Ecological City Design – an Interview with Richard Register

What are ecological cities?

An ecologically healthy city would be one that gets along with all the other plant’s and animals on the planet, that supports people and their compassionate creative activities in their lives and is healthy in the long term for evolution itself. If they can get along with the planet they live on, then they’re ecological cities.

They [should] have the following characteristics :

1. there is a very strong connection between the transit system and the structure of the city;
2. the city [should be more] three dimensional . . . [have more] density and diversity in close proximity . . . [in essence, more compact];
3. [it should use only] ten percent of the energy that we use now.

To actually look at the basic structure of the city is the Holy Grail if you’re going to have a healthy civilization in the future, how you’re actually going to build that civilization, it will come down to solving the problem of how to build the cities. And of course that’s very deeply involved in the amount of energy that flows through. I maintain that if we are to build ecologically healthy cities we could run the whole civilization on maybe ten percent of the energy that we use now.

If you consider the size of a sprawling suburb with lots of small houses and you consider the links of all the pipes and the wires and everything to hold it together, not just the cars gasoline and the infrastructure of all those literally millions and millions of cars on the planet, you begin to see that if it is more compact all those lines are shortened.

So it’s an articulation there of living, working, transit all being held together in a fairly small area . . . [where] the whole thing [is held] together by foot power and elevators . . . so that people could walk most places to get what they needed . . . And the result is they save lots of energy, they don’t produce a lot of pollution and they have plenty of room for many of the other aspects of an ecologically healthy city, one of them being very very efficient recycling, restoration of natural areas, bicycle and pedestrian paths and a lot of other things . . . the flatter the city, the more dependent on cars of course, the more energy consumption you’re going to have . . . so virtually everything once you establish a flat city becomes very very energy consuming just to hold the activities of the city together

[Thus,] the super most dense pedestrian orientated city, probably would be the least energy consuming and certainly the most conserving in terms of land. New York runs on about half the average per capita energy use of cities around the United States. It’s very compact. People get around by [walking and] transit there and there’s a lot of mixed use close together.

So over and over and over, from many different ways of looking at it, the city that is an ecologically healthy city, [is] a compact city, a city that doesn’t cover much landscape, that is much more three dimensional than two. That is a gigantic chunk of solving the problem of how we build our civilization.

Do you agree with “The End Of Suburbia’s’ premise?

Oil and gas peak is what the video “The End of Suburbia” is all about. It’s a wakeup call. It’s an opportunity. It’s saying we can’t go on like this . . . What I think needs to be done is for people to take very seriously what this energy deficit will mean and by energy deficit I mean it’s not just that we’re starting to have less energy available as we go over peak oil and down the other side. But that the demand is going to continue going up for some time. And that difference is something that we haven’t really experienced before in any major degree, but it’s going to get very substantial very rapidly. So the difference between the energy demand and the energy supply is something very very new and how we respond to this is anyone’s guess . . . It’s not enough just to conserve a little bit and to ride your bicycle more. If the world was still dependent upon vehicles that have to carry you everywhere you need to go. You have to change that.

How can we roll back sprawl?

There’s a lot of fear, there’s a lot of political cowardice out there, a lot of people who don’t want to face the results of what they’re doing . . . . We can change the city structure, but we have to get beyond this attitude that says hey I’m not responsible for anything, I’m a good guy. In fact we’re responsible for a whole lot. And we still might be good guys but we can’t go around ignoring it any longer. We have to actually do something about it.

And so to do something about it there are tools such as transfer of development rights. That gives the developer the opportunity to buy up land that’s in the wrong place, buildings that are in the wrong place and remove those uses. And then the developer gets a bonus. He gets to build more than he or she normally would and in exactly the right place in the city. Well where’s exactly the right place? That happens to be where transit works really well and where it can work even better in the future. Where you can create pedestrian areas that are very low energy in their basic functioning.

Basically, the idea is you find the centres that are active right now and you reinforce the development . . . And then you can use transfer development rights or simple zoning. You can say “hey from now on we’re going to have center oriented zoning in our city and we’re actually going to allow the developers to build taller buildings downtown.”

What are thoughts on smart growth and new urbanism?

