Ecocity Builders
We develop and implement policy, design and educational tools and strategies to build thriving urban centers based on “access by proximity” and to reverse patterns of sprawl and excessive consumption. Ecocity Builders and associates’ definition of “ecocity” is conditional upon a healthy relationship of the city’s parts and functions, similar to the relationship of organs in living complex organism. We are concerned with city design, planning, building, and operations in an integral way and in relation to the surrounding environment and natural resources of the region, utilizing organic, ecological and whole-systems lessons to actually reverse the negative impacts of climate change, species extinction and the destruction of the biosphere. We believe the form of the city matters, that it is within our ability, and indeed crucial, to reshape and restructure cities to address global environmental challenges.
Company details
Find locations served, office locations
- Business Type:
- Nonprofit organization (NPO)
- Industry Type:
- Environmental Management
- Market Focus:
- Globally (various continents)
- Year Founded:
- 1992
About Us
Founded in 1992 by ecocity pioneer Richard Register and a core group of ecologists and activists in order to further a set of specific goals outlined at the first International Ecocity Conference in Berkeley in 1990, Ecocity Builders continued to advance the body and practice of the ecocity movement that had began in 1975 with Register’s previous nonprofit, Urban Ecology.
Richard Register’s 1979 Vegetable Car in honor of Henry H. Bliss, first auto fatality.
Utilizing ecological urban planning, design, ecology, education, advocacy, policy and public participation to build healthier cities for both people and nature, Ecocity Builders’ early years were characterized by a number of local projects in the San Francisco East Bay.
For example, the Codornices Creek Project in 1994 that removed the water channel from its cement culvert along the Albany/Oakland border to create a mile-long park signified one of the earliest daylighted and restored creek beds in the United States.
During that time, Ecocity Builders also helped plan and provided support for a variety of small to medium sized depaving projects in Berkeley. Accomplishments included a garden to replace five parking spaces at the University Avenue Homes’ low income residence, as well as the conversion of a 28 space parking lot into a community-designed mini-park at Halcyon Commons.
Strawberry Creek Park Daylighting, West Berkeley
Over the years, many more projects would help define and refine “pieces of the ecocity,” providing living laboratories and models for practitioners in the emerging field of ecocity development. A street was redesigned as a “Slow Street,” a new bus line was established, street side fruit and nut trees were planted, and buildings were designed to feature rooftop access and greenery with views to nature.
Through its advocacy work, Ecocity Builders also began to lobby for and successfully co-author policies in Berkeley that are currently enforced, including the Ecocity Amendment to the 2001 General Plan, the Solar Greenhouse Ordinance, and the Residential Energy Conservation Ordinance (RECO).
In the mid 2000s, Ecocity Builders first began employing GIS mapping techniques to identify active urban nodes that could serve as Eco Districts. Based on a method for identifying urban villages in large urban areas that had first been piloted in Richard Register’s 1987 book Ecocity Berkeley, a project commissioned in 2009 by the Bay Area Air Quality Management District entitled Ecocity Mapping for Urban Villages would turn out to be the catalyst for Ecocity Builders’ more recent ventures into the web-based mapping and data visualization tools as developed through its Urbinsight platform.
These projects have not only created physical features, functions and established new laws, but have stimulated discussion of larger eco-urban issues and implications as well, leading to the creation of our current flagship projects, the International Ecocity Framework & Standards Initiative and Urbinsight.
Through it all, Ecocity Builders has managed to convene Ecocity World Summits in Australia, Senegal, Brazil, China, India, San Francisco, Turkey, Canada, France, and the UAE, poised to convene for the 12th time in Vancouver, B.C. October 2019.
Philosophy
Cities are the largest artifacts that humans build. They accommodate two out of every three people on the planet (and rapidly growing) and generate the majority of the world’s waste, pollution, and greenhouse gases. Consequently, if we could shape cities to function like healthy natural organisms with balanced and sustainable resource flows from source to sink, much of the Earth’s life support systems that are currently under existential pressures as a result of a prolonged but now outdated extractive industrial-age economic philosophy of externalizing ecological costs would be allowed to regenerate.
In order to prescribe a meaningful “treatment plan” to an imbalanced urban organism and develop the tools to gauge and guide progress, we must first conduct a thorough and holistic assessment of its current physical, cultural, and ecological condition. This is not an easy task, as modern cities aren’t isolated entities with clearly defined boundaries, but complex ecosystems interwoven not only into a bioregional but a global tapestry. At the same time, they are human-made organisms with physical and political boundaries, offering the tangible containers needed in order to be measured.
Therefore, an important step in the process of addressing urban challenges and creating effective solutions is the ability to understand, measure and quantify the environmental impacts of cities, for example, in terms of consumption of energy and natural resources and generation of waste. To provide a practical methodology for such measurement, we’ve been developing the International Ecocity Framework & Standards Initiative, organized through 15 conditions within four fundamental urban pillars.
