Chapter 7 of Ecocities offered the reader a tantalizing view into the world of the future. The author starts with a bit of background information on city planning. He describes it in terms of a traditional house construction. Despite having all the knowledge and materials needed for a real house, if these parts aren’t put together in the proper order, there will be chaos. For example, it doesn’t make sense to start nailing shingles onto the plywood roof until the roof is in place. Otherwise, all your hard spent work may go towards undoing someone else’s hard spent work. In addition, if you construct a building from the top down, all that you will be left with is a mangled pile of building materials and no house to show for it. This example illustrates the need to start from the beginning and think things through before first jumping into a project. Essentially, a project must have a well thought out structure and strategy before any action takes place. Part of this strategy should be based on what he calls the environmental prescriptions, which are conserve, recycle and preserve biodiversity.
After the intro, the author takes us on a fanciful trip through the ecocity of the future. Not by car of course, but by bike. He envisions a condensed city where much of the necessary transportation is done on foot or bike and whole communities of several buildings are connected via roof-top bridges and walkways. Boulevards would be both wide and narrow and be surrounded by buildings with lavish vegetation spilling out of window boxes and where children can play in the street without fear of being run over by a speeding truck. This city of the future also springs out of no where and immediately after the city begins the farm land. I certainly wouldn’t mind living in such a city, but I also don’t see how any such city is conceivable even in the next hundred years. The entirety of the street system is based off of mostly tunnels. Though they allow car-free places and easy deer migration, the cost to put them underground, as
His main attack, and rightfully so, is on urban sprawl. Motivated by easy transportation and cities designed around cars, city centers have begun to spread out, limiting the pedestrian access to such places. This promotes the privately owned mall which serves as nothing more than a collection of stores. Unlike most town centers, there is little or no personality to a mall and little is given back by a mall. There is also a massive waste of space on resources involved in the construction of such malls. Vast plots of land are destroyed to make way for air conditioned boxes with black roofs that only act like heat sink. Inside, they are filled with corporate named stores where much of the money gets sent away from a community to some office in a city far, far away. They do nothing to give back to the community and if anything only tend to weaken it. A booming city center, on the other hand, features stores, restaurants and jobs within walking distance of one’s home and because the stores are owned by the townspeople who run them, most of the community’s money stays in the community and helps strengthen it. These town centers also offer the chance to increase population densities. By having everything needed by a community at street level, the rest of the building is free to be developed into residences. As these residences get condensed even further, the various industries and services required by these homes become centralized, making them far more efficient. Also, people no longer have to drive to get to where they spend their money reducing the need for transportation infrastructure. This means taxes no longer have to go towards fixing roads and may now be used to liven up the neighborhood with murals and concerts. This example shows how population densities are inherent to the way a city runs itself and how a higher population density could prove to be the “magic bullet” that everyone’s looking for.
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