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INTERVIEW:
ECOTECTURE:
This city that you were talking about, what would be the actual
form it takes?
LIVINGSTON: (Laughs)
ECOTECTURE: You have already described
it in a general way. . . A community with a compact structure.
LIVINGSTON: Yes. My first overlay would
have been oaks, because that is the tree of this place. If you look
at it from an indigenous point of view, if you have acorns and you
have oak trees, you have absolutely everything from an indigenous
perspective of this place. If you don't have acorns, you are just
shit out of luck.
But we are Europeans, most of us, and we don't eat acorns. I would vote for
putting in trees that feed people. Because that is what needs to
happen right now. There is a lot of starvation in San Francisco,
and, in fact, that neighborhood, the (upscale) Embarcadero where
those palm trees are, you try to find some organic food somewhere
within walking distance. You won't be able to. You are hard put
to find any grocery store within walking distance.
We don't have a
water shortage,
we have a
storage shortage. |
There are already communities throughout the Bay Area where people
have to get into a vehicle, burn fossil fuels, travel may blocks,
if not miles out of the community to simply get food, not to mention
organic food. In the landscape, when you are working with the natural
world, I would think about planting things people could eat. Nut
trees are really great, because they don't store pollutants in their
nuts. They don't have a lot of lead. Some may, but walnuts, for
example, will not store lead in their nut. We don't have a lot of
leaded fuel anymore, but that is just an example. Nut trees make
great food trees.
But you talk to the Mayor and the Planner and they say, "What
would happen if somebody was coming along and they stumble on a
nut tree and turn their ankle and they can sue the City and dada,
dada, dada. . . Dada. Somebody will have to come along
and pick up the nuts and leaves." That is where you have to start
redefining what is important.
In the cities, we would have the greenbelts producing food and
habitat, there would be clean water running through the city, bioremediated.
ECOTECTURE: Do you think enough water falls on,
say, a typical city in Northern California so that it could recycle
and reuse its own water without having to go to outside sources?
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Cricket Cottage houses guests at
the Permaculture Institute. A year-around food supply
grows in the foreground.
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LIVINGSTON: You bet. You would have
to do calculations but the main issue is storage. We don't have
a water shortage, we have a storage shortage. It would be challenging
to store enough water for a city to use for five months out of the
year. We have one of the longest dry seasons in Northern California.
But, it is possible. Sure it is possible.
If you have a two thousand square foot house, and you get 24 inches
of rain, which is an average rain in the San Francisco area. . .
during the drought, it is a low average. . . that is two
cubic feet of water falling per square foot of your roof. If you
multiply that times 2,000 square feet (of roof), you have 4,000
cubic feet. Multiply that times 7.48 (gallons per cubic foot). So
that would be something around 32,000 gallons of water.
ECOTECTURE: Falling on a typical roof
in San Francisco?
LIVINGSTON: That is a small roof. That
is a typical suburban roof.
ECOTECTURE: Do you happen to know how
much water people would use in month?
LIVINGSTON: Say a family of four would
use 100 gallons per day times 30 days in the month, that would be
about 3,000 gallons per month. So the rainfall on the roofs alone
would provide enough water for about ten months of the year.
EDITOR'S COMMENT: The calculations above do not include water
that falls on the streets and other open spaces or reducing water
use through conservation and recycling measures.
When you talk to urban planners . . . If we are going to
get into city issues, and population, and density, the first consideration
is the car. In this whole vision of the city we haven't even mentioned
transportation. It is critically important that not everybody has
to drive and park. I wonder how much fuel gets burned just by people
driving around San Francisco trying to find a place to park. Stop
at a stoplight. Drive around the block, miss the parking space,
driving around for fifteen or twenty minutes just trying to find
a place to park-not getting there. How many gallons of fossil fuel
get burned, how much oxygen gets consumed?
The combustion engine in the city is unsustainable just from the
point of view of how much oxygen it uses. Four hundred cubic feet
of oxygen gets consumed for every gallon of gas that gets burned.
Of that, a certain percentage does get converted back to carbon
dioxide which can then get converted back to oxygen via trees and
plants, but a lot of it gets converted into carbon monoxide and
becomes an energy sink it doesn't get converted back to oxygen.
