Journey of the Universe weaves together the discoveries of the evolutionary sciences together with humanities such as history, philosophy, art, and religion. This course draws on the Journey of the Universe Conversations, a series of 20 interviews with scientists and environmentalists. The first 10 interviews are with scientists and historians who deepen our understanding of the evolutionary process of universe, Earth, and humans. The second 10 interviews are with environmentalists, teachers, and artists who explore the connections between the universe story and the practices for a flourishing Earth community.
Eco-Cities (Richard Register)
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Journey Conversations: Weaving Knowledge and Action
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从本节课中
Becoming a Planetary Presence: Communities, Cities, and Economics
The story of the isolated neutron’s quick decay and the neutron+proton’s long term stability as an illustration of the synergistic effects that will take place in Eco-cities. In ways we can only guess at, these new mutually enhancing relationships will lead to a qualitatively new vitality.
与讲师见面
Mary Evelyn TuckerSenior Lecturer and Senior Research Scholar
Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies
John GrimSenior Lecturer and Senior Research Scholar
Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies
[MUSIC]
Richard, welcome.
So good to see you again.
>> Thank you.
>> We met a number of years ago through Thomas Berry really, who thought so
highly of your work and he would always say, you've got to read Ecocity Berkeley.
And you've been at this for a long time, you've written a number of books,
you've held a number of conferences, you've traveled around the world.
Spoken in 29 countries on this topic.
>> Kept count.
>> So we'd love you to give us a sense, first of all,
of why at this moment in human history, when we've gone over
the 50% point of living in cities as a global population,
why are cities such a key to our future?
>> Well, it's not only that we're 50% living in cities but
it's like we're 95% living in the built environment.
Because there are very few hermits and herders and grazers
out there on the landscape right now, so people live in cities, towns and villages.
And at this point in history most of them are very, very badly designed.
But the larger question, what's the important about cities?
I think there's two very large overriding things, both of them having to do
with evolution, which Thomas Berry and I talk about once in awhile.
One of them is the creative potential of the city,
helping the human being fulfill their own potential.
So there's the positive side, and
when I first started thinking about ecological cities,
I met an architect by the name of Paolo Soleri and he pointed out that the really
healthy form of the city would be much more compact and three dimensional.
That's because if you look at evolution, you notice that the living organisms,
of which we're one,
our body is a living organism, is a very three dimensional complex structure.
It's not flat like a sheet of paper, like Los Angeles or Houston.
It's much more compact, three dimensional,
that's because the three-dimensionality works much better
in terms of the accessibility of all the parts of the organism to one another.
And if you don't have that, you have for example a suburban sprawl,
what you end up with is a vascular system of streets, driveways,
highways, interchanges, and so on.
So it's a physical structure that doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
But I started thinking that, I was making sculpture at the time,
that you could live in these exciting new environments that are much more
three-dimensional and much more like sculpture.
Not necessarily gigantic cities, but
cities of all scales could take on various unique forms, no matter where they were.
But they would be much more compact and three dimensional and
would be much less dependent upon cars and asphalt and oil and so on and so forth.
So the positive part of that is you'd be creating an environment that's quite
spectacular.
You could imagine getting up into these interlaced buildings with bridges between
them, with views out over the landscape.
Taking up a very small amount of land.
You'd take an elevator, staircase or something down to ground level and pop
right out of a very small footprint city into natural or agricultural landscapes.
So the positive potential there of treating cities like sculptures,
of becoming an art form in its own right,
which some people do think about cities as being.
But ones that could help you recognizing that you're in an evolutionary pattern
to further evolution.
To see yourself as a consciousness rising up in living material on the planet earth.
So you have a city with the harmony with the evolving human beings,
the city evolving in the direction that we don't know yet.
But if you entered into that adventure, of making the city into an art form for
our normal evolution, then that's really something.
I call it mini-plexion, miniaturization and complexification.
And the plex part means braiding, so you can think of little braidings getting
smaller and smaller into the future, where the miniaturization is
working in the small realm but the cities themselves are getting smaller, literally.
Instead of the vast areas of suburban sprawl with its redundant walls and
all those millions of gallons of gasoline to keep it going,
you actually have a compact city you can walk around.