For standards to be meaningful, there is a need for detailed, accurate data and information about local urban environmental conditions, as well as social and economic conditions that affect both the immediate quality of life for residents and the long-term resilience and sustainability of urban areas. Furthermore, access to such data and information is a key consideration, both for citizens (so that they can be involved in governance and action to improve environmental conditions and quality of life) and for governments (in order to support good public policy, decision making and urban management).
To that end, our Urbinsight project is currently being developed to strengthen sustainable life ways and urban systems within a placed-based cultural context and to increase social awareness through a broad vision that promotes public participation, integration, cooperation, equity and social justice.
Goals
- Catalyze a new transdisciplinary approach to urban data management and data representations that can inform local action.
- Provide essential metrics, knowledge and platforms for understanding the relationship between nature, culture and the built environment.
- Support community-led solutions as part of a just transition towards a healthier and equitable world.
Strategies
- Create and innovate Participatory Urban Metabolism Information Systems (PUMIS) and Participatory Geographic Information Systems (PGIS).
- Curate community mapping and IT to enable neighborhoods to build their own ‘community atlases’ as a way to inform each other on key issues and build social capital.
- Demonstrate the first of its kind “barefoot” bottom-up approach to environmental accounting and gap filling.
- Convene the world’s leading experts and practitioners to develop standard protocols for easy and rapid visualizations of the urban metabolism.
- Converge on key issues to help inform key policy initiatives at the global, national and local levels.
- Collaborate with like-minded organizations around the world to describe the overall health of the urban ecosystem (city)
- Promote key indicators for ecologically healthy urban design, bio-geo-physical conditions, socio-cultural conditions and addressing ecological imperatives.
- Educate and inform cities, policy makers, practitioners, service providers and citizens through democratic and accessible data initiatives, tools, resources, programs and partnerships.
What Is An Ecocity?
An Ecologically Healthy City
Simply put, an ecocity is an ecologically healthy city. And because each city is unique, there is no one-size-fits-all ecocity model or just one way to get there from where we are now. However, ecocities share basic characteristics analogous to healthy ecosystems and living organisms. As such, a working definition was adopted by Ecocity Builders and the International Ecocity Framework & Standards (IEFS) advisory team on February 20th, 2010, in Vancouver, Canada:
An Ecocity is a human settlement modeled on the self sustaining resilient structure and function of natural ecosystems. The ecocity provides healthy abundance to its inhabitants without consuming more (renewable) resources than it produces, without producing more waste than it can assimilate, and without being toxic to itself or neighboring ecosystems. Its inhabitants’ ecological impact reflect planetary supportive lifestyles; its social order reflects fundamental principles of fairness, justice and reasonable equity.
LIVING ORGANISMS
Like living organisms, cities and their inhabitants exhibit and require systems for movement (transport), respiration (processes to obtain energy), sensitivity (responding to its environment), growth (evolving/changing over time), reproduction (including education and training, construction, planning and development, etc.), excretion (outputs and wastes), and nutrition (need for air, water, soil, food for inhabitants, materials, etc.). One great way to understand the processes of an ecocity is to pay close attention to the inner and outer workings of your own body. Another is to cultivate and observe the micro and macro relationships inside your garden.
An ecosystem is a biological environment consisting of all the organisms living in a particular area, as well as all the nonliving physical components of the environment with which the organisms interact, such as air, soil, water, and sunlight. Urban entities (cities, towns and villages) are urban ecosystems. They are also part of larger systems that provide essential services such as regulation (climate, floods, nutrient balance, water filtration), provision (food, medicine), culture (science, spiritual, ceremonial, recreation, aesthetic) and support (nutrient cycling, photosynthesis, soil formation). A bioregional cluster of ecocities with integrated waterways and agricultural lands and connected by public transit and bike-ped greenways would constitute an ecological metropolis, or “ecopolis”.
In order to improve the wellbeing of something as complex as an urban organism there needs to be a set of criteria by which cities can adopt measures that would enable them to successfully move toward becoming ecocities. Ecocity Builders has been developing a framework that enables participating cities to assess their overall ecological health while also providing guidance towards a more restorative urban environment. Designed for a wide range of stakeholders, the International Ecocity Framework & Standards Initiative (IEFS) charts a city’s steps forward along fifteen conditions, with corresponding verifiable indicators, organized through four fundamental urban arenas: urban design, bio-geo-physical conditions, ecological imperatives, and socio-cultural conditions.
MEASURING HOLISTIC URBAN HEALTH
An important step in the process of addressing urban challenges and creating effective solutions is the ability to understand, measure and quantify the environmental impacts of cities. There is a need for detailed, accurate data and information about local urban environmental conditions as well as social and economic conditions that affect both the immediate quality of life for residents and the long-term resilience and sustainability of urban areas. Based on a bottom-up approach to documenting environmental conditions at the neighborhood scale, Ecocity Builders’ Urbinsight platform connects communities with web-based mapping tools designed to explore and measure holistic urban health, providing the tools, training, and knowledge for creating more sustainable, resilient urban environments.