The following abstract was submitted for an upcoming conference: 54th ISOCARP Congress, Bodø, Norway, 1-5 October 2018: Cool Planning: Changing Climate and Our Urban Future, in section #5 – SOCIAL NETWORKS: Citizen Participation, Urban Governance and Cultural Transformation. PDF available here. Twitter hashtag used by author is #CoolCities.
Adapt or Die. Kicking our Oil Addiction to create Post-Capitalist Community led Ecocities
SHORT SYNOPSIS
Species wise, its simple: Adapt or Die. The solution: Ecocities. A Post Carbon and Degrowth proposal, based upon Creative Descent responses to the twin challenges of Global Warming and Peak Oil. Planning becomes a community facilitation process led from the bottom up, to create a municipalist structured Global Ecocity Network.
ABSTRACT
Species wise, its simple: Adapt or Die. Recognizing that “Modern cities are a product of the oil age” (Brown), we acknowledge the severity of the threat from Today’s Global Crises; Humanity’s Survival (Capra). It is not enough to merely Fix the City; humanity needs a complete reboot. We must address the effects of our collective oil addiction, whose ever increasing hunger for resources through the ongoing process of Planetary Urbanization (Merrifield) has led to the situation where “The earth is rapidly dying: her forests are dying, her soils are dying, her waters are dying, her air is dying” (Shiva). The solution: Ecocities. A Post Carbon and Degrowth proposal, based upon Creative Descent responses to the twin challenges of Global Warming and Peak Oil, amongst others, driven by normal citizens becoming actors of change in their own localities. Rejecting recent mega Ecocity projects in Asia, this paper suggests scaling up the existing Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) model, to where “every village is an ecovillage, every city a green city” (Joubert), without losing their 3 core values: 1) Being rooted in local participatory processes 2) Integrating social, cultural, economic and ecological dimensions in a whole systems approach to sustainability 3) Actively restoring and regenerating their social and natural environments. The Ecocity challenge is to understand how such a vision can be implemented globally in today’s massive cities, Municipalism offers solutions here: A fractal-like Ecocity network, consisting of communities within communities; a confederation of clusters of ecological neighbourhoods, communicating with each other non-hierarchically, organizing both horizontally and vertically through local assemblies. Where any node within the structure is both local and global at all times. The key to this urban transition lies in seeing Municipalism as both a structure and process, as outlined by Bookchin and other Social Ecologists, which suggests that organised groups of active citizens are the ones best suited to manage local affairs with decisions moving upward from the local to the global: communities, streets, neighbourhoods, regions, cities, Bioregions. The term Sustainable Cities was of its time, unable to embrace or incorporate newer concepts such as resilience, regeneration and more, whereas the not fully defined term of Ecocities allows for flexibility to adapt with time, to encapsulate the utopian dream of what cities could be, or more accurately, need to become. The paper traces Ecocity developments and concludes they must be solutions for all citizens, as opposed to more gated communities for the few. In remembering Ecology and Economy share the same root (Oikos = Home; Logos = Understanding; Nomos = Management), it is clear that to get the ecological part correct in our communities and planet, we need to get the economic part correct also. Any ecological economic system must live within the limits of life on earth, this means breaking from the current economic model of endless growth. Therefor logically, the current system of global capitalism is incompatible with this Ecocity proposal. In finishing, this paper turns to solutions from the Global South and “The Greenest city on Earth” (Ecologist), Curitiba. Since new direct action focused movements in 2007, Curitiba has started to be transformed through Social Movements based on Radical Ecology, Citizen Participation, inclusivity and a vibrant cultural movement to effect political change in the urban landscape. In 2016 these groups have gone from occupying the streets to occupying the cities municipal institutions. Brand claimed Cities “are becoming the Greenest thing that humanity does for the planet, (but) they have a long way to go”, this papers response suggests Planning becomes a community facilitation process led from the bottom up, to create a Global Ecocity Network.
KEY WORDS: Ecocities; Municipalism; Citizen Participation
Vid from Conferences organisers:
Ecocity Lisboa 