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Designer, builder, visionary, and pragmatist,
Richard Register is the veteran of thirty years of frontline action
in the battle against urban sprawl—and for the rebuilding of
our cities so they harmonize with nature. Based in Berkeley, California,
but a well-traveled citizen of the world, Register has campaigned
locally and globally to turn his vision of the compact, pedestrian-oriented
ecocity into a reality.
His impressive list of achievements includes
writing two books (he's
at work on a third) and numerous articles, founding two active organizations,
Urban Ecology and Ecocity
Builders, restoring urban creeks and streets, and being one
of the prime movers behind three International
Ecocity Conferences (with a fourth scheduled for this April.)
In this three part interview, Register shares
his ecocity vision, reflects on his successes and failures, and
looks to the future. In Part I (this issue), he discusses the role
of cities in the biosphere and evolution, and basic principles of
ecocity design. Part II, to be published in our February 1, 2000
bonus issue, he focuses on the past and upcoming International Ecocity
Conferences. Part III, in our regular March/April issue, discusses
specific tools for urban revitalization, such as transfer development
rights, and Register's work in his home town of Berkeley.
I met with Richard Register
shortly after he returned from a conference on habitat, the internet
and evolution held at the futuristic city of Arcosanti
in northern Arizona.
-PSW
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The idea is that evolution moves in a pattern that is toward miniturization
and complexification over vast swaths of time, and the tempo tends
to pick up as well. Life, emerging from the primordial soup, as
another, higher level of integration and much more complex than
anything that existed before and the level of integration of the
phenomenon of life is very, very small relative to the scale of
the universe. Then, within living substance, of course, consciousness
emerges, and where consciousness connects between individuals you
have a social consciousness which Teilhard de Chardin called the
noosphere.
Register rendering of San Francisco as
an EcoCity (click on image).
So, at this conference at Arcosanti we were seeing the city in
relation to this evolution of consciousness. In that theory, cities
become nodes of consciousness, like little mini-brains around the
surface of the big brain which is the whole biosphere human beings
connecting with one another being the synapses. Now, of course,
we send satellites up into orbit, beam up information, and get enormous
amounts of information back down again. We are developing a very
complex interconnection of information flowing around the planet.
This amounts, some might say, to another breakthrough or leap in
the evolution of consciousness.
That is part of what was behind the conference. Some people there,
though, were saying that things were getting so sophisticated with
computers that we can imagine in the near future that we won't even
have to go to Arcosanti. To experience it, you don't even have to
sit there in the buildings and look out over the natural landscapes
and watch the sun rise and the moon set. You can get all this from
your computers and your headsets and on down the line- which, of
course, Soleri scoffed at quite heartily at the time.
I thought about that too. It seemed to me that when there is a
succession of parts that are evolving, (the evolution) is based
on a foundation of all the rest of evolution that's come before.
There is a differentiation between elements in the spirit of consciousness—the
noosphere. You might say it starts with data, moves up to information,
goes to knowledge, beyond that you might have wisdom, beyond that
you might have enlightenment, who knows. But in any case, you are
not going to get the enlightenment if you scramble in your data
and you can't sift out the chaff from the good stuff. If we are
to learn from evolution about building, it pays to notice that things
move in a sequence and have a hierarchy. We must build on what has
come before.
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ECOTECTURE: Tell me about the conference
on the electronic future of design at Arcosanti.
RR: There was a fellow there name Marcos
Novak. He was talking about trans architecture, liquid architecture,
and architecture that is electronically animated. For example, he
was talking about walls that had little pistons that you were supposed
to touch, and you feel whatever is transmitted to the piston wall
from some remote location. If someone else is pressing on the opposite
of the piston wall in New York, and you were feeling the other side
in, say, Los Angeles, you would have a tactile contact. It is fun,
it seemed like an art piece and all kinds of communication was possible.
You can imagine all sorts of erotic things evolving. (laughs) Then
there were examples of projected imagery using holographs and tying
them in with computers and these would move across the countryside
and people could get communications. This all in the
conference at
Arcosanti on habitat, the internet, and evolution.
The way a lot of the people representing the cyberspace world
were thinking was that we are now at another (rapidly growing) level
of evolution which is the cyber evolution in the conscious realm.
Part of what is going on at Arcosanti is the city, the "arcology"
as Paolo
Soleri calls it —architecture and ecology working together—
is a step in the evolution of consciousness on the planet, and in
the universe for that matter. This thinking is based on the ideas
of Teillard
de Chardin who Paolo admirers, and he's taken some of these
ideas farther than de Chardin himself.
Story continued at top
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