Ecocities and Oil Independence A presentation to the City of Oaklands Oil Independent by 2020 Task F

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Ecocities and Oil Independence A presentation to
the City of Oaklands Oil Independent by 2020
Task ForceAugust 30, 2007Presenters Kirstin
Miller and Richard Smith for Ecocity Builders
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We work to build thriving city and neighborhood
centers while reversing sprawl development.

• Ecocity Builders collaborates with local
  governments and community groups to think through
  and develop policies and strategies that chart a
  shared course for a healthy future, for both
  people and nature.

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What is an ecocity?

An ecocity is a human settlement that enables its
residents to live a good quality of life while
using minimal natural resources and while
assisting in the regeneration of natural and
agricultural environments.
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Buildings
Its buildings make best use of sun, wind and
rainfall to help supply the energy and water
needs of occupants. Generally multistory to
maximize the land available for green space.
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Biodiversity
It is threaded with natural habitat corridors, to
foster biodiversity, create a healthy green
infrastructure and to give residents access to
nature for recreation and education.
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• Food Goods

Its food and other goods are sourced from within
its borders or from nearby, in order to cut down
on transport costs.
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Transportation
The majority of its residents live within walking
or cycling distance of their workplace, to
minimize the need for motorized transport.
Frequent public transport connects local centers
for people who need to travel further.
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Reuse, Industrial Processes
The goods it produces are designed for reuse,
remanufacture, and recycling. The industrial
processes its uses involve reuse of by-products,
and minimize the movement of goods.
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Workforce
It has a labor intensive rather than a material,
energy, and water intensive economy, to maintain
full employment and minimize material throughput.
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The Way It Is Now

• Cities consume 75 of the worlds energy, and
  produce 80 of its greenhouse gases.
• - Source Mayor Bloomberg Keynote Address at the
  C40 Large Cities Climate Summit, NYC May 07

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Unhealthy cities- 2 dimensional, car
dependent, energy and land hogging. Enormously
wasteful.
What ARE we mostly building?
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• Few people realize the price inner cities have
  paid for our national love affair with the
  automobile. But the evidence of devastation is
  not hard to find. White flight to the
  metropolitan fringe, driven in part by racism, is
  linked to destruction of human resources in the
  metropolitan core, to waste of petroleum energy,
  pollution of air and water, and degradation of
  urban biological resources.
• Carl Anthony Energy Policy and Inner City
  Abandonment, 1991, Race, Poverty the
  Environment

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Cities planned for cars, not people
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Anywhere, USA
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Obesity and physical inactivity

• Shortens lifespans
• Is surpassing smoking as the leading preventable
  cause of death
• Costs 262 billion per year in health care and
  lost productivity

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Typical American Development
10 miles
Home
Work
2 miles
8 miles
Shopping
Unhealthy cities built for access by cars and
lots of cheap energy.
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From unhealthy city to ecocity
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Transportation Priorities Ranking

• Walking
• Bicycling
• Light rail
• Buses
• Heavy rail for long distance travel

Key Principle Access by Proximity
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London
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Venice
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Streetcars in LA
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Pacific Electric Railway 1,150 miles of track
Bought and dismantled by GMs National City Lines
between 1936 and 1950 They also dismantled
streetcar lines in Detroit, New York, Oakland,
Philadelphia, St. Louis, Salt Lake City, Tulsa,
Baltimore, Minneapolis and many other cites in
the US.
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MUNI and the Key System
The Key System and other street car lines were
the East Bays counterpart to San Franciscos
MUNI.
Key system car in Oakland, 1954
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Transit Oriented Development and Centers
Oriented Development

• TOD
• Builds up mixed-use development around transit
  stations/corridors
• Focus is on going
• somewhere rather then being somewhere

• COD
• Focus on walkable mixed-use centers, linked by
  transit
• Reinforces existing vital areas with more density
  and diversity
• Focused on centers, not corridors, on being
  somewhere not going somewhere

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1. RECENTRALIZE CREATE URBAN VILLAGES

• Develop a system to identify and designate a
  range of centers within Oakland in various sizes
  and densities (urban villages).
• Evaluate these existing or potential urban
  villages for accessibility to housing, jobs,
  nature and parks, services and transportation.
• Use this evaluation system to identify specific
  needs and create action/area plans to make each
  urban village vibrant, healthy and energy
  efficient.

