Sunday, July 15, 2012

EARTHED: ECOCITIES / RICHARD REGISTER & PAOLO SOLERI



Richard Register, Bejing, China

Richard Register is a pioneer of ecocity thinking and is widely credited as the man who coined the term. His work and thoughts have found practical expression in many countries of the world through Ecocity Builders, the organisation he founded in 1992. 

Site includes a very long A-Z list of some of the world's other leading eco-city practitioners
 


Source: '5 Most Crucial Eco-city Projects'. on 21st Century Architecture

Ecocity Builders are consulting to the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-city Administrative Committee (STECAC) that is responsible for the building of a flagship Chinese ecocity project currently in construction. The size of Manhattan, it will eventually house 350,000 citizens. It is the prototype for a new generation of compact pedestrian cities that will use 1/10th of the energy and 1/5th of the land of a traditional city.

Video report on the Tianjin project and others in India can be found on a BBC World Service site. The eco-city film is Part 10 of a larger project entitled 'Horizons: An Insight Into the Future of Global Business' (sponsored unfortunately by Dow Chemical).


Richard Register and Paolo Soleri, Ecocity World Summit 2008

Richard Register was inspired as a young man by meeting - by chance - Paolo Soleri, a visionary architect/philospher - who was at that time (the 1970s) engaged in building Arcosanti, an experimental town in the mountains of central Arizona, to demonstrate how urban conditions could be improved while minimising the impact on the earth. Over 6,000 people have helped in its construction and work continues to this day. The guiding principle behind his work is arcology (combining architecture and ecology).
SEE PREVIOUS POST: URBAN AGRICULTURE





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