Eco-City Movement
What is an Eco-City?
An Eco-City is an ecologically healthy city. Eco-Cities are places where people can live healthier and economically productive lives while reducing their impact on the environment. They work to harmonize existing policies, regional realities, and economic and business markets with their natural resources and environmental assets. Eco-Cities strive to engage all citizens in collaborative and transparent decision making, while being mindful of social equity concerns.
Eco-city development integrates vision, citizen initiative, public administration, ecologically efficient industry, people's needs and aspirations, harmonious culture, and landscapes where nature, agriculture and the built environment are functionally integrated in a healthy way.
Roots of the Eco-City Movement
The Eco-City concept is rooted in the West. In 1991 several hundred innovators came together for the First Los Angeles Ecological Cities Conference (Walter, Bob, Lois Arkin and Richard Crenshaw, Sustainable Cities—Concepts and Strategies for Eco-city Development, Los Angeles: Eco City Media, 1994). Sustainability pioneer Richard Register, founder of Urban Ecology in the San Francisco Bay Area, was one of the early advocates for linking ecological principles to the redesign of cities.
With a focus on urban green space and biodiversity, planning Professor Rutherford B. Platt, with assistance from U.S. Man and Biosphere Program, the Chicago Academy of Sciences, US EPA, US Forest Service and National Park Service convened a sustainable cities symposium that was later compiled and edited into a book, The Ecological City (1994).
Eco-Municipalities
A parallel approach to creating a system for city sustainability can be found in Sweden’s Eco-Municipalities. Under the official moniker of Eco-Municipalities, over 70 cities and towns in Sweden – 25% of all municipalities in the country – have adopted a common set of sustainability principles and have implemented these widely and systematically throughout their municipal operations and larger communities. The first eco-municipalities developed in Sweden, beginning in the 1980s. The work of the early eco-municipalities became the model for Agenda 21, the Guide for Local Sustainable Development that emerged from the 1992 Rio Summit – the U.N. World Conference on Sustainable Development. A key element to the success of Eco-Municipalities is their collaborative, participatory approach towards implementation.
Most Eco-Municipalities rely on the Natural Step principles as their underlying framework. Natural Step co-authors Torbjörn Lahti and Sarah James continue to work on an emerging network of eco-municipalities here in the United States.
Thanks to the assistance of 1000 Friends of Wisconsin, the state plays host to most of the American eco-municipalities. The American Planning Association’s sustainability objectives are also based upon the same sustainability model as the Eco-municipality approach. The American Planning Association’s four sustainability objectives use planning approaches that: 1) reduce dependence upon fossil fuels, underground metals, and minerals; 2) reduce dependence upon synthetic chemicals and other unnatural substances; 3) reduce encroachment upon nature; and 4) meet human needs fairly & efficiently.
Requirements of an Eco-City
- Ecological Security
Clean air, and safe, reliable water supplies, food, healthy housing and workplaces, municipal services and protection against disasters for all people. - Ecological Sanitation
Efficient, cost-effective eco-engineering for treating and recycling human excreta, gray water, and all wastes. - Ecological Industrial Metabolism
Resource conservation and environmental protection through industrial transition, emphasizing materials re-use, life-cycle production, renewable energy, efficient transportation, and meeting human needs. - Ecoscape (ecological-landscape) Integrity
Arrange built structures, open spaces such as parks and plazas, connectors such as streets and bridges, and natural features such as waterways and ridgelines, to maximize biodiversity and maximize accessibility of the city for all citizens while conserving energy and resources and alleviating such problems as automobile accidents, air pollution, hydrological deterioration, heat island effects and global warming. - Ecological Awareness
Help people understand their place in nature, cultural identity, responsibility for the environment, and help them change their consumption behavior and enhance their ability to contribute to maintaining high quality urban ecosystems.
(Adapted from the 2008 Eco-City Conference Declaration in San Francisco)
Key Actions of an Eco-City
- Provide safe shelter, water, sanitation, security of tenure and food security for all citizens and with priority to the urban and rural poor in an ecologically sound manner to improve the quality of lives and human health.
- Build cities for people, not cars. Roll back sprawl development. Minimize the loss of rural land by all effective measures, including regional urban and peri-urban ecological planning.
With “eco-city mapping” identify ecologically sensitive areas, define the carrying capacity of regional life-support systems, and identify areas where nature, agriculture and the built environment should be restored. Also identify those areas where more dense and diverse development should be focused in centers of social and economic vitality. - Design cities for energy conservation, renewable energy uses and the reduction, re-use and recycling of materials.
- Build cities for safe pedestrian and non-motorized transport use with efficient, convenient and low-cost public transportation. End automobile subsidies, increase taxation on vehicle fuels and cars and spend the revenue on eco-city projects and public transportation.
Provide strong economic incentives to businesses for eco-city building and rebuilding. Tax activities that work against ecologically healthy development, including those that produce greenhouse gases and other emissions. Develop and enhance government policies that encourage investment in eco-city building. - Provide adequate, accessible education and training programs, capacity building and local skills development to increase community participation and awareness of eco-city design and management and of the restoration of the natural environment. Support community initiatives in eco-city building.
- Create a government agency at each level – village, city, regional, national and international – to craft and execute policy to build the eco-city and promote associated ecological development. The agency will coordinate and monitor functions such as transportation, energy, water and land use in holistic planning and management, and facilitate projects and plans.
- In policy at all levels of government and in the decision making bodies of all institutions – universities, businesses, non-governmental organization, professional associations and so on – address in the plans and actions of those institutions specifically what can be done through the institutions’ physical design and layout relative to its local community to address global heating, the coming end of fossil fuels and global crisis of species extinctions.
- Encourage and initiate international, inter-city and community-to-community cooperation to share experiences, lessons and resources in eco-city development and promote eco-city practice in developing and developed countries.
(Adapted from the 2008 Eco-City Conference Declaration in San Francisco)