ECOCITY BUILDERS RECOMMENDATIONS
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2. UPDATE GENERAL PLAN

• Review the LUTE (Land Use and Transportation
  Element) of the General Plan and help develop
  recommendations for an amendment based on the
  urban villages approach.
• Example recommendations include calling for added
  density and diversity of uses in the centers,
  with commitment to principles of access by
  proximity rather than by automobile.

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• 3. UPDATE TDR ORDINANCE AND START REMOVING
  DEVELOPMENT IN TARGET AREAS
• Propose a revision of Oaklands TDR (Transfer of
  Development Rights) ordinance to accomplish
  energy and land saving density shifts, based on
  the urban villages development pattern.

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• 4. ADOPT A
• CAR FREE BY
• CONTRACT
• HOUSING
• ORDINANCE
• Adopt an ordinance that provides that any
  residential building whose owner rolls over
  renters such that all residents eventually sign
  car-free contracts is awarded lower taxes and is
  encouraged to turn the former parking into other
  uses such as new units, shops, offices and
  storage, through an incentives package.

Gold dust apartments, Missoula, MT
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5. UPDATE ZONING Review Oaklands Zoning element
with an eye to reconciling updated GP elements
with Zoning looking towards the Urban Villages
model.

• Inclusionary Zoning. Require all apartments or
  condos of more than 9 units to have 15 to 25
  low to moderate income housing available.
• Car Free Street and Zones. Zone for opening
  streets to pedestrians and eliminating them to
  cars in a strategy that grows, for example, 5
  percent of the street system every year.

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BUILDINGS

• 6. MAXIMUM GREEN
• Green Building policies should include incentives
  for not only energy efficiency and energy
  generation, but even larger incentives for solar
  passive design and placement of buildings in
  minimal energy relationship and maximum transit
  benefit relationship to existing urban fabric.

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7. MINIMUM STANDARDS

• The city should consider requiring all new
  buildings to meet a standard of energy efficiency
  that is beyond Title 24 of the California Code of
  Regulations of California's Energy Efficiency
  Standards for Residential and Nonresidential
  Buildings. (The Energy Efficiency Standards for
  Residential and Nonresidential Buildings were
  established in 1978 in response to a legislative
  mandate to reduce California's energy
  consumption.)
• For example, Oakland could require a 20 or
  greater improvement over Title 24 for all new
  buildings.

SF Plaza Apartments
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DESIGN

• 8. DESIGN GUIDELINES
• Review multi family residential design guidelines
  and make updates based on other successful models
  like Portland and Vancouver, with a base
  requirement of green features and extra bonuses
  for above and beyond, like eco roofs.
• Design guidelines should also include not only
  single buildings, but also public spaces, and
  should encourage or require integrated planning
  approaches to achieve overall high quality,
  useful and attractive city spaces.

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INFRASTRUCTURE IMPROVEMENT

• 9. INFRASTRUCTURE Review internal and external
  pathways and propose updates for development
  impact fees and infrastructure improvements.

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10. INCREASE EFFICIENY OF EXISTING STOCK

• The city should work with landlords to improve
  the energy efficiency of all existing apartment
  buildings and condos in order to make the
  existing housing stock more energy efficient.

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11. ENERGY SUPPLY

• SOLAR AND WIND ENERGY SUPPLY TO GRID We recommend
  that Oakland form a CCA (Community Choice
  Aggregate) with nearby cities to purchase and/or
  develop bulk renewable power from primarily solar
  and wind power plants.
• GRID SOLAR OVER PHOTOVOLTAICS For maximum energy
  and land efficiency, we recommend grid delivered
  electricity from solar and wind sources to
  multifamily buildings designed for passive solar,
  solar thermal, and with the use of rooftops also
  for gathering places and views, water collection
  and insulation.
• ELECTIC PUBLIC TRANSIT SYSTEM, DELIVERY AND
  SERVICE VEHICLES We recommend using clean
  electricity to power rail systems as well as the
  citys service and delivery vehicles. Limited
  biofuels could also be appropriate for some
  service vehicles.

