Design for Ecological Democracy (Randolph T. Hester)

 This book is about building ecological democracy through design. It is

about remaking American cities so that we can better work with our neighbors

and others; solve intricate community problems that help us sustain

our liberty, our way of life, and the ecological systems on which liberty and

life depend; and gain pleasure from the places where we dwell. Places that

attract an informed and active citizenry, that are resilient ecologically, and

that enhance our lives through their livability are the foundation for an ecological

democracy that is essential to our nation’s long-term health and to

lives that are more rewarding than most of us presently live.

The State of American Habitation

What is wrong with the cities we have created? According to most researchers,

the way we presently inhabit the earth is not sustainable. They point to

the greenhouse effect, to global economics that create international cities

and exploit backwaters, to developing-country inequities, and to the loss of

cultural and biological diversity. All are critical issues of urbanity.

For example, one thousand species of plants and animals are going extinct

each week, primarily because of habitat destruction, and present city

forms are in large measure responsible for these declines in biological diversity.

But the problems we face every day are more personal and insidious

than the loss of biological or even cultural diversity. If we do not address

daily issues of habitation, we have little chance of solving more remote ones.

For the last fifty years, at an ever-accelerating pace, cities, subdivisions,

parks, even our houses have diminished our daily lives, often in ways about

which we are unaware. Poor city design divides us from others in our communities,

undermines our sense of community and place, destroys natural

habitats that once gave us immeasurable joy (and provided niches for many

of those extinct species, some of whose songs welcomed us each morning),

and fails to inspire our spirits. In the name of progress, we destroy the best

Introduction

neighborhoods to build highways that are still unable to relieve traffic congestion.

The vehicles that ride on ever wider streets add deadly pollutants to

our everyday environments, make neighborhood play unsafe for our children,

and turn across-the-street neighbors into strangers. As we improve environments

for cars, we neglect walking and grow less healthy. We have

subverted the intention of separated land uses to such an extreme that zoning

segregation makes it nearly impossible to earn a living and be a parent at

the same time. We sanitize our suburbs, but we can’t make places where we

feel safe. We have lost the balance that makes a city clean enough to be

healthy and dirty enough to be happy. We have created pockets of poverty

and wealth that cannot be escaped. When people are locked in and locked

out, alienated from each other, can these be civilized cities?

In the process of city building, building community has been lost. Traditions

of barn raising, through which both physical and social communities

were nurtured simultaneously, have been replaced by technical experts,

none of whose specialties include making community. They attend to bricks

and mortar, street widths and lights, zoning and subdivision rules, contracts

and financial bottom lines. Nurturing a sense of community is not a goal,

and decisions are made that preclude our ability to work together. A popular

downtown post office might be closed and a new one built far from

downtown, making chance meetings less likely for downtown business

people or shoppers. The budget-saving design of the new post office may

further diminish community by eliminating a lobby where people might

stop and chat.

We have designed cities that do not take advantage of natural factors.

Inspired by their regional characteristics, cities could save billions of dollars

in energy, food, drinking-water costs, and waste disposal while providing

recreational amenities, local identity, and sense of place. But city makers

continue to design urban areas more and more the same and less and less particular

to vegetative mosaics, microclimates, air-movement patterns, and

hydrologic cycles. We still call resulting urban wildfires, energy shortages,

and flood damage “natural disasters.” Even innocuous-seeming conveniences

of air conditioning, television, home delivery of mail, private swimming

pools, the Internet, and underground storm-drainage systems separate

us from local environments and render us ecologically illiterate.

I recently worked in a neighborhood where twenty years earlier residents

culverted the creek running through their community as part of a city

2 Introduction

flood-control plan. Although there was no history of flooding on that creek,

the underground culvert was seen as a modern improvement, and from that

point on, residents were denied access to wildlife along the stream. Today,

children in that neighborhood never creek walk or pile rocks to divert water

or explore riparian mysteries. They never chase native frogs or dragonflies or

marvel at the magic of a tadpole or nymph. In fact, residents of the neighborhood

today, adults and children, are unaware that a natural stream ever

existed there. Such diminishments of joy have sapped our cities of their

ability to nurture us in fundamental ways. We don’t know what we’ve got

until it’s gone and maybe not even then.

None of these actions—a street widening here, a post office relocation

there, air conditioning, stream channelization—seems particularly harmful,

but the cumulative effect is devastating on the livability of our cities and

on us as human beings. These forces also contribute to environmental and

community anomie. From the root anomia, meaning “lawlessness,” anomie

is a diseaselike state of confusion individuals have developed about how to

act toward their neighbors, their fellow citizens, and the landscape. Citizens

of the United States and other developed countries have gained freedom

from environmental constraints through technology, standardization, and

specialization. We no longer experience ecological interdependence in our

daily lives as, say, a farmer does. This freedom and affluence have freed us

from community responsibility because we can so often provide privately

what was once attainable only if shared. Facilities like parks, schools, swimming

pools, gyms, and movie theaters used to be provided only in the public

realm but now are routinely afforded privately, making civic engagement

less essential. Independence from the world around us and disassociation

from community offer us enormous short-term freedoms, but adverse longterm

consequences—not just for human beings but also for cities—have

thoughtlessly resulted. Anomie undermines our humanity and cripples our

ability to create fulfilling, inspiring cities. Seemingly freed from our dependence

on community and environment, we must choose and forge new relationships

with both.

Ecological Democracy

The vicious iterative cycle in which insecure and unrooted individuals make

insecure and unrooted cities, which make even more insecure and unrooted

Introduction 3

individuals, was generations in the making and will be generations in the

undoing. Shifts that disrupt the unhealthy cycle are essential. This is the

great challenge of our time.

