By Richard Register In the perfect world of politics and economics rolling along, direct and official accountability to the public, through free speech, open deliberation and voting (decision making) and taxing and spending (getting real about doing something) would be mainly through government and the law-making...
Ecocity Economics 101 Richard Register Some of you regular readers of our Ecocity Builders Newsletter might be interested in the way my mind works, which is largely through visual representation, so this article is one version of that. This will be something of an introduction to my...
The international Ecocity Standards call for “Healthy Biodiversity” (www.ecocitystandards.org). This means that the range of plants and animals living in local, bioregional and global ecosystems is sustained, and that natural habitat is restored. Conservation of habitat has been an important strategy to ensure nature’s long-term...
I hadn’t seen Sylvia in six months, the longest stretch in the last 20 years or more. Too much travel, followed by greatly reduced mobility – mine, because of sciatica. Man did it hurt! Hard to walk. But being 90% recovered from two months of...
The Bio-Geophysical Conditions for Ecocity Standards (www.ecocitystandards.org) include "Responsible Resources/Materials." This includes careful stewardship of scarce resources whether they be renewable or non-renewable. It may seem counter-intuitive to put sand in this category. Sand, one of the world's ubiquitous materials, is actually becoming a scarce...
What about the long-term vision, not just for ecocities, necessary to any healthy vision of the future, but the longest term vision? For that we have to look to evolution. Most of you readers of our newsletter have no doubt noticed the banner heading under the...
Not to sound like a television game show, and certainly not to offer a $64 billion dollar prize for the answer, as if money would do it all… but what is the best answer? That’s in the singular. Is there one? Skip oil; go solar? Are there...
We often focus on the built environment as a solution space for reducing energy and materials demand; however, equally important is the consumption characteristics of the people who live in these built environments that we call cities. While it is true that the built environment influences...
Cover Image: Mayor Humberto Sanchez shakes my hand agreeing to proceed with working on an ecocity project adjacent his city of Sacaba, a sub city of Cochabamba, partnering with Ecocity Builders, second largest to Cochabamba in the Kanata region, sometime referred to as the Cochabamba...
At the Ecocity World Summit 2015 in Abu Dhabi, I had an opportunity to participate in a tour of Masdar, an experiment in sustainable development at the neighbourhood scale. Here is a brief synopsis of first impressions using Ecocity Standards to help assess where Masdar...