Faith in "real" cities

The Cleveland EcoVillage project is rooted in an unexpected faith in citiesa faith that cities are good for people and good for the earth.

This faith is unexpected because people often have the opposite viewthat cities are the home of humanity's darker impulses and most wasteful behaviors. Cities are insatiable consumers of resources and profligate producers of pollution. They exert tremendous ecological pressures on the rest of the planet.

But cities also present opportunities. By concentrating population in compact areas, they can help conserve the land. By developing sophisticated treatment systems, they can minimize the water pollution of millions of people. By promoting compact neighborhoods and public transit, they can reduce housing costs and dependence on the automobile. By facilitating trade and social interaction, they promote the flowering of human culture.

In many ways, then, cities can be the places where the most people can live full lives with the least impact on the earth. Indeed, we have to make this so because the majority of the world's six billion people will soon live in urban areas. We have no choice but to make cities as ecological as possible.

In Northeast Ohio, older industrial cities such as Cleveland have declined, bottomed out, and started to redevelop. In this process of regeneration, we have a chance to adopt different design principles. Instead of industrial-age design principles based on the domination of nature and the endless consumption of fossil fuels, we can adopt ecological design principles that help us work with natural systems and the renewable cycles of solar energy.

To succeed, we need to regenerate cities from the inside and from the outside. Inside of cities, we must reinvest in great neighborhoods. Out on the edges of metropolitan areas, we must reduce the suburban sprawl that sucks life from the urban core.

The Cleveland EcoVillage project, a partnership of EcoCity Cleveland and the Detroit Shoreway Community Development Organization, is part of the inside strategy. It aims to demonstrate how an urban neighborhood can be redeveloped using the best ecological thinking.

It focuses on an existing neighborhood, a "real" place. In contrast, many of the other ecovillage projects around the world are somewhat utopian. They involve well-off people building their solar dream houses together in a remote and scenic location. Such projects often demonstrate important ideas and technology, but most of the rest of the world can't live like that. The real challenge is to build sustainable communities where most people now livein places like Cleveland, Ohio.

 

 

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EcoCity Cleveland
3500 Lorain Avenue, Suite 301, Cleveland OH 44113
Cuyahoga Bioregion
(216) 961-5020
www.ecocitycleveland.org
Copyright 2002-2003

 

 

Downtown Cleveland with Edgewater Park in the foreground
Cities can be the places where the most people can live full lives with the least impact on the earth.

Older industrial cities, such as Cleveland, have declined, bottomed out, and started to redevelop. In this process of regeneration, we have a chance to adopt different design principles. Instead of industrial-age design principles based on the domination of nature and the endless consumption of fossil fuels, we can adopt ecological design principles that help us work with natural systems and the renewable cycles of solar energy.

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