If is wasn't for the fact that there is a breeze coming into most
cities, people would be suffocating. In Mexico City, people are
suffocating. They are suffering from lack of oxygen because they
live in a bowl and don't have that air flow.
So, transportation. I think an electric/hydrogen car, whichever
ends up being the car of the future, is critically important. I'm
interested in electric cars because of the sound. I'm very noise
sensitive. Imagine a city where there isn't the rumble of engines
happening all the time. Imagine what that would be like. . .
just that in terms of people's quality of life. They have this white
noise constantly Rrrrrrr.
The combustion
engine in the city
is unsustainable
just from the
point of view of how
much oxygen it uses.
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ECOTECTURE: Have you ever been to Venice?
LIVINGSTON: No.
ECOTECTURE: It is just like that. There's
no cars. It's all water.
LIVINGSTON: There you go.
ECOTECTURE: There are a few motor boats
on the Grand Canal and a few smaller motorboats on the back canals,
but mostly, it is just like your place here no cars. It is
really neat.
LIVINGSTON: Exactly. That does a lot
to stop the agitation, the constant agitation of people who live
and work and spend 100 percent of their time in cities. Imagine
a city that is not only cleaning its own water and air, but it is
also breeding humans who have a quality of life and hope for the
future that they don't have right now. So that the children that
are growing up in the neighborhoods know that there is a better
world out there for them than there was for their parents, that
things are improving. As children grow up, just that would create
a blossoming human being instead of a despondent one. Right now
there is a lot of despondency and hopelessness and depression.
But if you lived in a city that had light, where everyone was
exposed to everyone else, there wasn't isolation, there was mixed
economic community so you would have the very wealthy living right
next door to the very poor and there would be housing for everyone.
Politically, I don't know how to work that one out. I don't get
involved in politics, because are you talking about being a communist,
about socialism, being a capitalist, or, what are we talking about?
The trickle down theory? I don't know about any of that. I don't
even know where to go with that. That is somebody else's realm.
But as far as design, as far as re-designing and redefining the
cities, that is where I have a vision, and other people such as
Richard Register have a vision. So
many people could work together to create that if we had the economic
ability and political will to do it.
One strategy would be that as the city decays then you rebuild
it. You can't just go in and rip everything out and put if back
in, but every sewer system in San Francisco is totally falling apart.
As you have to rip up the streets and get at these pipes to re-configure
them, that is when you start redesigning your infrastructure for
your sewage treatment. That is when you have to start thinking about
scale, and about people. What is more efficient, to remediate sewage
on a household basis, or a neighborhood basis? Which is the easiest,
most stable system to design. Sometimes, it might be easier to do
everything on a per-household basis. Everybody has his or her own
little system where they flush their toilet and it goes into their
own greenhouse and it is all quite simple, no muss, no fuss, and
all those pipes under the street can just rot. It wouldn't even
matter. That's one idea. There are a lot of different ideas.
There is no need to
build more energy
infrastructure.
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Mixed use. That means people can walk to where they work, walk
to where they shop. Foods can be produced and sold within the city.
Jobs are created that way. We are not just providing office buildings
for jobs, but actually providing jobs for people to be working within
the city. The education system would be locked into all of this
because there is a lot that school kids could be learning. We have
things like the jail garden project, and people who do community
service could be helping grow food for people who are less fortunate,
or whatever.
You can hunt and peck and pick on just about every aspect of what
a city could be. When you start to think about it, it all starts
to make sense. It all can be in sync with the other systems. So
you can link your transportation system with your food production
system and with your community economics and urban redevelopment
corridors and energy production systems. There is no need to build
more energy infrastructure. Especially here. I keep thinking of
San Francisco because I grew up here. This is a city I know.
You start putting windmills on those buildings, you would get a
cash crop (of energy). Maybe nobody would have to pay any city taxes.
They would generate more power than most of that city could use
I'll bet. If you fly over San Francisco and see all these windmills
fluttering around. But, people are going to complain, “I don't
want to live by windmills.” There is always this block that
keeps those types of ideas from happening. But, if you are really
serious about "let's get efficient, let's produce our energy,”
you have a resource in San Francisco that would probably cover half
of California. (Laughs) I don't know about that!
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