Ecocity World Summit 2008
Academic and Talent Scouting Sessions
April 22-23, 2008
UC Berkeley Extension
95 Third Street
San Francisco, California, USA

INTRODUCTION

Eighteen years ago the First International Ecocity Conference was convened across the San Francisco Bay at Berkeley. The series moved on: to Australia, Africa, South America and Asia. Now the conference is back in North America and the world is a very different place. Since the first conference, society has awakened to the climate crisis we highlighted in Berkeley all those years ago. Many are now aware that energy problems are waiting around the corner of something called 'peak oil' - that time when, pump as we may, oil production will be going down faster than demand is rising for the simple reason that the supply, large as it has been, is not infinite.

In 1990 we described cities as the largest creations of our species and asserted that they were directly connected to the state of the planet's environment as well as to local problems and solutions, both ecological and economic. Cities, we said, vary wildly in their impacts on the world, on us, and our civility. We should pay attention to that.

In many ways we are still not paying attention. How far we haven't progressed is evident in the 2008 United Nations Bali Conference on Climate Change, where not a word was said about urban form. It is remarkable that more of us don't connect the largest creation of our species to the largest of our environmental, resource consumption and biodiversity problems – and to their solutions.

The most central mission of this conference is to alert people to that connection.

Now we are nearing a threshold. Will we cross into a whole other realm, a whole other way of building – for people instead of for the requirements of machines? Because when the first order of city planning is "ample car parking" you know for whom you are building. Are we going to redesign and start reshaping cities on the human measure and for ecological health before relatively inexpensive energy goes away forever? We could slam into a recession or even a world depression caused largely by increasing difficulty of getting enough energy to run the sort of technologies and lifestyles we seem set upon having. Or will we modify our ways of building and living for the long haul?

These are the questions we face at this time in evolution, as whole species are disappearing from the Earth. As we build, so shall we live – and enable others, meaning the plants and animals we share this planet with – to thrive or disappear forever. The way we build cities is this crucial.

We may well find out that the far happier healthier way of building cities is also the most culturally enriching and equitable way, the way most beneficial for all life on the planet, the way that also rescues us from the destructive forces we have unleashed, and is at the same time the way that can actually work.

From all over the world we are inviting architects, planners, environmentalists, climatologists, energy experts, leading mayors and governors, innovators, students, developers building the right thing, indigenous people, artists and others to present their best thinking and experience. But we will also challenge everyone to go beyond their past successes and transform this largest of all our creations, our cities, into something far better.

The conference calls for creativity and the courage to change and for an optimism born of clear vision and concrete steps to a much healthier future.

Richard Register, Conference Co-Convener
President, Ecocity Builders