Neither applied ecology nor direct democracy alone can overcome these

problems, but when combined they offer hope. Ecological democracy is an

antidote to the poisons we have inflicted on ourselves and habitation. More

important, ecological democracy represents the best possible life we can

achieve. It offers no quick fix but rather a path for a long journey.

Democracy is government by the people. It is exercised directly through

active involvement in a locality and indirectly through elections, following

principles of equality and attending to individual needs and broader community

goods. Ecology is the science of the relationships between organisms,

including our environments and us. It encompasses the study of

natural processes, ecosystems, and interactions of humans with each other,

other species, and the cities we occupy. It includes principles of social and

environmental function and interconnection. It is also a comprehensive,

long-term way to think creatively.

Ecological democracy, then, is government by the people emphasizing

direct, hands-on involvement. Actions are guided by understanding natural

processes and social relationships within our locality and the larger environmental

context. This causes us to creatively reassess individual needs, happiness,

and long-term community goods in the places we inhabit. Ecological

democracy can change the form that our cities take creating a new urban

ecology. In turn, the form of our cities, from the shape of regional watersheds

to a bench at a post office, can help build ecological democracy.

Life, Death, and Rebirth of Ecological Democracy

Ecological democracy is almost like wedding apparel, “something old, something

new, something recurring, something true.” The founders of our country

articulated a rural version of ecological democracy that underlies our

independence and constitution. Thomas Jefferson envisioned a yeoman

farmer who was so in tune with the local landscape that rainfall, stream patterns,

forests, soil, and crops informed his every action, public and private.

Farmers stewarded the land in Jefferson’s vision. Likewise, farmers stewarded

democracy through native ecological wisdom and direct grassroots partici-

4 Introduction

pation. This vision—in spite of being flawed at the time and romanticized

now—serves as a recurring American ideal. It is part of our unconscious

identity, a self-evident truth. Over time, however, citizenship that was

grounded in land stewardship and direct democracy declined to near extinction.

Agrarian society became urban, mobile, and specialized. For over a

hundred years—from the Civil War to the civil rights movement—our government

was run increasingly by professionals and less by lay citizens. Representative

government freed us from obligations of local involvement.

Urban specialization freed us from dependence on local ecology.

Near death, ecology and direct democracy reawakened in the second

half of the twentieth century. They were separately rediscovered in forms

that are radically more complex than those that Jefferson likely imagined:

something old became something utterly new. New and powerful enough to

be considered among the most important discoveries of our time, applied

ecological science and participatory democracy are two forces that most

influenced the shift in the postmodern world view. After Rachel Carson

sounded the alarm in Silent Spring in 1962, ecological principles slowly reworked

their way into our consciousness. It became apparent that the built

environment must be formed by applied ecology. At first, this ecological

thinking focused exclusively on what wild land to conserve and where not

to build. But urban ecological design has evolved into a comprehensive understanding

of organisms, habitats, and events—natural and political. Likewise

democracy has grown! There are twice as many democratic countries in

the world today as twenty-five years ago, and in that time, more than sixtysix

nations have made a transition from authoritarian regimes. Around

the world, a desire for freedom and the associated expectations of citizens to

participate directly in city-design decisions are rising and, in many cases,

erupting. But these social movements are only infrequently informed by ecological

thinking in local governance or the design of democratic habitation.

Ecology and democracy are powerful but separate entities.

The Marriage of Necessity and Happiness

Applied ecology and direct democracy have seldom been partners in modern

life, either in the political landscape or in the mundane details of everyday

life. In my own profession of landscape architecture and environmental

Introduction 5

planning, applied ecology and participatory democracy were formed from

different ideologies. Landscape ecology, even with its holistic view, is based

in fragmented scientific study that is theoretical, objective, abstracted, leery

of human emotion and magic, and confounded by democratic impulses.

Those who first applied ecology to city design saw a crisis so immediate and

severe that solutions had to be imposed top down with minimal citizen participation.

Skeptical of lay people, ecological scientists echo the words of the

legalist scholar, Han Fei-Tzu, who claimed that the intelligence of the general

public is not to be relied on any more than the mind of a baby. Direct

citizen participation in city design did not come of age in the United States

until the 1960s era of civil rights, and it did so with religious, not scientific,

zeal. A passion for freedom and equality and a disregard for top-down

authority were essential ingredients for grassroots success. The adage “Don’t

Trust the Experts” expresses the reciprocal skepticism that democratic movements

have for state and corporate science, which so often is biased against

the less powerful—and the less powerful include most of us. Of course, it is

not this simple. There are good reasons that the application of ecological

science to city design and participatory democracy have developed separately

and antagonistically.

Whatever legitimate bases for the schism, applied ecology and participatory

democracy must be married, otherwise human habitation and life

itself cannot be enduring and joyful. Even when combined, ecology and

democracy face formidable challengers in the struggle for centrality in the

design of our cities. In this struggle between ecological democracy and ever

bigger and unaccountable economies, exploitative oppression, global cultural

dominance, and our own status seeking, success will depend in large measure

on the strength of the union formed between ecology and democracy.

Urban ecology and active democracy strengthen each other and can

make a more vigorous city landscape together. Democracy bestows freedom—

the dream of all who do not have it. Freedom can fuel personal

fulfillment and, if unchecked, alienation, selfishness, and irresponsibility.

Ecology explains our interconnected roles to even the lowliest creatures and

makes us think comprehensively and outside narrow confines. In so doing,

ecology creates responsible freedom. In a democracy, ecology is the constituency

for the future. Ecology provides “the rightly understood” in the

political phrase “self-interest rightly understood.” It forges the basis for civil

6 Introduction

society to address a shared public good among fractured interests. Ecological

processes also inspire the form of human habitation in ways that are efficient,

cost effective, locally distinctive, and minimally consumptive.

