[Scpg] Green Cities and the End of the Age of Oil Richard Register, June 2005

[Wesley Roe and Marjorie Lakin Erickson]

http://www.commongroundmag.com/2005/cg3206/greencities3206.html

Green Cities and the End of the Age of Oil
by Richard Register, June 2005

Over the past century, our cities have been shaped - literally - for
the benefit of the automobile and oil industries. Today, with global
oil reserves headed toward irreversible decline, we need to face the
challenges of the imminent post-oil reality. Seizing foreign oil fields
(then "spinning" the story to make a prophet of Orwell) will not solve
our environmental problems. Building Green Cities for people, not cars,
will.

In their controversial essay, "The Death of Environmentalism," Michael
Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus claim that the environmental movement
has worked its way into historical irrelevance. These writers suggest
that "the greatest tragedy of the 1990s is that, in the end, the
environmental community had still not come up with an inspiring vision,
much less a legislative proposal, that the majority of Americans could
get excited about."

I disagree, not only with these two green movement morticians but also
with some of their critics. Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra
Club, has rightly scolded Shellenberger and Nordhaus for "failing to
offer their own ideas," a lapse that "rendered their report nihilistic
- able to destroy but not create." But what does Pope offer? The
environmental movement, he says, "needs deeper, more robust, more
sustained collaborations" and "a new economic order." His action plan
is focused on renewable energy. Does he see any alternative to tacking
solar panels onto the past century's exoskeleton of freeways,
automobiles and sprawl? Not in his response. "As early as the Carter
Administration," Pope writes, "the Sierra Club sought an alliance with
the United Auto Workers... to preserve and enhance the U.S. auto
industry." In their desire to deliver "what Mainstream America wants,"
environmentalists discovered that people wanted cars. So the Sierra
Club's response has been to try and convince the auto industry that the
environmental situation could be improved if Detroit simply built a
"better" automobile. This won't work and here's why.

The 'Green Car' Myth

Consider the energy required to move a 130-pound human body by foot as
compared to moving that same body the same distance seated behind the
wheel of a 4,000-pound SUV. The average human can hit about 5
miles-per-hour in a brisk walk while the typical car averages 40 mph
(city and freeway). While it is true that you can move eight times
faster inside a two-ton vehicle, accomplishing this feat requires
burning around 1,900 times as much energy (and that's not factoring in
friction, which increases with speed). This should tell you something
about the fundamental insanity of depending on gas-fueled cars in an
oil-starved future.

And, it's not just the oil. Even if powered by biodiesel, hydrogen or
sunbeams, the private automobile is still part of an unsustainable
urban system that requires massive networks of streets, freeways, and
parking structures to serve congested cities and far-flung suburbs.
Driving a Prius hybrid simply makes it easier for people to live
farther from the rest of their lives (while seducing them into thinking
that they are "doing something for the environment"). We don't want to
face this truth because it implies too much change. Autoworkers want to
keep their jobs and Sierra Clubers want to be free to drive 40 miles to
experience nature whenever they feel like it.

Raised in a car-worshiping culture, we tend to assume that everyone
lives in a world of breezy trips through city streets and top-down
forays deep into the country. It's hard to believe there are worlds
without cars. But the startling fact is that, far from being a
majority, only one of thirteen people on Earth actually owns a car.
Consider this: 92 percent of the world's people do not own cars - and
the 8 percent who do are directly responsible for climate change and
the alarming collapse of biodiversity on planet Earth.

If the auto industry is to have any future in a post-oil world, it may
have to retrain its workers to build the efficient mass-transit systems
that will serve the new ecologically healthy Green Cities, towns and
villages of the 21st century. Environmentalists and autoworkers should
begin thinking hard about how to rebuild low-energy, car-free cities.
Autoworkers should be studying renewable energy systems and lobbying
for massive federal investments in those technologies. We need to
rebuild our entire civilization (towns and villages, too) on this
basis. A proper accounting of the auto-urban paradigm would include the
energy needed to draw the oil, cook the asphalt, erect the freeways,
mine and mill the steel used to manufacture the cars and, of course,
deploy the troops and weaponry to secure America's access to foreign
oil. Add it all up and you begin to get a sense of the enormity of the
problem.

Of course, it's a hard assignment. How could solving a problem as large
as preventing the collapse of planetary biodiversity and inventing a
new civilization in balance with nature be an easy task?

How Cars Shape Cities

The oil-burning, fume-spewing private automobile is only part of a
larger environmentally damaging system - the energy-intensive spawling
infrastructure of our cities. When small buildings are scattered over
large areas, more energy is required for heating and cooling as well as
for transportation. Pedestrian-friendly Green Cities - built for
people, bicycles, mass transit and renewable energy - would not only
cut air pollution, they also would promote the rebuilding of essential
soil and water resources while increasing plant and animal
biodiversity.

Knowledgeable environmentalists extol the Leadership in Energy and
Environmental Design (LEED) standards for buildings, but they seldom
apply similar standards to cities. Last summer, I was a speaker at a
Sustainable Communities Conference in Vermont. The organizers took two
busloads of participants to admire a beautiful new LEED platinum-rated
factory that produces towers for wind electric generators. Hard to get
greener that that.

But there was a problem: it took us 20 minutes on the highway to get
there. And, when we arrived, there was no other building in sight on
the rolling landscape of broad agricultural fields.

