Ecocity Builders
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| Motto | Building cities in balance with nature. |
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| Formation | 1992 |
| Founder | Richard Register |
| Headquarters | Oakland, CA, USA |
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Exec. Dir.
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Kirstin Miller |
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President
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Richard Register |
| Website | ecocitybuilders |
Ecocity Builders is a 501c non profit located in Oakland, California that provides advocacy, consulting, and education in sustainable city planning with a focus on access by proximity and pedestrian-oriented development. Ecocity Builders also implements urban design projects utilizing a large network of alliances with city governments, businesses and NGOs. Ecocity Builders' approach is based the work of founder Richard Register, an American artist, peace activist and urban theorist.
Ecocity Builders is primarily concerned with promoting the creation of ecocities, a phrase first coined by Richard Register at the 1st International Ecocity Conference in 1990. Ecocity Builders defines an ecocity as an "ecologically healthy human settlement modeled on the self-sustaining resilient structure and function of natural ecosystems and living organisms." An ecocity can encompass any size of settlement, from neighborhood or village up to metropolis, that functions in harmony with the ecosystems of which it is part. These greater environmental systems include the watershed, bioregion, and ultimately, of the planet, as well as human social systems such as local, regional, national and world economic, governmental, and cultural exchange systems.
Biometrics is central to the Ecocity concept through the analogy of the cities as living organisms. Cities (including their inhabitants) exhibit and require systems for movement (transport), respiration (processes to obtain energy), sensitivity (responding to its environment), growth (evolving/changing over time), reproduction (including education, construction, planning and development, etc.), excretion (outputs and wastes), and nutrition (need for air, water, soil, food for inhabitants, materials, etc.).
Ecocities exhibit characteristic design elements such as pedestrian-oriented "nodes" or centers of resources and social interaction, mixed-use planning, pervasive natural features (gardens, urban agriculture, parks), de-emphasis on individual vehicular transit, and equitable access to resources. Register's ecocities are influenced by the arcology movement including an emphasis on hyperstructures—large, complex interconnected buildings. Register has published collections of his extensive drawings of ecocity plans and interventions in several books (see “Sources”).
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