[T]he word smart growth [should be seen in the context of] a world where we have grown far too large in terms of population, spreading out of the cities, consumption of energy, assailing of the biological soil for all of the other plants and animals. When we do these sorts of things we have this enormous negative impact. Basically the notion of smart growth just doesn’t seem so smart.

I think that you have to say that what is smart is to contemplate shrink. So I have a little slogan that is shrink for prosperity. Well we can make our cities smaller, smaller, smaller in the way that I describe three-dimensional cities actually taking up much less material energy and space and come up with a society that is far far healthier in the environment. And we should think about shrinking the population, get very serious about that. Our impacts are far too high.

The new urbanist promotes town centers, transit centers of certain scale that gets up to about four stories and beyond that they don’t want to appear to be too threatening. The new urbanist also has a manifesto that says we have to be in the contemporary city providing for automobiles, but in a way that doesn’t afflict the pedestrian environment. Well why do they say that? It doesn’t make any sense to me . . . People love pedestrian environments. Why on earth would they say you have to design for automobiles? They come up with some very strange notions.

Why is it that a lot of people would say that we have to have human scaled and human scaled is only up to four stories [as in the case of the new urbanists] when you can create pockets in larger buildings that have wonderful views, that become mini parks in their own sense? When you have this new aesthetic that rises up into the sky with windscreens and trellises and vines adding life to the top of a building. I just don’t understand why people have to limit their ideas before they even trial the full range of ideas for making high-density cities more beautiful.

What is the importance of aesthetics in ecological city design?

I think that aesthetics is a distant early warning system . . . I grew up in New Mexico, a very beautiful place, when I was a child and I could see an absolutely clear sky to the horizon. It was surrealistically open and beautiful and you could see the stars setting on the western horizon every night. And when a star would hit the horizon it was so clear there that it would blink out like that. The star would then just disappear. You don’t see that anymore. The stars fade, fade, fade and then disappear well before they ever get to the horizon. The aesthetic, the beauty of that, the sort of stunning clarity of the clarity of the natural air and the landscape in New Mexico that time, my children can’t experience. It’s gone. There’s too much air pollution throughout the entire country now to ever see that. It’s just not going to happen in the foreseeable future. You have to change our transportation systems, the way we build cities, everything. The aesthetics, the loss of something in aesthetics like that warns us that something is really way off.

Aesthetics are [also] extremely complex and a lot of people have a real aesthetic around great wine and food and they buy art and they stuff art into their expensive houses and they do horrible things with their investment and they divide themselves from the people that are starving. That’s where a lot of art goes, to very wealthy people who are not helping the world very much in the way they spend their money or the way they invest, the things they do in their lives. So aesthetics is a potentiality. To provide the beauty of a city that is ecologically healthy is potentiality.

We [should create] a world in which the aesthetic can back in from nature to enrich our lives. I think that’s one of the most important things that can be done. And so you can actually build cities, I believe, that start enhancing bio diversity, that start not actually just stopping the destruction and protecting what we have left. But actually consciously enriching the bio diversity of the world in which we live. We can do that simply by planting for example window boxes with native plants on it to reattract a lot of the birds that have been driven out of our environment.

Can you describe the car sharing system ?

It’s better than owning a whole car all to yourself obviously. But the real profound question here is are moving away from automobiles or are we moving towards them, insofar as city car share and other programs that share cars are actually getting people out of their privately owned cars and into sharing cars? That’s good, insofar as they are taking some people who don’t have cars into the new possibilities of car sharing, it’s not necessarily so good. I’ve known several people who have gone from having no cars to actually joining a car sharing club. Where they’re going to go next I don’t know. Maybe they’ll go back to not owning a car. So in my mind it’s right in the middle. It’s a fifty fifty thing. It’s part of the car culture. It’s part of trying to deal with the car culture, but it’s not much.

What is much and what we need much is to have car free housing, car free by contract, car free anyway you can get it . . . Don’t call it a subsidy when it goes to transit and call it we’re building a freeway and not saying it’s a subsidy when it goes into the freeway. You should say in both cases hey we’re investing in the squandering of oil when we build the freeways and the overchanges . . . We should start get used to shifting the investment . . . [for example] the federal government should give concrete and steel, just plain give concrete and steel to developers who are going to do ecologically healthy buildings by various design parameters in the pedestrian parts of downtown . . . Give it to them in the same way they give the car drivers the freeway interchanges and all the steel and concrete that go into that. We’d have a far healthier world.

