosanti, Arizona and Auroville, India are heroic attempts by still starving young city experiments, young as cities go, ignored like the insane panhandler down the street, but in this case real geniuses nobody pays any attention to. Solar and wind technologists are making hardware to harmoniously provide energy for such cities and organic farmers raising their food. But does anybody put all these pieces together? Not yet.

"Part of the new New Orleans rebuilt above the floods on 20 feet of elevated fill . A good solution that's possible with pedestrian compactness and streetcars and bikes, but not possible as a scattered car infrastructure which would require far too much fill."
TreeHugger: Will these ecocities be affordable to the average person, or will they turn into gated communities for the rich?

RR: In capitalism as it is trying to grow and extend itself into the future: gated communities for the rich. In a system that I'll call tax the rich and build for future people, plants and animals on a healthy Earth - which is very different from industrial socialism - not just the average person but the low-income person too.
I have been vilified by some "social justice" people for ignoring the poor. I have to say categorically that this is a lie and that furthermore I've generally been far lower-income than my accusers! I like low-income people - I am one! The raw beginning of the advantage of ecocities for low-income people is that the city becomes accessible, at least physically, to everyone without the requirement to invest $10,000 a year in a car and its support systems.
That's helpful but it doesn't solve all problems. Racial, religious, ethnic and other divisions sew seeds of poison so bad that even in the best designed cities you could well have jerks swilling martinis behind guard walls and security forces with guns one foot of concrete and steel away from starving untouchables. Can't solve everything I'm talking about here, though a lot has to do with the city and its design and functioning. Oddly, some people believe city design could solve everything. I for one make no such claims.
In fact I'll say this at this juncture: aside from design of the built environment, the other two big ones are over-consumption and over-population, probably followed by eating too much meat. Those are the big four assaulting the planet. None of those stand alone, but then none of them, if ever largely solved, implies the others will be solved because of that as well.

Full Story: Interview with Richard Register: Ecocities of Tommorrow