In return, direct democracy enlivens ecology with local wisdom and

overcomes the alienation, anomie, and bleakness that some see in a world of

severe limits. Hands-on participation shows ecology how to recultivate fallow

community and environmental caring. Involvement awakens us to the

poetry of place and civic creativity. Enhanced by ecological knowledge,

active engagement reveals the joys of nature itself. In spite of biological caution,

democracy accommodates human passion for security, new experience,

recognition, and sensual response. Direct democracy provides the forum

through which ecological thinking becomes part of daily life and decision

making. Together—and only when integrated—ecology and democracy

provide the foundation for making informed choices and better cities and

for discovering more fulfilling lives. The union of ecology and democracy is

essential for making a sustainable future and providing us with greater

happiness.

Design of City and Landscape Together

Ecological democracy will produce radically new forms of habitation, not in

extravagant architecture but rather in a search for roots, foundations, and

fundamentals—the basics of a satisfying life. First, however, these new

forms of habitation must be created to nourish, sustain, and make a fledgling

ecological democracy appealing. In this book, I focus on an urban form

that encourages us to choose and then create ecological democracy.

I concentrate on the form of the city not because I think that economic

and government institutions are less important or that city form determines

human behavior but because physical design is what I know best. This book

is not about participatory process. I have written about participation elsewhere,

and in spite of my commitment to process, I observe that the physical

city must be made differently for us to attain the needed social

transformation. Form matters to participation. Form matters to ecological

democracy. City form influences our daily lives. City form concretizes our

values and reflects them back to us. City form can make us a more resilient

society and more fulfilled individuals.

Introduction 7

Enabling, Resilient, and Impelling Form

There are three fundamental issues of habitation and therefore only three

roots to be reformulated to make better cities. To effect the transformation

to ecological democracy, our inhabited landscapes need to be attended in

these ways. First, our cities and landscapes must enable us to act where we

are now debilitated. Second, our cities and landscapes must be made to

withstand short-term shocks to which both are vulnerable. Third, our cities

and landscapes must be alluring rather than simply consumptive or, conversely,

limiting.

This metamorphosis of the inhabited landscape must be guided by

three fundamental and interrelated traits that integrate democracy and ecology—

enabling form, resilient form, and impelling form. These traits are the

building blocks of cities where ecological democracy can flourish.

Each of these three foundations is defined by design principles that are

grounded in human values, everyday behavior, participatory actions, and

ecological processes. By marrying the concepts of the social and natural sciences

that are essential for designing the urban landscape, I have distilled

fifteen design principles that form a practical thesis for reforming the landscape—

from the region, city, and town to the neighborhood, street corner,

garden, and household. These fifteen principles are embedded in enabling,

resilient, and impelling form.

Enabling Form: “We Got to Know Our Neighbors”

We need to reform our cities so that we can act as communities and not divide

and debilitate our deliberative democracy. Enabling form helps us get

to know unfamiliar neighbors and facilitates working with them and others

to solve difficult problems. Enabling form provides the centeredness that is

necessary for both neighboring and shared experiences. A bench at the post

office illustrates. It encourages people to linger in a public setting, meet others

on their way to get mail, and share news of the locality. Enabling form

reveals how interconnected we are to other people and to our landscape. As

connectedness permeates our consciousness, it instills the responsibility to

care for others far beyond our circle of family and friends. Fairness becomes

not a matter of guilt or altruism but a matter of fact. Enabling form allows

us to pursue healthy status seeking through the discovery of what is sacred

8 Introduction

in our everyday habitation. This develops rootedness and a collective destiny

that is tied to place and inspires a shared higher civic purpose.

Resilient Form: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Sustainable Happiness

We need to reform our cities to be ecologically resilient. Rather than being

ecologically impoverished and imperiled, constantly requiring a technological

fix to right the catastrophe prompted by a previous technological fix,

resilient cities derive from the particular character of the surrounding ecology—

climate, hydrology, vegetation, and building materials. For example,

buildings can be designed to heat and cool themselves naturally and to provide

healthy air, water, food, and shelter for human and wilder inhabitants.

Good cities deliver buoyant natural processes, promoting biological and cultural

diversity while selectively balancing unity and complexity in city design.

Resilient form turns density and smallness from scorn to advantage and

limits the extent of urbanization within the bounds of a region, thus enhancing

sustainability and providing healthy doses of natural magic for

everyday life. The city becomes adaptable and more financially secure. Resilient

form fuels life, liberty, and the pursuit of sustainable happiness.

Impelling Form: “Make a City to Touch the People’s Hearts”

We need to reform our cities to impel us by joy rather than compel us by insecurity,

fear, and force. The urbanism of mindless free enterprise compels

us through insecurity. Doomsday regulators compel us through fear and

force. Neither is appropriate in an ecological democracy. We must, instead,

make cities that impel us because they touch our hearts. Even though future

habitation may be fundamentally different than today’s, it will derive from

recognizable everyday patterns. Impelling form invites us to be our natural

selves. It inhabits our daily lives with the science that is needed to help us be

good citizens and also to enrich us. Good cities make us conscious of our

oneness with and distinctiveness within the ecosystem, which results in a

sense of identity with the places we live, relatedness, and childlike awe. Impelling

form produces multiple avenues for stewardship that make both the

earth and the stewards themselves healthier. Impelling form provides a variety

of urban tempos from light speed to snail’s pace. Such cities exude joy.

Introduction 9

They acknowledge grief and despair, but above all, they celebrate lives. An

impelling city uplifts us in spite of all else. That is the wonder of good cities.

The Glocal Design Process

Implicit to ecological democracy is a design process that is participatory, scientific,

and adventuresome. Because ecological democracy stresses the direct

involvement of citizens in local decision making, future habitation will be

designed at the grassroots level through direct face-to-face participatory

actions. These actions will be holistically informed by local wisdom, attachment

to place, and networks of interconnectedness and ecological thinking.