What do you think of hybrid cars, hydrogen and other new car technologies?

Unless you understand whole systems you might not understand that something that works really well in the small scale, may be very damaging to the whole organism.

In the whole system, which in this case is the city, the car functions as a unit with them. You want to make the car really effective, look at the human body. You have a cancer cell in this body. You know it’s creating some damage. You want to make it really effective. You want to make it healthier, it’s going to attack the body worse. You have healthier cancer cells, you have a less healthy body. You have tumors that are growing, growing, growing in your body, that’s a problem. They’re healthy, I mean as far as they are concerned. You have a better car as far as it’s concerned. It saves gasoline. It gives the services to the people who are running around town faster, with less money. It’s cheaper because it doesn’t burn up as much gasoline. Then you’re able to drive farther out and live farther from the centre.

And that’s actually exactly what happened in the 1970’s when cars got much more efficient in the United States. That was the fastest rate of growth of suburbia in history. Price went way down. Everybody said hey now I get to live farther out and pay less money too. And of course the land prices are cheaper out there, so they’re building houses cheaper. The whole thing, the whole pattern was that because you could now travel farther for less, in other words you have quote the better, the more energy efficient car, well sprawl got a lot worse.

So you can a better piece of a whole infrastructure making the whole infrastructure much worse. Then when you get down to refinements about that. Well should it be a Prius? Should it be hydrogen? Should it be something else? You just have to say wait a minute we have to redesign so you don’t need these things. Some things in your society you just don’t need the cancers, tumors in your body. Skip it. Design a body without these tumors and get on with living a healthy life . . . [We] actually [are] responsible for sprawl. We are. It happens to be the truth. Well don’t obsess about it. Don’t feel guilty. Get active. Start changing the city so that you create models as a healthy way of living.

Is the cancer metaphor applicable to cars in China?

Oh definitely. I was in the worst traffic jam I’ve ever been in in China. I had arrived in Shanghai and then I was going to go to a place called Ningbo in three and a half-hours. It took nine hours. There were two times when the car was completely stopped on a four-lane freeway, which they’re busily trying to expand to six lanes by the way. And you can see all the buildings being torn down along the side of the four-lane freeway as they’re quickly expanding it for the expansion. For one hour twice, for one hour each, the car was totally stopped. I’ve never been in traffic jam that bad anywhere in the world and I’ve been in a lot of them in India and Turkey and South America and all over the United States and this is the worst one I ever saw.

Does oil and gas peak change the game?

It’s a wakeup call. It’s an opportunity. It’s saying we can’t go on like this. And what I maintain is that the ecological city redesigned, as I’ve been describing it, the ecological city is a city that can run on one tenth the energy. Now how else can you get there?

You want to have renewables. Renewables I think are intrinsically more expensive per calorie delivered. You have to gather the stuff up. You have a solar collector, you put it out there. You’re bringing energy in from the sun, you have technologies and so on to concentrate this energy and then you turn it into something like electricity or use it as hot water, but you need to actually gather it. What happens at the crust of the earth for one hundred and fifty million years is busy gathering solar energy and laying it down in the form of coal, oil and natural gas. And that stuff is pretty easy to grab onto compared to gathering all the energy in the first place and putting all that technology together. The crust of the earth did it for us in the case of the fossil fuels. But now we have to exert a lot of energy to get there. So I maintain that energy is going to be expensive from now on.

How can ecological city design support relocalization?

Well so much of relocalization or bioregional development has to do with removing sprawl development so that you now have access to the land again. Because we have covered such vast areas with the city and the infrastructure the city requires. So if you’re looking at relocalization and the fine tune restructuring of agriculture and bringing back native species, you simply have to get the city off it’s sprawled format. You have to reshape it around smaller structures and then the biology and the richness of the biology come back and with it, I think, also a lot of the human history diversity that has gone down at any particular place because it was originally anchored in the biology.

~ Summarized from “Ecological City Design, an Interview with Richard Register” at Global Public Media: Public Service Broadcasting for A Post Carbon World

Keywords : peak oil, post carbon, city, design, eco-literacy, eco-intelligence, civilization, sprawl, car, transportation, relocalization, energy crisis, biodiversity
(use search box to list entries with one of these keywords)