Eco-city definition(s) - DAC
Danish Architecture center interviewed a couple experts on their definition of sustainable cities
http://sustainablecities.dk/en/experts
Richard Burdett, Professor of Architecture and Urban studies at the London School of Economics.
The sustainable city of the future should be versatile, compact and beautiful.
Joan Busquets, Professor in Practice of Urban Planning and Design at the Graduate School of Design (GSD) at Harvard University.
The sustainable city is a long lasting city, that delts properly with the natural geography, with a friendly city center.
Thomas Sieverts, architect and urban planner
The most important thing that a sustainable city has to have is beauty.The sustainable city is not so much about the ‘hardware’ of the city but the very behavior of the city and how people treat the city. The sustainable city is about behavior and about creating a simple set of rules that educate people to act and behave in a sustainable way.
Pan Haixiao, Professor of Land Use and Transport Studies at Tongji University
If you look at the definition of sustainable development, first that we would have a developed country, that we would have some kind of development… where people can survive in the city. So economic vitality is very important. At the same time, with less environmental impact. And also, that [the city] can be shared by different social groups, that different social groups can be participants in decision making.
Thomas Ermacora, director & owner of Etikstudio, founder of CLEAR Village Foundation
People-Centric + Semi-Dense + Poetic
Janette Sadik-Khan, commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation
A safe city, a healthy city, a city that has a high quality of life
Vandana Shiva, activist and philosopher
A sustainable city is really a city that functions like a cluster of villages, in the sense that each part of it is self-reliant and self-sufficient
John Whitelegg, professor of Sustainable Transportation at Liverpool John Moores University and a Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of York’s Stockholm Environment Institute
The sustainable city is, first of all, a vast improvement in quality of life that ordinary people can detect and enjoy
Arun Jain, urban designer, former Portland, Oregon’s first Chief Urban Designer
Resilience (how do you plan for uncertainty) + Balance (being proportional in terms of how much emphasis we put on what) + Strategic focus
It is all about behaviour
Cameron Sinclair, co-founder of Architecture for Humanity
Mobility + Technical Aspects (how to achieve a 0 carbon city) + Social Cohesion = Diversity and complexity in a simple world
Hilmar von Lojewski, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit
density, proximity, and a mixture of users
Herbert Girardet, social anthropologist, cultural ecologist, writer, consultant and filmmaker
Self sufficient city. The impact on the planet today is primarily from urban consumption patterns. Secondly, it’s important for cities to adopt a circular metabolism (recycling, ...).. The third primary characteristic of a truly environmentally sustainable city is carbon neutral transport systems.
David Harvey, professor of Anthropology at the Centre for Place, Culture and Politics at the Graduate Centre, City University of New York.
there is no single ’silver bullet’ solution to creating a sustainable city. We need to work on a variety of different aspects of city life simultaneously. There are six aspects that I would single out for special attention, recognizing that how they fit together and interact in the end will be determined by how the city and its relation to nature evolve over time :
1.What kind of relation to nature is envisaged and with what kind of ecological footprint?
2.The question of technologies is crucial
3.Social relations and division of labour are crucially connected to technological choices and the relation to nature.
4.The organization of production systems relates to the organization of social and technical divisions of labour as well as to technologies.
5.The urban experience gives rise to certain mental conceptions of the world and political subjectivities.
6.The qualities of daily life and the cultivation of a sense of well-being
Jan Gehl, pofessor of Urban Design at the School of Architecture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen
a sustainable city would be a very people-friendly city. It would be a city with good public spaces and a city that is rather compact. It would be a city that really invites people to walk and bicycle as much as possible. A good walking and cycling environment with a good public realm is also a good environment for public transport, so there is an important connection here as well. Strengthening public transportation will be essential in the future, in order to become less dependent on private cars and also in order for the city to become more people-friendly.