"Wouldn't it be more fun," I asked the company tour guide, "if instead
of driving way out to this splendid isolation and back every day, you
could just walk out the factory door and bike over to a class or back
to your residence?" Here was a beautifully designed solar building with
state-of-the-art natural lighting and insulation, constructed so the
residents would consume almost no energy - except for the hundreds of
gallons of gasoline they burned in their cars every day to get there!

The Eco-City Vision

"No wonder the public doesn't want to hear the truth about global
warming," former Sierra Club President Adam Werbach laments, "Nobody's
offering them a vision for the future that matches the magnitude of the
problem."

Excuse me? Dozens of environmental thinkers have been offering such a
vision for 30 years. I've co-produced five international Eco-City
conferences on five continents, written three books and been invited to
speak on every continent.

Like Pope, Werbach calls for renewable energy. Good idea, but not
enough. The renewable energy regime needs a physical infrastructure in
which to operate - i.e., a city to match. If you install a fleet of
clean, solar-powered buses in a typical sprawling low-density city,
those "eco-buses" are still going to run practically empty. Rebuilding
cities for pedestrians will reverse sprawl by bringing departure points
and destinations closer together. City planners call this "mixed use"
and "balanced development." Freeways could slowly be torn down as
pedestrian-friendly cities are efficiently - and affordably - connected
by train. That's a vision worth adopting. But, in order for this to
happen, environmentalists and developers need to work together.

How to Build Eco-Cities

The first step toward turning today's Gridlocked Cities into Green
Cities is to identify the major commercial and neighborhood centers and
map them for higher density. Re-zoning to facilitate higher-density
pedestrian transit centers will promote "access by proximity - instead
of transportation." As these centralized pedestrian/transit centers
grow in density and diversity, outlying areas would be replaced by
natural areas, open spaces, and small farms.

Metropolitan areas now spread over (hundreds of) thousands of acres
need to break up into discrete communities - forming archipelagos of
smaller, compact Green Cities around what are today's downtowns.
Ecovillages would arise where today's neighborhood centers now exist.
In his classic book, Ecotopia, Berkeley author Ernest Callenbach
envisioned the Bay Area metropolis (which includes Oakland, San Jose,
Berkeley, Palo Alto and Richmond) transforming into a necklace of
separate towns linked by high-speed public transportation - each with
its own particular economy, products and character (and all surrounded
by resurgent green and edged by the shimmering waters of San Francisco
Bay).

A Transfer of Development Rights (TDR) offers one promising tool for
facilitating the transitions required by ecological city design. A
developer can use a TDR to purchase and remove a building whose
crumbling foundation sits atop a buried creek. In return, the developer
wins the privilege of erecting a larger building in a
pedestrian/transit center. The developer gets a "density bonus" and the
city gains new open space for a community garden, public park, or
sports field and more housing in transit/pedestrian centers.

But won't it be oppressive to live in more densely settled core cities?
Not if you build them with lots of sun pouring into the interiors,
heating and refreshing the air without the use of fossil fuels or
nuclear fission. Build rooftop gardens, cafes, promenades, mini-parks,
entertainment enclaves and recreation outposts high in the buildings to
provide spectacular views overlooking the city's reviving bioregion.
Solar collectors and windmills would glint in the sun. The ecological
Green City would be alive with bicycles, solar greenhouses, creeks,
plants, animals, and people.

Builders of the new housing units in these evolving Green Cities would
recruit renters and condo owners who wished to free themselves from
cars. Contrary to legend, there are many such people out there.
Businesses would grant hiring preference to people living nearby. Given
sufficient diversity, you don't need to travel far for life's basics:
shelter, job, school, food. Green City buildings could be interlinked
by high bridges so that clusters of structures become easily available
to pedestrians on many levels. Terraces with communal gardens would
provide fresh produce and rooftop parks would provide recreation - all
accessible by glass elevators gliding over the outsides of buildings
offering stunning views of the new vertical Green City environment.

Facilities needing little natural light (theaters, photolabs,
warehouses) would be located in the lower stories, lifting other
downtown activities higher into the sun. Covered streets would have the
grandeur of cathedrals (, with beams of light falling into quiet
interiors bustling with pedestrians). Downtown buildings would provide
workplaces for residents. The hundreds of thousands who once poured
into the city over miles of freeways, would now quietly zip to work on
foot or bicycle leaving a minority of outside workers to arrive by bus
and rail.

First we'd create car-free streets, then larger, car-free zones. As any
tourist returning from a European vacation can testify, car-free
streets and plazas are extremely pleasant community enclaves that
bristle with life and are economically self-sustaining.

Eco Cities would promote the restoration of ancient creeks buried under
pavement and concrete. Living streams, shorefronts, wetlands, and
ridgelines would once again become signature landmarks for Green City
residents. Restored urban creeks and wooded groves would provide
natural habitat for birds and animals and become beautiful and
educational local resources for Green City children who would no longer
need to climb into a car and drive 40 miles to "experience nature."
With sufficient care, restored creeks magically reawaken with
populations of dragonflies, butterflies, hummingbirds, fish, and
crawdads. In California, native salmon and large wading birds like
egrets and herons have already returned to some of these reborn
watersheds.

Rebuilding our cities to serve people, not cars, will take decades, but
the transformation offers lasting solutions for most of our most
pressing environmental problems. These solutions will start to appear
immediately. They will multiply rapidly as the transformation proceeds.


Richard Register is President of Ecocity Builders in Oakland,
California. He is author of Ecocities: Building Cities in Balance with
Nature and Ecocity Berkeley. Ecocity Builders hosted the Green Cities
Conference in Oakland on May 31 as part of the World Environment Day
activities hosted by San Francisco. www.ecocitybuilders .