They will be neither local nor global but glocal. The design process of glocalization,

in which local decisions are made in the context of external forces

and ramifications, is fundamental to ecological democracy. I have articulated

this process in previous books, most expressly in Planning Neighborhood

Space with People (1984) and Community Design Primer (1990). This

process creates a forum where our best and lesser intentions struggle with

each other. It facilitates the uncovering of residents’ best intentions and incites

them to act on those intentions.

The Focus Is Design

This book is not about the participatory process itself. It is about city form.

It emphasizes how the urban landscape can be shaped to encourage ecological

democracy. I explain—through the principles of enabling, resilient, and

impelling form—what to think about and give priority to in designing the

landscape. I explain how to analyze and synthesize the urban landscape in a

focused, efficient way. I use case studies to show how to form places that support

ecological democracy. These projects are more inspired by local natural

processes and traditional culture than most present city design. The designs

are idiosyncratic: they are more ecologically diverse, culturally expressive,

integrated, contextually responsive, and internally satisfying and less subject

to formalistic fads and status-seeking than most recent modern urbanity.

These projects demonstrate that ecological democracy is at once both visionary

and achievable. Most of the cases were dreams just out of the grasp

of a community but were attained via concerted collective action. They and

thousands of similar successes around the country and world are indicators

10 Introduction

that ecological democracy is emerging. But the foundations and principles,

not singular projects, are fundamental to designing for ecological democracy

because the foundations of enabling, resilient, and impelling form will inspire

landscapes of ecological democracy not yet imagined.

How do these foundations relate as theory? My primary thesis is simple.

To create settings for ecological democracy, every design action must simultaneously

address enabling, resilient, and impelling form, not separately but

together. In this regard, successful designers craft all three into a single fabric.

The most rational way to do this is to ask if each of fifteen design principles

is being optimized as the design takes shape. I find this theory most

applicable when I am wrestling with one aspect of the design problem. I

make myself pause and in orderly fashion check each principle to see which

principles are being ignored. Usually some are. Rectifying those omissions

enriches the design. In this way, the principles serve as a theoretical checklist.

Any useful theory of city design should serve this purpose foremost.

But are some principles more important than others? There are two answers.

Theoreticians address this question by analyzing which principles explain

most of a phenomenon, in this case the design of cities to encourage

ecological democracy. In this regard the single most powerful principle is sacredness

for both content and operational importance. It expresses values

held most dear and that influence urban form directly. Sacredness encompasses

centeredness, connectedness, limited extent, and particularness explicitly

and all other principles indirectly. This does not conclude causality

but rather singular interrelatedness. In the same manner, centeredness, connectedness,

limited extent, and particularness rank as more interrelated than

other principles. Theoretically, they are more important.

The principles exert parallel catalyst influences on each other, but some

are exceptional. For example, sacredness triggers stewardship and fairness

through empathic connectedness. It also counters unhealthy status seeking,

which otherwise has a disproportionate negative influence on various principles.

Several principles (notably inhabiting science and stewardship), although

less connected to others, forge new relationships with place that are

based on an understanding of local ecological processes. Catalyst impacts

make less connected principles theoretically vital to ecological democracy. I

note these relationships throughout the book.

The practical answer to the question of which principles are most important

is that it depends on the context of each city region. For example,

Introduction 11

centering and limited extent are lacking in most American cities and need to

be the first order of business, from both a theoretical perspective and the

nitty gritty of city making. But in cities like Boulder, Colorado, and Los Angeles,

where limited extent is being addressed, other principles take precedence.

Similarly, the lack of density is a first-order priority in most American

cities but less so in Honolulu. The fifteen principles should be continually

evaluated so that focused attention can be paid to the most critical issues

rather than to symptoms of any given region. This must be done without

losing sight of the overriding consideration that these fifteen principles are

interconnected and must be addressed simultaneously.

This Book Is for Students of Ecological Democracy

I have written primarily for people who want to build a sense of community

as they build cities. You are designers—mostly landscape architects, city and

environmental planners, architects, engineers, lawyers, resource managers,

and students with bold ideas. The book might be useful for anyone involved

in making cities. This includes experts in law, real estate, education, health,

and finance. It includes mayors, council members, city managers, and

others who design and administer cities. Nongovernment organizations,

whether focusing on environmental justice or intercontinental ecosystem

networks, can be helped to act effectively through an understanding of the

ideas discussed in this book. I don’t know the language of policy makers in

state and federal government, but the principles here probably would be useful

to you as well. Each can take action to create enabling, resilient, and impelling

form.

The book should be useful to any residents who want to improve or remake

their community. If you are discontented with your neighborhood,

city, or region or if you are a volunteer, a parent, a teenager, an illegal immigrant,

an environmental activist, a NIMBY, or a do-gooder who is discontented

with your locality, the principles here may help you envision positive

alternatives. This is critical because as a citizenry we have become much

better at saying what we don’t want than what we do want. Scary ecology

and weak democracy have made us pessimistic about change. Doomsday

ecology is now part of our mainstream consciousness. But intelligent ecology

is what we most need. Free-enterprise democracy has made us irresponsible.

Principles of ecological democracy can formulate attractive new

12 Introduction

choices and show us what we need to know and do to be good citizens. An

ecological democracy will not work until all of us are more fluent in the language

of enabling, resilient, and impelling form.

I have also written for myself. This is a book that would have helped me

immensely forty years ago when I was trying to combine sociology, ecology,

and design. It would have helped me last year in my professional work designing

parks in the San Fernando Valley and South Central Los Angeles.

Oh, how it would have helped when I was a young city council member in

Raleigh, North Carolina, lacking a practical vision to guide me in making

decisions big and small. It would have helped me as a citizen activist fighting

against highways and for endangered species. In each of these, I would

have done a better job with these principles in my hand, in my mind, and

in my heart. I will use this book to improve my efforts. I hope this book will

help each of you create places where ecological democracy can grow and enrich

many lives.

