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Atlanta's EcoCity Evolution
The city of Atlanta began 2008 with the declaration that "Our Future is Green." This video represents bold vision-casting by our city's leadership and makes this little ol' EcoBroker proud to call Atlanta home.
It got me to thinking: how green could our city be? Atlanta already has more LEED certified buildings per capita than any other U.S. city. With the BeltLine we are underway with the largest green redevelopment project in the country. A good start as Mayor Franklin says, but what would it take to achieve her goal of becoming the greenest city on earth?
I speak often about the greenovation of personal properties, but our homes are systems within a system. We can green them up all we want but if they aren't part of a larger, greener system then how ecological is the end result? EcoHomes need to be embedded within EcoCities. What if we took greenovation to a whole new level -- say a block of downtown Atlanta. What would that look like? Richard Register, author and artist of EcoCities: Rebuilding Cities in Balance With Nature, provides us a triptych illustrating the evolution.
We begin with a slice of typical downtown America, like the picture below. We'll call this EcoCity Night. Look familiar? Bring any places in Atlanta to mind?
This could be any downtown with it's auto-dominated, concrete-covered landscape and big boxes of steel and glass. Nothing is built to human scale and it is not very pedestrian-friendly.The streets are congested and the citizens are choking on car exhaust.
Step two is EcoCity Dawn. Here we re-vision the built environment and get busy with the heavy lifting. We deconstruct and rebuild, beginning the process of creating a livable city center. Old waterways are uncovered, materials are recycled, out-dated and underutilized office towers are converted into vertical villages, parking is reclaimed, and mixed-use zoning is established. Alternative energy and water conservation strategies are planned and implementation begins.
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Finally we have EcoCity Day. Richard Register describes the achievement:
An EcoCity downtown with waterways restored, bridges between buildings, pedestrian streets, solar active and passive energy technology and design, rooftop access to elevated “streets” and bridges between buildings. Slowly, people are moving in from the suburbs toward city and town centers using development profits to help pay for buying and removing buildings in automobile dependent areas. Now the city center runs on a fraction of the energy as before, has streets filled with fruit trees, is extremely friendly to the pedestrian and the whole city takes up much less room, making room for more agriculture and natural land.
Burke Sisco
I've had some rich email exchanges with Richard Register since I made this post. Richard is the EcoCity Guy. He is one of the world's leading theorists and authors in ecological city design and planning. He is the Conference Convener for EcoCity 2008, a world summit to be held in San Francisco, April 22-26. He also has a thriving seedling in his window box whose parent is the world's oldest living organism -- the celebrated Methuselah Tree -- a 4,700 year old bristlecone pine! Fascinating!
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Source: EcoCity Builders
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