by Richard Register, Founder of the International Ecocity Conference Series and President of Ecocity Builders

I’ll get to highlights from Ecocity World Summit 2013 shortly but first… Am I proud of launching the first of the International Ecocity Conferences? Well it does feel great to see that in Nantes the tradition marches on. And yes we who put on the first in the series worked fabulously hard in 1989 and l990 and had some real successes at the time – as I noticed so did Senator of the Loire Atlantique départnent and Conference Chair Ronan Dantec and Annie-Claude Thiolat, Project Manager for the Tenth International Ecocity Conference and the rest of their crew. It all took place in Nantes, France, the European Commissions’ European Green Capital 2013 and home of Ecocity 10, aka, The Nantes Ecocity World Summit. (The European Commission is, says Wikipedia, “the executive body of the European Union responsible for proposing legislation, implementing decisions, upholding the Union’s treaties and day-today running of the EU.”)

But the conference series wasn’t actually my idea. I started off our conference this year with the keynote talk mentioning that. Though in important ways I am the founder of the series for organizing the first of the International Ecocity Conferences and many people assumed I’d had the idea, I had not. But it has been a wonderful success in the eyes of thousands of participants by now and if there is a lesson in the story it is that each of you in the audience, I said, can take away a good idea and apply it yourself – you’ll be hearing many extraordinarily powerful and helpful ideas here in Nantes at this conference – go for it! Carry them back home, out into the world and do something about them. We can do it.

It was a zoologist named Lee Altenberg, I told the audience, who in 1988 suggested the idea for a major ecocity conference. He knew the 20th anniversary Earth Day events were coming up in April of 1990 and there would be a major opportunity to bring important environmental ideas into action through many events because of the anniversary’s added attention. He also had been noticing that it seemed no one but Urban Ecology, the organization I was president of previous to Ecocity Builders, was working energetically on ecocity issues. I realized the conference was a great idea and adopted it. I chose the rather generic name for it – the International Ecocity Conference – borrowed $1,000 at 7% interest and started work, volunteering my time otherwise, paid for mostly by my labors in earthquake retrofit construction – we’d just had the Loma Prieta Earthquake and everyone was bolting down their houses to their foundations or reinforcing the strength of their walls in other ways. I worked about 30 hours a week doing that up to three months before the conference, after which a few small grants and registrations for the event began rolling in paying the bills. At that point an assistant and I started getting paid for the work.

The idea of a conference series wasn’t mine either. To my delight Paul Downton, architect from Adelaide, Australia and one of our star speakers at the First International Ecocity Conference, seeing the high spirits and fabulous information at Ecocity 1, immediately after offered to hold Ecocity 2 in Adelaide in 1992 – and we were off and running as a conference series. The series idea itself, then, was another good idea I happily adopted and activated.

As said, I stressed to the Nantes audience, if there’s a lesson in it, it is that good actions for powerful ideas can echo through history for decades. All that’s required is that people of good conscience gather up their energy and do something. This admonition goes out now to all you readers of this newsletter too.

This was our first conference with a national legislator,Senator Ronan Dantec, hosting. It was also the first of our conferences to be attended by a country’s Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault. Both of them in their talks had a great deal to offer in terms of real substance for major moves toward ecocity change. Currently I’m in correspondence to get the transcripts of recordings to make them available to our Ecocity Builders members and those in the galaxy of our past conferences attendees, most of whose addresses we have in our Ecocity Builders records.

One of the highlights was in fact their pledges, the Senator’s and the Prime Minister’s, to carry one of the main themes of the conference into international debate. Specific recommendations to link ecocity concepts, current policies and projects to climate change at up-coming international events, such as the COP 19 taking place in November in Warsaw, was among them. As readers of the newsletter will note from many earlier articles herein, we have for years been trying to get the issue of urban layout and design into the deliberations at the highest levels about those ecocity/climate linkages. All sorts of supply side solutions, many very good, such as promoting solar and wind energy, have gotten considerable attention and entered into various national policies and into the global consciousness. All sorts of technologies for conservation, better constituent materials in products and buildings, better recycling, more preservation of natural areas and support for “alternative” transportation infrastructure and vehicles have been debated and turned into policies of various sorts around the world. But precious little was to be heard in these deliberations of the basics of ecocity principles and major changes in the physical arrangement of cities. And this despite the glaringly obvious fact of the scale of cities, largest creations of our species. Maybe this will change and maybe largely due to efforts of people in attendance at our conference, including Senator Dantec and Prime Minister Ayrault. It might be mentioned also that the Prime Minister was also Mayor of Nantes in past days and in that position must have learned a great deal about the workings of and importance of cities in policy, society and nature. It wasn’t for nothing Nantes was chosen by the European Commission as the European Green Capital of 2013.

Gross National Happiness was the notion of the fourth King of Bhutan back in 1971, represented at our conference by the country’s Secretary of the Ministry of Works and Human Settlement, Dasho Dr. Sonam Tenzin. His brief: highways, bridges, dams, power plants, airports and cities. In 1971 when asked how his country’s Gross National Product was doing King Jigme Singe Wangchuck (pronounced WONG-chook) retorted that Gross National Happiness was more important. Thus, in an off handed manner, he launched that most serious and should-be-legendary GNH initiative of Bhutan. That simple but powerful notion, that the economic objective of production and consumption should be in service to the people’s happiness instead of being the objective of economic policy, was in itself a profound and courageous notion to put into the international debate. And so it was that it became a major emphasis of our conference as well. With approximately the same population of San Francisco and a land area a little smaller than Switzerland, the country’s efforts for GNH made it among nations the mouse that roared out a message of powerful importance putting values ahead of profits. And in the confluence of ecocities and GNH I for one am hoping we can magnify both concepts and show that through far better city design we can make nature as well as people much happier.

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READ ARTICLE (in French! with very nice photo gallery)

This month, our car free journey spotlights Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Despite its old age, Albuquerque is nothing short of a funky, eclectic, sunny getaway. The city boasts a great mix of art, culture, outdoor recreation and family fun. It is situated in the high desert which means four distinctly mild seasons and beautiful sunrises and sets against the backdrop of the beautiful Sandia Mountains and three small volanoes on the western horizon.

It is a getaway that is affordable as well as accessible for weekend travelers. Because most major attractions are within walking distance of a downtown hotel, or along a bus route, the city is a good weekend getaway choice for visitors who don’t want to drive.

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