This book is for students of ecological democracy. Eventually, that will

include all of us.

Introduction 13This book is about building ecological democracy through design. It is

about remaking American cities so that we can better work with our neighbors

and others; solve intricate community problems that help us sustain

our liberty, our way of life, and the ecological systems on which liberty and

life depend; and gain pleasure from the places where we dwell. Places that

attract an informed and active citizenry, that are resilient ecologically, and

that enhance our lives through their livability are the foundation for an ecological

democracy that is essential to our nation’s long-term health and to

lives that are more rewarding than most of us presently live.

The State of American Habitation

What is wrong with the cities we have created? According to most researchers,

the way we presently inhabit the earth is not sustainable. They point to

the greenhouse effect, to global economics that create international cities

and exploit backwaters, to developing-country inequities, and to the loss of

cultural and biological diversity. All are critical issues of urbanity.

For example, one thousand species of plants and animals are going extinct

each week, primarily because of habitat destruction, and present city

forms are in large measure responsible for these declines in biological diversity.

But the problems we face every day are more personal and insidious

than the loss of biological or even cultural diversity. If we do not address

daily issues of habitation, we have little chance of solving more remote ones.

For the last fifty years, at an ever-accelerating pace, cities, subdivisions,

parks, even our houses have diminished our daily lives, often in ways about

which we are unaware. Poor city design divides us from others in our communities,

undermines our sense of community and place, destroys natural

habitats that once gave us immeasurable joy (and provided niches for many

of those extinct species, some of whose songs welcomed us each morning),

and fails to inspire our spirits. In the name of progress, we destroy the best

Introduction

neighborhoods to build highways that are still unable to relieve traffic congestion.

The vehicles that ride on ever wider streets add deadly pollutants to

our everyday environments, make neighborhood play unsafe for our children,

and turn across-the-street neighbors into strangers. As we improve environments

for cars, we neglect walking and grow less healthy. We have

subverted the intention of separated land uses to such an extreme that zoning

segregation makes it nearly impossible to earn a living and be a parent at

the same time. We sanitize our suburbs, but we can’t make places where we

feel safe. We have lost the balance that makes a city clean enough to be

healthy and dirty enough to be happy. We have created pockets of poverty

and wealth that cannot be escaped. When people are locked in and locked

out, alienated from each other, can these be civilized cities?

In the process of city building, building community has been lost. Traditions

of barn raising, through which both physical and social communities

were nurtured simultaneously, have been replaced by technical experts,

none of whose specialties include making community. They attend to bricks

and mortar, street widths and lights, zoning and subdivision rules, contracts

and financial bottom lines. Nurturing a sense of community is not a goal,

and decisions are made that preclude our ability to work together. A popular

downtown post office might be closed and a new one built far from

downtown, making chance meetings less likely for downtown business

people or shoppers. The budget-saving design of the new post office may

further diminish community by eliminating a lobby where people might

stop and chat.

We have designed cities that do not take advantage of natural factors.

Inspired by their regional characteristics, cities could save billions of dollars

in energy, food, drinking-water costs, and waste disposal while providing

recreational amenities, local identity, and sense of place. But city makers

continue to design urban areas more and more the same and less and less particular

to vegetative mosaics, microclimates, air-movement patterns, and

hydrologic cycles. We still call resulting urban wildfires, energy shortages,

and flood damage “natural disasters.” Even innocuous-seeming conveniences

of air conditioning, television, home delivery of mail, private swimming

pools, the Internet, and underground storm-drainage systems separate

us from local environments and render us ecologically illiterate.

I recently worked in a neighborhood where twenty years earlier residents

culverted the creek running through their community as part of a city

2 Introduction

flood-control plan. Although there was no history of flooding on that creek,

the underground culvert was seen as a modern improvement, and from that

point on, residents were denied access to wildlife along the stream. Today,

children in that neighborhood never creek walk or pile rocks to divert water

or explore riparian mysteries. They never chase native frogs or dragonflies or

marvel at the magic of a tadpole or nymph. In fact, residents of the neighborhood

today, adults and children, are unaware that a natural stream ever

existed there. Such diminishments of joy have sapped our cities of their

ability to nurture us in fundamental ways. We don’t know what we’ve got

until it’s gone and maybe not even then.

None of these actions—a street widening here, a post office relocation

there, air conditioning, stream channelization—seems particularly harmful,

but the cumulative effect is devastating on the livability of our cities and

on us as human beings. These forces also contribute to environmental and

community anomie. From the root anomia, meaning “lawlessness,” anomie

is a diseaselike state of confusion individuals have developed about how to

act toward their neighbors, their fellow citizens, and the landscape. Citizens

of the United States and other developed countries have gained freedom

from environmental constraints through technology, standardization, and

specialization. We no longer experience ecological interdependence in our

daily lives as, say, a farmer does. This freedom and affluence have freed us

from community responsibility because we can so often provide privately

what was once attainable only if shared. Facilities like parks, schools, swimming

pools, gyms, and movie theaters used to be provided only in the public

realm but now are routinely afforded privately, making civic engagement

less essential. Independence from the world around us and disassociation

from community offer us enormous short-term freedoms, but adverse longterm

consequences—not just for human beings but also for cities—have

thoughtlessly resulted. Anomie undermines our humanity and cripples our

ability to create fulfilling, inspiring cities. Seemingly freed from our dependence

on community and environment, we must choose and forge new relationships

with both.

Ecological Democracy

The vicious iterative cycle in which insecure and unrooted individuals make

insecure and unrooted cities, which make even more insecure and unrooted

Introduction 3

individuals, was generations in the making and will be generations in the

undoing. Shifts that disrupt the unhealthy cycle are essential. This is the

great challenge of our time.

