ecopolis now

The Asia-Pacific Forum for Environment and Development (APFED), which is hosted by the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES), has announced that the Christie Walk Ecocity Project, Adelaide, South Australia has won the Silver Prize in the Ryutaro Hashimoto APFED Awards for Good Practices. This new international environment award is given for outstanding achievements in [...]

I conduct ‘thought experiments’. These can be fun. They cost almost nothing, you can do remarkable things to anyone, anywhere, anytime — and they don’t even notice! My favourite experiment focusses on metropolitan Adelaide (you can do this too).

The dawning of my political awareness took place during the heady days of the late 1960s and early ’70s and that took my views on organic architecture thoroughly into the public realm, leading me to question how whole neighbourhoods and cities could better fit their place and respond to the needs of their occupants.

Christie Walk is the first development of its kind in an Australian city. It can lay claim to a number of substantial firsts:

By the year 2020 over 50 per cent of the world’s population will live in cities. Most Australians already do. Clearly, our present patterns of urban settlement are not sustainable. In this article, first published in Habitat Australia, Volume 19 Number 4 August 1991 I introduced the idea of ‘Ecopolis’ (from Eco — ecological, Polis — self-governing city), an eco-city concept based on principles of ecological sustainability, bioregional integrity and social equity.

Anyone interested in reading the original ‘Ecopolis Now!’ article can find it in Habitat Australia Volume 19 Number 4 August 1991 p.22-28, published by the Australian Conservation Foundation.

Or you can just bounce over to the ‘re-print’ here at ecopolisnow.com.

As an advocate of Ecopolis for the best part of 2 decades I was pleased to see the idea given such a beguiling presentation in New Scientist of 17 June.

There has been a good deal of seminal work by far more people than Fred Pearce mentions, but he has done a fair job of bringing together most of the key issues that define an Ecopolis (and the front cover illustration was terrific!).

What I can’t understand is why he misrepresents Christopher Alexander as an advocate for inflexible cities that deny the value of neighbourhoods.

Drawn in September 1990, this image was one of several prepared for the first exhibition of ‘Ecopolis’ called ‘Ecopolis Now! Escape from the Cities of Boiling Frogs’. The original was done in technical pen and coloured pencil on A4 paper.