|
ECOTECTURE: Do you have an idea as to
how small that amount of land could be?
RR: I would guess it would run from
10 percent to 25 percent of the land area, without being radically
three dimensional like Paolo Soleri's Arcology idea. His idea is
to create cities that are in a single structure, like an Indian
pueblo, for example. But he has different, modern designs for what
that might look like. It is the idea of a whole city that is a three
dimensional lattice work of habitations and work spaces is what
he is thinking about.
Even shy of that I think you would be building cities on one tenth
to one quarter of the land that is now occupied by cities. Just
look at the difference between Phoenix and Boston, for example,
there is a seven to one ratio in density there. Boston is 14 percent
the land area of Phoenix. To say you could get down to 10 percent
maybe isn't that radical.
ECOTECTURE: Yet Boston doesn't strike
one as so impossibly dense of a city that one wouldn't want to live
there.
RR: Well, a lot of people love living
there. Obviously there is a different attitude about living in Boston
than living in the suburbs some place far from the city. But, we
are building for the future in any case. What we are designing,
thinking about, and building right now is only going to slowly come
about. So, our children are likely to have a different attitude
about how they want to live than we might want them to live, or,
than we want to live anyway. So, it would make some sense, since
it takes decades to build cities, to think through giving them another
option and see if they like it.
Right now, the subsidies go the the sprawled city. Subsidies go
to the freeways and the oil depletion allowances so you can get
your gasoline cheaper and so on. We are used to that. We could be
giving the subsidy to low income housing and student housing in
the middle of downtown, and transit. But, we are choosing right
now to give most of the subsidies to the big money folks.
Berkeley, for example, rezoned its western section in its "West
Berkeley Plan," a few years ago, and now we have built between five
and seven thousand parking places in West Berkeley. I used to think
it was a little bit less, but I have just taken a tour of West Berkeley
this morning, driving out there to visit a creek I'm working on,
and it's awesome. They have put in lots of new places there, lots
of new shops, offices, some cleaner industry, and gigantic parking
lots to serve it all in the open space that was there just ten or
fifteen years ago. It's part of a plan to get more tax base in the
City of Berkeley, and it's working. People make money on car infrastructure.
There is an enormous subsidy right now to continue building the
automobile infrastructure. If we are thinking about a healthier
way to build, an ecologically healthier way in my mind, where is
the money for it? We can make these decisions, but, basically, society
isn't making these decisions very well.
ECOTECTURE: Do you think it would be
fair to say that we probably have most of the knowledge base we
need to accomplish the ecological rebuilding of cities, but it is
more a question of education, money, and politics? Or, do you think
that there's new technological breakthroughs or new knowledge that
we need to have?
RR: I think we don't have the right
knowledge available to most people. I think I have the knowledge
and the people who go to these International
Ecocity Conferences have some knowledge about it. Then there
are some people who are getting kind of close, like the New
Urbanists who talk about their transit oriented centers, which
is helpful, heading in the right direction-there is some knowledge
there.
The knowledge that is missing is what I sometimes call "ecocitology"
the art and science of building ecological cities, understanding
what they are. There's a whole system of thinking there that evolves
from those principles I mentioned, the first two of which are the
three dimensionality and the fitness with evolution, that cities
should be informed by. That is the foundation of the knowledge of
ecological city design. The rest is details. The details are all
important, and that is where you add in your permaculture, passive
solar buildings, and all sorts of things that make enormous amounts
of sense-transit, bicycles, creek restoration and so on. It could
be done in a very beautiful way that really serves lots of people.
Story continued at top
of page
|
ECOTECTURE: How would you make that
beautiful?
RR: In all sorts of ways. I think there
is a real challenge here with roof-top gardens, public spaces up
high with great views, the kind of planting you bring into those
areas. I think you really should respect some of the architectural
heritage of the city in what you are building as new stuff.
You might want to try to devise an ecological aesthetic too, an
aesthetic that celebrates an ecological life. Humming birds, butterflies,
song birds- you can actually do plantings to attract them, design
your buildings with terracing. You and I were out on the terrace
of my apartment a few minutes ago. It is a microsopic terrace here.
Those little outdoor places would be considerably larger than the
terrace we have at this little flat. People could have plots of
land up in the air. Features like bridges between buildings and
pedestrian passsageways in the middle of blocks down on ground level-these
things turn the city into a sort of a playground. They work really
well in malls all over the world, they work in areas like San Francisco's
Pier 39, commercial areas. There are many places where people love
to be in pedestrian environments. You can work with that in higher
density and do it effectively.
Register rendering of a Keyhole Plaza (click
on image).
How to do it in a beautiful way? I might point out that we have
this democracy of the lowest common denominator in this country
where everybody's house is the same size in suburbia, which means
you don't get a view, unless you are up on a steep hill. The house
across the street, like the house across from this one, is the same
height, so you can't see the (San Francisco) Bay. You have all the
trees and houses in each other's way. To actually have a view, you
have to rise up a little bit higher, so your view started about
the third or forth floor here. But no one is allowed to build that
high in Berkeley. So, everybody is equal, nobody gets the view-unless
you are rich and live in a place up in the hills, in Berkeley, anyway.
In other words, one of the aesthetic solutions is the more attractive,
taller building which provides not only what could be the beauty
of the building itself, but, also, lets you get up in the air where
you can look around and see the beauty of your natural bioregion.
Richard Register's EcoCity Plan for Berkeley,
California.
|