Neither applied ecology nor direct democracy alone can overcome these

problems, but when combined they offer hope. Ecological democracy is an

antidote to the poisons we have inflicted on ourselves and habitation. More

important, ecological democracy represents the best possible life we can

achieve. It offers no quick fix but rather a path for a long journey.

Democracy is government by the people. It is exercised directly through

active involvement in a locality and indirectly through elections, following

principles of equality and attending to individual needs and broader community

goods. Ecology is the science of the relationships between organisms,

including our environments and us. It encompasses the study of

natural processes, ecosystems, and interactions of humans with each other,

other species, and the cities we occupy. It includes principles of social and

environmental function and interconnection. It is also a comprehensive,

long-term way to think creatively.

Ecological democracy, then, is government by the people emphasizing

direct, hands-on involvement. Actions are guided by understanding natural

processes and social relationships within our locality and the larger environmental

context. This causes us to creatively reassess individual needs, happiness,

and long-term community goods in the places we inhabit. Ecological

democracy can change the form that our cities take creating a new urban

ecology. In turn, the form of our cities, from the shape of regional watersheds

to a bench at a post office, can help build ecological democracy.

Life, Death, and Rebirth of Ecological Democracy

Ecological democracy is almost like wedding apparel, “something old, something

new, something recurring, something true.” The founders of our country

articulated a rural version of ecological democracy that underlies our

independence and constitution. Thomas Jefferson envisioned a yeoman

farmer who was so in tune with the local landscape that rainfall, stream patterns,

forests, soil, and crops informed his every action, public and private.

Farmers stewarded the land in Jefferson’s vision. Likewise, farmers stewarded

democracy through native ecological wisdom and direct grassroots partici-

4 Introduction

pation. This vision—in spite of being flawed at the time and romanticized

now—serves as a recurring American ideal. It is part of our unconscious

identity, a self-evident truth. Over time, however, citizenship that was

grounded in land stewardship and direct democracy declined to near extinction.

Agrarian society became urban, mobile, and specialized. For over a

hundred years—from the Civil War to the civil rights movement—our government

was run increasingly by professionals and less by lay citizens. Representative

government freed us from obligations of local involvement.

Urban specialization freed us from dependence on local ecology.

Near death, ecology and direct democracy reawakened in the second

half of the twentieth century. They were separately rediscovered in forms

that are radically more complex than those that Jefferson likely imagined:

something old became something utterly new. New and powerful enough to

be considered among the most important discoveries of our time, applied

ecological science and participatory democracy are two forces that most

influenced the shift in the postmodern world view. After Rachel Carson

sounded the alarm in Silent Spring in 1962, ecological principles slowly reworked

their way into our consciousness. It became apparent that the built

environment must be formed by applied ecology. At first, this ecological

thinking focused exclusively on what wild land to conserve and where not

to build. But urban ecological design has evolved into a comprehensive understanding

of organisms, habitats, and events—natural and political. Likewise

democracy has grown! There are twice as many democratic countries in

the world today as twenty-five years ago, and in that time, more than sixtysix

nations have made a transition from authoritarian regimes. Around

the world, a desire for freedom and the associated expectations of citizens to

participate directly in city-design decisions are rising and, in many cases,

erupting. But these social movements are only infrequently informed by ecological

thinking in local governance or the design of democratic habitation.

Ecology and democracy are powerful but separate entities.

The Marriage of Necessity and Happiness

Applied ecology and direct democracy have seldom been partners in modern

life, either in the political landscape or in the mundane details of everyday

life. In my own profession of landscape architecture and environmental

Introduction 5

planning, applied ecology and participatory democracy were formed from

different ideologies. Landscape ecology, even with its holistic view, is based

in fragmented scientific study that is theoretical, objective, abstracted, leery

of human emotion and magic, and confounded by democratic impulses.

Those who first applied ecology to city design saw a crisis so immediate and

severe that solutions had to be imposed top down with minimal citizen participation.

Skeptical of lay people, ecological scientists echo the words of the

legalist scholar, Han Fei-Tzu, who claimed that the intelligence of the general

public is not to be relied on any more than the mind of a baby. Direct

citizen participation in city design did not come of age in the United States

until the 1960s era of civil rights, and it did so with religious, not scientific,

zeal. A passion for freedom and equality and a disregard for top-down

authority were essential ingredients for grassroots success. The adage “Don’t

Trust the Experts” expresses the reciprocal skepticism that democratic movements

have for state and corporate science, which so often is biased against

the less powerful—and the less powerful include most of us. Of course, it is

not this simple. There are good reasons that the application of ecological

science to city design and participatory democracy have developed separately

and antagonistically.

Whatever legitimate bases for the schism, applied ecology and participatory

democracy must be married, otherwise human habitation and life

itself cannot be enduring and joyful. Even when combined, ecology and

democracy face formidable challengers in the struggle for centrality in the

design of our cities. In this struggle between ecological democracy and ever

bigger and unaccountable economies, exploitative oppression, global cultural

dominance, and our own status seeking, success will depend in large measure

on the strength of the union formed between ecology and democracy.

Urban ecology and active democracy strengthen each other and can

make a more vigorous city landscape together. Democracy bestows freedom—

the dream of all who do not have it. Freedom can fuel personal

fulfillment and, if unchecked, alienation, selfishness, and irresponsibility.

Ecology explains our interconnected roles to even the lowliest creatures and

makes us think comprehensively and outside narrow confines. In so doing,

ecology creates responsible freedom. In a democracy, ecology is the constituency

for the future. Ecology provides “the rightly understood” in the

political phrase “self-interest rightly understood.” It forges the basis for civil

6 Introduction

society to address a shared public good among fractured interests. Ecological

processes also inspire the form of human habitation in ways that are efficient,

cost effective, locally distinctive, and minimally consumptive.