So that's the positive side.
The city's an instrument for
furthering human evolution in a very creative sort of way.
Now that's the way it started about 35 years ago,
40 years ago when I was thinking about all of this.
In the meantime, crises have developed.
And it looks like it might be the only thing that can rescue us.
Like I say it's 95% of us live there, not just 50%.
But this designed environment we live in is very badly designed, and
if the European city runs on one-third the energy of an American city,
as it is now, and they're stuffed with a lot of cars too for
the same basic level of prosperity, well then what's going on here?
It's a gigantic hint, I mean, it's 66% savings in energy right off the top.
Just to start talking about the difference between the American city and
the European city.
So if you push that in the ecological city design, I think you could run cities
easily on one-tenth the energy of the cities we have now on one-fifth the land.
But you have to actually get there.
And I think that we may have a chance to get there.
>> I think this is so right, namely the direction of how we design,
redesign and build new cities is crucial to our future.
I would say, and thanks to your work and others, that we are getting more traction.
At Yale we have a whole Urban Ecology Institute that's 25 years old, it's been
concentrating on things that you've been thinking about too, trees in cities,
urban ecology, of gardens, wastewater, rainwater, and so on.
But I think the scale, of course, is what is needed now.
The mayor of New Haven has created a whole body of inner city workers,
with tree planting and so on, they're going to do a million trees,
and this is spreading across the country.
So there is an urban ecology movement.
But I think what you're speaking about is design.
I love this sense of design that's organic, that's evolutionary.
Why did people come to cities?
What did they look like?
What can we draw on for our own thinking at present?
>> Well I actually went to what's sometimes called the oldest city in
the world, it had about 10,000 people 8,000 years ago.
That's Catal Hoyuk in central Turkey, because it's kind of a destination place
for a person like me who sees cities in the evolutionary timeframe.
And to me it was fascinating to be there because it existed there for
about 8 or 900 years and
then there were about 1,000 years before anything else happened like it.
And then when that started to happen, that was in the Mesopotamian valley.
But I sat there looking around, thinking it's fantastic what was going on here,
it's the first real city all by itself on a whole universe of people,
and is serving certain purposes.
The city is the economic engine that pulls together all sorts of creative
energy by having a lot of diversity close together.
It's kind of like the whole evolutionary theory that you have stars condensing out
of gas and gas clouds of the universe,
and then exploding and throwing more material out into space, then planets
becoming smaller units in space with much more complex environments and so on.
Well cities follow that pattern too, so you have the most ancient of cities
pulling together ideas and people and little technologies here and there.
They started building with basically, adobe brick there, first time,
they had some copper that was some of the earliest ever.
They made the first mirrors by polishing, very fine grain polishing obsidian.
And then they had fired pottery, they did figurines,
they had wonderful mosaics on the walls.
All this art, all this technology, all this Came together in a focal point,
the city.
So they function like that in many times in history and then you go up to
a larger population, maybe 30,000 in the early Mesopotamian valley, and
they had answers 4,500 years ago that we could use today.
For example because they had a pedestrian compact city
everything was very close together.
that meant that in an area that flooded a lot, Tigris-Euphrates Valley,
if you built your city up on a platform, about 20 feet, the floods would come and
go around the city, very simple, and so here you are in an agricultural zone.
A big flood comes down.
And it's as if you're in this slow-moving ocean suddenly.
It must have been actually quite fun and
exciting to be an At the time of a big flood, 4,500 BC.
So if you have a pedestrian environment, which is compact and
covers a small amount of land,
compared to a motorized environment that covers 50 times the land area, you can
actually afford to build a little bit of elevated fill and put your city on it.
They did 4,500 years ago, it's still a good idea.
These principles still work.
>> Can you go back and give us a sense of the development of history of the city as
well, after After theses early cities, what happened for humans in their
coming together as collective entities, along these river valleys and so on?
>> One city, you know creating the economics to generate trade,
and other cities at a distance picking up on the trade.
Venice is an example, so you develop on Venice Italy.
That Venice was in an area where they had salt pans,
evaporative salt Is low and flat on the water.
