Ecocity Builders

Ecocity Builders is primarily concerned with promoting the creation of ecocities, a term first coined by Richard Register in his 1984 essay, "EcoCities: Making cities sustainable is a crucial challenge".^[1][2][3] Ecocity Builders defines an ecocity as an "ecologically healthy human settlement modeled on the self-sustaining resilient structure and function of natural ecosystems and living organisms."^[4] An ecocity can encompass any size of settlement, from neighborhood or village up to metropolis, that functions in harmony with the ecosystems of which it is part. These greater environmental systems include the watershed, bioregion, and ultimately, of the planet, as well as human social systems such as local, regional, national and world economic, governmental, and cultural exchange systems.

Biometrics is central to the Ecocity concept through the analogy of the cities as living organisms. Cities (including their inhabitants) exhibit and require systems for movement (transport), respiration (processes to obtain energy), sensitivity (responding to its environment), growth (evolving/changing over time), reproduction (including education, construction, planning and development, etc.), excretion (outputs and wastes), and nutrition (need for air, water, soil, food for inhabitants, materials, etc.).

Ecocities exhibit characteristic design elements such as pedestrian-oriented "nodes" or centers of resources and social interaction, mixed-use planning, pervasive natural features (gardens, urban agriculture, parks), de-emphasis on individual vehicular transit, and equitable access to resources. Register's ecocities are influenced by the arcology movement including an emphasis on hyperstructures—large, complex interconnected buildings. Register has published collections of his extensive drawings of ecocity plans and interventions in several books (see “Sources”).

Summarize Timeline Fact Check

Ecocity Builders was founded by Richard Register in 1992 in order to further specific aims of the first International Ecocity Conference (Berkeley, 1990). The first conference was convened by the Urban Ecology group, an organization also founded by Richard Register. Ecocity Builders went on to involve many of the same key actors as Urban Ecology.^[5] Ecocity Builders' early years were characterized by a number of local projects in the San Francisco East Bay, primarily Berkeley. These projects included creek daylighting Cordonices Creek, Slow Streets, and community projects.

Ecocity Builders flagship project included one of the earliest daylighted and restored creek beds in the United States. The Codornices Creek project, 1994, removed the water channel from its cement culvert along the Albany/Berkeley border and created a mile-long park. Ecocity Builders collaborated with the Urban Creeks Council, who applied for and received $25,000 from the Department of Water Resources Board to fund the project.^[6][7] The second lower half of the creek park was restored in 2004 on a budget of $2.1 million under the auspices of the Codornices Creek Watershed Council.

Ecocity Builders helped plan and provided support for a variety of small to medium-sized depaving projects in Berkeley. Examples include removing five parking spaces at University Avenue Homes' low income residence for a garden, and Halcyon Commons.^[8] The latter converted a 28 space parking lot into a community-designed mini-park featuring a large grassy area surrounded by flowering shrubs and trees, a picnic area, and a tire swing.^[9]

Starting in 1979 Richard Register and other Berkeley activists began advocating the City of Berkeley for traffic-calming street plans based on the Australian "slow ways" streets.^[10] The Milvia Slow Street, part of the City of Berkeley's Bicycle Boulevard network, was finally designed under their guidance in 1990. The design covers roughly six blocks of residential street in which 30 curb bulb-outs were placed to narrow the street at intersections and mid-block locations. These bulb-outs and planted islands create a serpentine design, which requires vehicles to slow and negotiate a winding path along the street. Official studies confirmed the Milvia Slow Street to have a significant calming impact on vehicle speed and volume along the corridor.^[11]

Richard Register piloted a method for identifying “urban villages” in large urban areas in his book Ecocity Berkeley (1987). He proposed the eventual densification of these areas to create more compact, efficient urban entities where goods and services can be accessed via walking and biking. Ecocity Builders conducted early GIS mapping projects to formalize this process.^[12] The results identified actual active urban nodes (clusters of commercial, social and transit activity) as opposed to the on-the-book zoning for commercial/transit centers. They also identified barriers in these areas to being “complete” service access, such as a lack of large grocery store in West Oakland, and lack of integrated transit in Montclair Village.^[13]

In Berkeley Ecocity Builders successfully co-authored and lobbied for policies that are currently enforced, including the Ecocity Amendment to the 2001 General Plan, the Solar Greenhouse Ordinance, and the Residential Energy Conservation Ordinance (RECO).^[14]

Task Forces, Committees

• UC Hotel Conference Center Task Force, Berkeley
• San Francisco Open Space Task Force, San Francisco
• Oil Independent Oakland by 2020 Task Force, Oakland

Policies, Campaigns

• Oil Independent Oakland Action Plan
• “Ecocity” Transfer of Development Rights
• Ecocity Amendment
• Berkeley RECO Ordinance
• Berkeley Solar Greenhouse Ordinance