In return, direct democracy enlivens ecology with local wisdom and

overcomes the alienation, anomie, and bleakness that some see in a world of

severe limits. Hands-on participation shows ecology how to recultivate fallow

community and environmental caring. Involvement awakens us to the

poetry of place and civic creativity. Enhanced by ecological knowledge,

active engagement reveals the joys of nature itself. In spite of biological caution,

democracy accommodates human passion for security, new experience,

recognition, and sensual response. Direct democracy provides the forum

through which ecological thinking becomes part of daily life and decision

making. Together—and only when integrated—ecology and democracy

provide the foundation for making informed choices and better cities and

for discovering more fulfilling lives. The union of ecology and democracy is

essential for making a sustainable future and providing us with greater

happiness.

Design of City and Landscape Together

Ecological democracy will produce radically new forms of habitation, not in

extravagant architecture but rather in a search for roots, foundations, and

fundamentals—the basics of a satisfying life. First, however, these new

forms of habitation must be created to nourish, sustain, and make a fledgling

ecological democracy appealing. In this book, I focus on an urban form

that encourages us to choose and then create ecological democracy.

I concentrate on the form of the city not because I think that economic

and government institutions are less important or that city form determines

human behavior but because physical design is what I know best. This book

is not about participatory process. I have written about participation elsewhere,

and in spite of my commitment to process, I observe that the physical

city must be made differently for us to attain the needed social

transformation. Form matters to participation. Form matters to ecological

democracy. City form influences our daily lives. City form concretizes our

values and reflects them back to us. City form can make us a more resilient

society and more fulfilled individuals.

Introduction 7

Enabling, Resilient, and Impelling Form

There are three fundamental issues of habitation and therefore only three

roots to be reformulated to make better cities. To effect the transformation

to ecological democracy, our inhabited landscapes need to be attended in

these ways. First, our cities and landscapes must enable us to act where we

are now debilitated. Second, our cities and landscapes must be made to

withstand short-term shocks to which both are vulnerable. Third, our cities

and landscapes must be alluring rather than simply consumptive or, conversely,

limiting.

This metamorphosis of the inhabited landscape must be guided by

three fundamental and interrelated traits that integrate democracy and ecology—

enabling form, resilient form, and impelling form. These traits are the

building blocks of cities where ecological democracy can flourish.

Each of these three foundations is defined by design principles that are

grounded in human values, everyday behavior, participatory actions, and

ecological processes. By marrying the concepts of the social and natural sciences

that are essential for designing the urban landscape, I have distilled

fifteen design principles that form a practical thesis for reforming the landscape—

from the region, city, and town to the neighborhood, street corner,

garden, and household. These fifteen principles are embedded in enabling,

resilient, and impelling form.

Enabling Form: “We Got to Know Our Neighbors”

We need to reform our cities so that we can act as communities and not divide

and debilitate our deliberative democracy. Enabling form helps us get

to know unfamiliar neighbors and facilitates working with them and others

to solve difficult problems. Enabling form provides the centeredness that is

necessary for both neighboring and shared experiences. A bench at the post

office illustrates. It encourages people to linger in a public setting, meet others

on their way to get mail, and share news of the locality. Enabling form

reveals how interconnected we are to other people and to our landscape. As

connectedness permeates our consciousness, it instills the responsibility to

care for others far beyond our circle of family and friends. Fairness becomes

not a matter of guilt or altruism but a matter of fact. Enabling form allows

us to pursue healthy status seeking through the discovery of what is sacred

8 Introduction

in our everyday habitation. This develops rootedness and a collective destiny

that is tied to place and inspires a shared higher civic purpose.

Resilient Form: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Sustainable Happiness

We need to reform our cities to be ecologically resilient. Rather than being

ecologically impoverished and imperiled, constantly requiring a technological

fix to right the catastrophe prompted by a previous technological fix,

resilient cities derive from the particular character of the surrounding ecology—

climate, hydrology, vegetation, and building materials. For example,

buildings can be designed to heat and cool themselves naturally and to provide

healthy air, water, food, and shelter for human and wilder inhabitants.

Good cities deliver buoyant natural processes, promoting biological and cultural

diversity while selectively balancing unity and complexity in city design.

Resilient form turns density and smallness from scorn to advantage and

limits the extent of urbanization within the bounds of a region, thus enhancing

sustainability and providing healthy doses of natural magic for

everyday life. The city becomes adaptable and more financially secure. Resilient

form fuels life, liberty, and the pursuit of sustainable happiness.

Impelling Form: “Make a City to Touch the People’s Hearts”

We need to reform our cities to impel us by joy rather than compel us by insecurity,

fear, and force. The urbanism of mindless free enterprise compels

us through insecurity. Doomsday regulators compel us through fear and

force. Neither is appropriate in an ecological democracy. We must, instead,

make cities that impel us because they touch our hearts. Even though future

habitation may be fundamentally different than today’s, it will derive from

recognizable everyday patterns. Impelling form invites us to be our natural

selves. It inhabits our daily lives with the science that is needed to help us be

good citizens and also to enrich us. Good cities make us conscious of our

oneness with and distinctiveness within the ecosystem, which results in a

sense of identity with the places we live, relatedness, and childlike awe. Impelling

form produces multiple avenues for stewardship that make both the

earth and the stewards themselves healthier. Impelling form provides a variety

of urban tempos from light speed to snail’s pace. Such cities exude joy.

Introduction 9

They acknowledge grief and despair, but above all, they celebrate lives. An

impelling city uplifts us in spite of all else. That is the wonder of good cities.