And forests, and so they had lumber and
they had salt they could sell to Constantinople.
And so, they would trade the salt and the lumber, but coming back the other way,
they would be getting glasswares and textiles and the latest in navigation
instruments and what people are learning about ship building all sorts of things.
So they began in Venice to reproduce what they were getting from Constantinople.
Then later they serve that function that Constantinople served for
them in seeding cities elsewhere around the world.
So the cities became all around the world, focal points for
all sorts of cultural scientific, artistic and
spiritual development beginning to explore the universe around.
The city is the instrument that brings so
many of those pieces together that it's like the generator of the real prosperity.
The prosperity in the positive sense is doing things that
don't necessarily have to damage the planet that much.
Now, at some point though, you get the parasitic affect of cities too.
Where you would have the plunder of the European cities of the cities of
the New World for example pulling out all the wealth and melting down all these
wonderful artworks that people did because they're made out of gold and silver.
And then trading that off into India for things like textiles and spices and so on.
So you had this world trade situation but
you have some people that have gone kind of greedy in the extreme.
Enslaving people in the colonial period.
And taking the energy out of those other cities.
And then creating in a lot of cities the impression that the city is really pretty
parasitic on nature.
And you have people these days that are interested in city design, landscape
architects, who think that cities are not a place where nature should be.
You have a public plaza, a public square, you're not supposed to have nature there.
What's that supposed to be all about?
But, in fact, if we don't have our cities, at this point in history,
actually celebrate nature and come to understand it much, much better.
And in the largest context that's understanding its role in evolution,
we're in serious trouble.
>> Now two questions then.
We have to think about building cities from the ground of like in China,
new eco cities.
China has cities of 35 million people, easily 35 cities with a million people.
The sense of a new eco city is one dimension here.
Then how are we going to retrofit cities that are already built in a certain way?
So new cities and then retrofitting our cities, what are your recommendations?
>> I think it's most important to deal with retrofitting existing cities
because they're there for a reason.
The food was good there, the trade routes crossed, one thing or another.
And so people started building cities a long time ago in
very good places for cities.
Rich soils, big fisheries, resources near by and so on.
Of course humans have spread out across that and would sprawl and
covered a lot of agricultural lands and cut down forests and so on.
But the very places places have been taken by cities already.
It is really important to deal with that and to try to actually change cities.
You can imagine a full scale new city.
I have nothing against that.
I do drawings illustrating exactly what I think they would like if they were
approaching an ideal and I think an ideal is a good thing to approach like
the good in the and the just and the beautiful.
Well here is the healthy, let's design cities so our lifestyles can be healthy.
It's an ideal, you never arrive at the ideal, but
it's a lighthouse that guides you in the right direction.
So you can imagine a whole new ecological city, and I do that a lot,
but the most important thing I think is to retrofit existing cities.
How to do it?
There's zoning and general plans.
I mean straight forward approaches that are politically established.
You have to actually change people's minds, you have to change the zoning you
have to make the way for the zoning changes with general plans.
But there's a couple of tools that I work with in my organization,
Eco City Builders that addressed that head on.
And Vancouver now the first major city I know of that's doing this they are using
something that's exactly like this, almost exactly like our eco city mapping, and
the mapping system that shows you where to move things to and
where to move development is very key.
Define the centers of the city, that are already fairly lively and fairly dense.
They're fairly pedestrian, they work well with transit.
It's not that hard to do.
Then you map the city so
that you see those places where you want to augment that pattern.
Because our cities are very much dominated by automobiles and
far-flung asphalt and the need for enormous amounts of energy.
So you find the places in the city that works really well with minimal energy
that support pedestrians that aren't very automobile friendly, frankly
because the automobile gets into these environments and cause a lot of problems.
So you re-enforce the pedestrian designs in these areas.
You make them more dense.
But you make them more dense in a way that's very balanced so that jobs and
housing and daily life activities are fairly close together.
And then you can walk most places.
You bicycle to other places beyond that, and you can take transit beyond that, but
you get away from the automobile as much as you can.
It's important to understand that to buy a better car might create a worse city and
a worse situation.
