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?