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Urban Villages Approach

• Grand Problem
• How does Oakland
• Create an economically, socially and
  environmentally healthy city
• Evolve quality higher density, walkable urban
  villages in existing and proposed activity
  centers
• Retain culture of existing residents, and retain
  the residents themselves
• Recover elements of nature that may have been
  destroyed
• Meet its goals for sustainability and
  environmental quality.

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Sub Problem

• Where do you site new development, (or remove
  inappropriate development) in a way that
• Reduces carbon emissions
• Begins to reshape the city into a more
  ecologically healthy form based on walkable
  centers linked by transit
• Includes affordable housing
• Builds community and
• Adds jobs near homes or homes near jobs?

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Mapping
We built an Ecocity Map base map with the
following layers DISTRICTS Neighborhood
Commercial Retail Districts, Planning Areas,
Entertainment, Industry, "Initiative 2000"
Community Groups, Community Development
Districts, Tourist Centers, Major Retail,
Qualified Census Tracts TRANSPORTATION Bus
Routes, Streets, Car Counts, Freeways, BART
Lines, Airport, Travel Time DEMOGRAPHICS Census
- SF1, Census - SF3
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Mapping, continued
Layers (cont) LAND USES Vacant Lots, Land Use
Type, Garages, Parcel Map, Sports and Convention
Facilities, Gov Buildings, Hospitals, Libraries,
Community Health Facilities, Recreational
Centers, Educational Institutions, Senior
Centers, Shelters, Child Care, City Parks, Public
Housing NATURAL FEATURES Water, Vegetation,
Contours, Flood, Fill, Endangered Species, EPA
data (Waste, Superfund, Brownfield, etc)
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Land Uses
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Transportation Network
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Landform and Streams
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Golden Gate Activity Center
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Street Network
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Topography and Water Features
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Zoned Uses
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The model will enable the City and citizens to

• Conduct much more rigorous suitability analysis
  for sustainable development moving toward oil
  independence
• Work interactively with stakeholders to explore
  scenarios
• Enable audiences to see the possible impacts of
  ecocity mapping for sustainability, in a way that
  isnt possible without a computer model

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Reshape Oakland for

• Keeping total energy consumption within
  sustainability limits
• Promoting biodiversity - the city contributes to
  the natural environment
• Urban agriculture and nature restoration
• Transportation - pedestrian, bicycle, transit
  first. Moving away from private, car based
  infrastructure to public transit networks.

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Environment Ministry of Japan Recommends Urban
Centralization to Curb Global Warming

• The Japanese Ministry of the Environment released
  a report in March 2007 recommending the
  centralization of cities.
• The report is the outcome of meetings held by the
  ministry since 2005 to explore the necessity for
  city planning that takes into account global
  warming countermeasures in order to drastically
  reduce greenhouse gases.
• http//www.env.go.jp/en/

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• As city functions become decentralized, per
  capita CO2 emissions from automobiles and the
  passenger transport sector increase. The report
  points out that it is essential to review the way
  cities are structured in order to reduce
  greenhouse gas emissions.
• In Japan, urban functions have been increasingly
  decentralized - residential areas and large-scale
  retail stores are being built in the suburbs and
  even public facilities such as city halls and
  hospitals are being transferred to the suburbs.
  Such decentralization has generated a situation
  in which people cannot lead convenient lives
  without driving their own cars.

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• Based on the relatively new concept that natural
  resources such as waterfronts, green areas and
  ventilation pathways are important city
  infrastructure for improving the quality of life,
  the ministry suggest that in future, urban
  development should incorporate this kind of
  natural resource, such as large-scale street tree
  planting projects, and a well-developed public
  transportation system.

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• The report also mentions that centralized cities
  will increase daily life convenience for seniors
  and others who cannot drive, reduce
  infrastructure maintenance and other burdens on
  public finances, and revitalize local
  communities.
• It concludes that centralizing cities while
  taking global warming countermeasures into
  account will improve the environment, people's
  lives and the economy.

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Thank you
For more information, contact Kirstin Miller,
510-419-0850 Ecocity Builders PO Box
697 Oakland, CA 94604 http//www.ecocitybuilders.o
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