Green Cities and the End of the Age of Oil
by Richard Register

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

Common Ground (June 2005)
[no endorsement of the magazine implied]

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 US 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 five miles-per-hour in a brisk
walk while the typical car averages forty miles per hour (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 forty 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 eight 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 twenty 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
thirty 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
- that is, 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 forty 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.
http://www.ecocitybuilders.org.

Copyright 2005 Common Ground

http://www.commongroundmag.com