I was in Los Angeles right in the fulcrum of major change for the whole planet.
It was incredibly smoggy then, we were losing a 1000 or
more people every year to the so called excess deaths.
Well they decided to clean up the atmosphere, very good measure,
clean air, healthy people and so on.
And so they did, they cleaned it up pretty well.
About of 95% of the pollution is taken out of the air because they fixed the car.
They made the car better.
So the solved the local air pollution problem by fixing the car and
it delivered the climate change problem because the other
cities in the world followed Los Angeles.
So you now have Beijing and it something like seventh ring road is being built.
Very a lot automobile dependent even though it's very dense in many areas.
All around the world, the nano was being introduced as this car for
everybody in India.
Everybody in India, that's 1.3 billion people already.
It's 1.7 billion people approximately now in China, and they all want cars.
I think the real hangup here is that people are really attached to their cars
and it touches them very very personally, and we've grown up now for three or
four generations in cities where cars have been so dominant,
and the cities have been radically reshaped around the automobile.
So to reshape a city moving towards an ecological city,
we have an enormous problem, which I think is maybe best illustrated by a taxi
cab ride I had in China a few years ago.
Where someone was saying well what do you do?
And I said I work on an ecological cities and
one of the things we find a problem is cars.
He says, but If I can have a car, how can I have a woman?
How can I find a wife?
And so again, that's personal, and you use cars for dating and baiting traps.
You're trying to attract women when you're a young man,
and your beautiful car that can go anywhere, high mobility and so on.
Well this is an incredibly disastrous situation.
And when the environmentalists of the United States think they're solving
a problem by switching to an electric car and they're still building
sprawl infrastructure, they're getting only a small piece of the action.
So the time has come, we have to look at the whole city.
The whole city isn't just the houses.
It's the houses, it's the asphalt paving, the driveways, the streets,
the interchanges, the parking lots, the parking structures.
So if you don't actually say, how can we redesign the whole system?
So instead of having a cars sprawl oil system,
you have a pedestrian compact mixed use, much smaller city,
literally physically much smaller with much, much lower demands.
I think you're not going to solve these problems.
And I think that a lot of good things have happened, leading cities like Curitiba,
Brazil that have many good models.
They have an excellent transportation system.
They have density close to dedicated bus routes,
which means that only buses go on those routes, and emergency vehicles.
And by organizing the city much better, they save an enormous amount of energy and
have some many good ecological features that result.
>> I remembered when I met you almost 10 years ago, and
you were working on daylighting the creek, Strawberry Creek there in Berkley, and.
>> 20 years ago.
[LAUGH] >> And you've been working on all this for
a long time.
But since even of day-lighting creeks for many peoples and new idea,
but the power of water in our midst, and why day-lighting of creeks?
>> Well the creeks are like the water, the vascular system of the whole city,
the whole region, the whole bio-region.
You have these watersheds that we all live around, unless you live in a desert and
have a very peculiar and interesting way of living.
[LAUGH] It is pretty hard to do.
But in most cases, water is extremely important.
Plus, that's where all sorts of animals go to get drinks and
you have very rich riparian zones there and so on.
So, when it comes to creek restoration in cities, most cities have buried most
of their creek systems and yet it's a very small fraction of a city's surface.
So if you were to rearrange a city so that you'd be honoring nature in any way and
actually inviting it physically back into your environment, actually protecting
the threatened species, and so on, by creating environments where they can live.
That's very powerful.
And there's plenty of room to do that if you redesign a city.
>> Yeah, in places like Seoul have done this and other cities around the world.
>> Well, I've had a direct relationship with that because in 1979,
we started working on Strawberry Creek in Berkeley.
And by 1990, some people came over from Korea to check it out and
see what it looked like.
By the year 2000, they were getting serious about planning.
By the year 2004, they had destroyed this enormous two-decker arterial that went
through the middle of the city that was creating tons of smog and
everything and started to dig up the creek.
And two years later,
they had this gigantic creek restoration project right in the middle of Seoul.
So my history has been involved with that, and I've had the good luck of
arriving in Seoul when they're actually digging it up with the bulldozers and
restoring the old creek channel where it used to be.
