Village Wisdom: Future Cities
by Richard Register
Paperback
- 229 pages
1st edition (April 10, 1997) Ecocity Builders
by Philip S. Wenz, Publisher
Here is author Richard Register's experience at the International Ecocity Conferences as told to ecoTECTURE and reported here.
It [the conference] was pretty amazing.
It was amazing largely because the people who went there actually lived in a traditional village. It is a black village, actually a town of about 30,000. They speak French. They are Muslim. They are polygamist. They have just a whole different perspective on life, different history and everything.
They have the conference in that setting, and many of those people who live there gave presentations about their history and their perspectives and how their city, Dakar, and the villages in that region work. Also, a lot of the people came from around the world.
The around-the-world-perspective lives indeed in this rich resource. Presenters represented Brazil, Catalonya, Norway, Senegal, South Africa, Chile, Russia, Sarawak, Venezuela, Sweden, Cuba, and of course industrial Europe and America, including the Ithica Ecovillage in New York where the idea for the conference was hatched.
Register has gone beyond reporting by mere location, however, and divided the presentations into a dozen useful categories:
- Where Are We, Anyway (Conference Plenary Session Remarks)
- Toward the Ecocity- Cities in Transformation (Reports on Developing Cities)
- Ecocity Theory, Conceiving the Foundations
- Woman's Issues are World Issues are Ecological Issues
- Traditional Villages of the Dakar Region
- Development- Africa and Beyond
- Appreciation, Preservation, Transformation—Roots and Challenges
- Ecovillages, Housing and Whole Communities
- Sustainable Agriculture
- Eco-technology- Tools for Harmonious Living
- Nature (In the City)
- Conclusions (by Register and others)
All in all, there are some 57 articles on subjects ranging from the ecological city plan for Bergen, Norway, to the roots of prostitution in the breakdown of the tradition family and village structure. Presenters, too, are from all walks of life from woman's rights advocates to city planners to wastewater treatment experts.
Village Wisdom, Future Cities should be part of every ecocity designer's library.