Not your usual conference on sustainability

Could it be that the best, most enjoyable community might also be the best, most effective solution to climate change, the crises at the end of cheap energy and the collapse of species diversity around the planet?

We are at the crossroads and the Seventh International Ecocity Conference can tell you which route to take for avoiding the worst and attaining the best of cities, towns, villages and healthy relationships with nature on this fine planet.

What is unique about the Seventh International Ecocity Conference, also known as the Ecocity World Summit, is that it recognizes that we have to deal with the largest of humanity's creations directly and fearlessly. Now that over 85% of humanity lives in cities, towns and villages – the built community of our species – we must confront the basic principles and policies, details and life ways that are tied to that foundation of so much in human creativity and civilization. We have been building cities for machines and very cheap energy that is on its way out. Now we need to build something different: the city for ourselves, the city for people and all life on the planet, not the city for cars and oil.

What is different about the Seventh International Ecocity Conference is that we are facing the true proportions of the problem. And if we don't learn what the nature of our built environment is, we may well make small improvements that perpetuate its destructivity longer into the future. Better cars can't make better cities and a better relationship to nature. Only better cities can. That's the lesson of seeing the city as a whole system, as having an "anatomy" like other living things.

Welcome another perspective, a whole other approach.

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.

For more information about upcoming International Ecocity Conferences, please refer to host organization Ecocity Builders: www.ecocitybuilders.org. Thank you for your interest in the ecocity approach, and we hope that you stay in touch.