And then one year later, I came back, and the project was complete.
I mean, they built quickly in Asia.
And it's kind of inspiring if you're building the right thing.
And the people love it, by the way, I was here on a summer night last year, and
there were little children wading in the water,
and the adults taking pictures of them with these cameras.
There's flashing lights everywhere and the little sort of green, blue glow that
comes from all these cellphones with cameras on them these days.
I went back the next morning, I was shocked.
There's six inch fish, right there, swimming around the middle of Seoul,
Korea with people waiting around in the creek, the house is beautiful so.
>> it is amazing transformation I've seen the before and after too.
It's totally incredible and
again it's one of the powers of your work Richard is you have modeled.
You've thought this things through and
the fact that they are getting traction part of our evolutionary movement,
mean that's a huge move right for major Asian city to do it.
But, you've shown that it can be done and that's a powerful and
inspiring thing for people.
The change can happen locally, but it can have a ripple affect around the world.
If we can re-align ourselves with evolution, if we can
bring forward even principles of design right from evolution, organic principles.
If we can bring from history examples of cities and
their functionality, we can draw on our evolutionary past,
to create something more sustainable, more functioning, more flourishing.
That's the promise, isn't it, of eco-cities?
>> Well, the eco-city leave room for everything else.
And a number of things that can be solved going to a whole systems perspective is
really kind of awesome.
For example, because you have a transportation system
in an ecological city, city for pedestrians instead of cars,
you save an enormous amount of energy in the transportation itself.
And so much so in fact that this is probably on the order of 25% of
the energy we use could be saved in the transportation system.
But what about the buildings?
We now have scattered little buildings all over the place.
And so for heating and cooling those buildings,
we use a vast amount of energy as well.
But if you have a compact set of buildings,
the larger building shares energy between the units.
So I for example, live in an apartment house with somebody above,
someone below, and on two walls.
That means that three quarters of the surface of the building is shared energy.
And so, we very seldom even have to use the energy in our apartment house,
because we have water heating, and showers, and cooking.
And our each body is about a 100 watt bulb worth of energy going all the time.
So you have not the transportation, but the heating and cooling as well and
what about all the electronics?
Well, the ecological city makes it possible for much more face to face.
Down on the streets, you walk a short distance you have a complex center
relationship with business people or friends that meet in a cafe or something.
You don't have to be on the internet as much because you have the face-to-face
availability of libraries and people and business associates and so on.
So there is three very large energy
uses the resolve largely just by moving towards the ecological city.
I mean, not only that but the city solves the agricultural problems,
it solves the nature problems in many ways by leaving room for those things.
Right now, you have cities spreading out of their agriculture land and the central
valley of California, which is the richest production area in the entire country.
And slowly those cities are covering more and more agricultural landscapes,
that should reverse, that should be covering less and less as time goes on.
So the ecological city is an agricultural solution that leaves room for nature,
provides the opportunity to restore biodiversity in the cities and the creeks.
It provides educational information that you can get by walking around town
with your kids or with somebody who actually can give you a guided tour.
So if you take the whole system's perspective, and you look at that
whole city, you discover it solves energy problems, land use problems,
agricultural problems, natural problems, face-to-face social problems.
It's absolutely stunning what you get,
if you can take that whole system's perspective and redesign the city.
>> Could really help our dependence on oil in so many ways.
And as well as you've said, it could really energize the human for
these kinds of interaction, for further creativity in this evolutionary process.
>> And in a very simple level too you have many people saying well let's have more
solar energy, lets have more wind energy, lets have more energy, more energy,
more energy.
Well, wait a minute.
There are better energy sources available.
And I started writing about them in 1971 in the Los Angeles Times.
Solar energy articles, I was doing back then.
It's a good idea.
You want to move towards more solar energy, more wind energy.
That's true.
But you have to get the demand down to the point where those intrinsically
more expensive energy sources, I'm afraid that's going to be the truth.
You don't need as much of it any way.
So you have on one hand a better energy source being utilized and
you have on the other hand a much lower demand because of the way you design and
that's your major energy solution.
[MUSIC]