The Glocal Design Process

Implicit to ecological democracy is a design process that is participatory, scientific,

and adventuresome. Because ecological democracy stresses the direct

involvement of citizens in local decision making, future habitation will be

designed at the grassroots level through direct face-to-face participatory

actions. These actions will be holistically informed by local wisdom, attachment

to place, and networks of interconnectedness and ecological thinking.

They will be neither local nor global but glocal. The design process of glocalization,

in which local decisions are made in the context of external forces

and ramifications, is fundamental to ecological democracy. I have articulated

this process in previous books, most expressly in Planning Neighborhood

Space with People (1984) and Community Design Primer (1990). This

process creates a forum where our best and lesser intentions struggle with

each other. It facilitates the uncovering of residents’ best intentions and incites

them to act on those intentions.

The Focus Is Design

This book is not about the participatory process itself. It is about city form.

It emphasizes how the urban landscape can be shaped to encourage ecological

democracy. I explain—through the principles of enabling, resilient, and

impelling form—what to think about and give priority to in designing the

landscape. I explain how to analyze and synthesize the urban landscape in a

focused, efficient way. I use case studies to show how to form places that support

ecological democracy. These projects are more inspired by local natural

processes and traditional culture than most present city design. The designs

are idiosyncratic: they are more ecologically diverse, culturally expressive,

integrated, contextually responsive, and internally satisfying and less subject

to formalistic fads and status-seeking than most recent modern urbanity.

These projects demonstrate that ecological democracy is at once both visionary

and achievable. Most of the cases were dreams just out of the grasp

of a community but were attained via concerted collective action. They and

thousands of similar successes around the country and world are indicators

10 Introduction

that ecological democracy is emerging. But the foundations and principles,

not singular projects, are fundamental to designing for ecological democracy

because the foundations of enabling, resilient, and impelling form will inspire

landscapes of ecological democracy not yet imagined.

How do these foundations relate as theory? My primary thesis is simple.

To create settings for ecological democracy, every design action must simultaneously

address enabling, resilient, and impelling form, not separately but

together. In this regard, successful designers craft all three into a single fabric.

The most rational way to do this is to ask if each of fifteen design principles

is being optimized as the design takes shape. I find this theory most

applicable when I am wrestling with one aspect of the design problem. I

make myself pause and in orderly fashion check each principle to see which

principles are being ignored. Usually some are. Rectifying those omissions

enriches the design. In this way, the principles serve as a theoretical checklist.

Any useful theory of city design should serve this purpose foremost.

But are some principles more important than others? There are two answers.

Theoreticians address this question by analyzing which principles explain

most of a phenomenon, in this case the design of cities to encourage

ecological democracy. In this regard the single most powerful principle is sacredness

for both content and operational importance. It expresses values

held most dear and that influence urban form directly. Sacredness encompasses

centeredness, connectedness, limited extent, and particularness explicitly

and all other principles indirectly. This does not conclude causality

but rather singular interrelatedness. In the same manner, centeredness, connectedness,

limited extent, and particularness rank as more interrelated than

other principles. Theoretically, they are more important.

The principles exert parallel catalyst influences on each other, but some

are exceptional. For example, sacredness triggers stewardship and fairness

through empathic connectedness. It also counters unhealthy status seeking,

which otherwise has a disproportionate negative influence on various principles.

Several principles (notably inhabiting science and stewardship), although

less connected to others, forge new relationships with place that are

based on an understanding of local ecological processes. Catalyst impacts

make less connected principles theoretically vital to ecological democracy. I

note these relationships throughout the book.

The practical answer to the question of which principles are most important

is that it depends on the context of each city region. For example,

Introduction 11

centering and limited extent are lacking in most American cities and need to

be the first order of business, from both a theoretical perspective and the

nitty gritty of city making. But in cities like Boulder, Colorado, and Los Angeles,

where limited extent is being addressed, other principles take precedence.

Similarly, the lack of density is a first-order priority in most American

cities but less so in Honolulu. The fifteen principles should be continually

evaluated so that focused attention can be paid to the most critical issues

rather than to symptoms of any given region. This must be done without

losing sight of the overriding consideration that these fifteen principles are

interconnected and must be addressed simultaneously.

This Book Is for Students of Ecological Democracy

I have written primarily for people who want to build a sense of community

as they build cities. You are designers—mostly landscape architects, city and

environmental planners, architects, engineers, lawyers, resource managers,

and students with bold ideas. The book might be useful for anyone involved

in making cities. This includes experts in law, real estate, education, health,

and finance. It includes mayors, council members, city managers, and

others who design and administer cities. Nongovernment organizations,

whether focusing on environmental justice or intercontinental ecosystem

networks, can be helped to act effectively through an understanding of the

ideas discussed in this book. I don’t know the language of policy makers in

state and federal government, but the principles here probably would be useful

to you as well. Each can take action to create enabling, resilient, and impelling

form.

The book should be useful to any residents who want to improve or remake

their community. If you are discontented with your neighborhood,

city, or region or if you are a volunteer, a parent, a teenager, an illegal immigrant,

an environmental activist, a NIMBY, or a do-gooder who is discontented

with your locality, the principles here may help you envision positive

alternatives. This is critical because as a citizenry we have become much

better at saying what we don’t want than what we do want. Scary ecology

and weak democracy have made us pessimistic about change. Doomsday

ecology is now part of our mainstream consciousness. But intelligent ecology

is what we most need. Free-enterprise democracy has made us irresponsible.

Principles of ecological democracy can formulate attractive new

12 Introduction

choices and show us what we need to know and do to be good citizens. An

ecological democracy will not work until all of us are more fluent in the language

of enabling, resilient, and impelling form.

I have also written for myself. This is a book that would have helped me

immensely forty years ago when I was trying to combine sociology, ecology,

and design. It would have helped me last year in my professional work designing

parks in the San Fernando Valley and South Central Los Angeles.

Oh, how it would have helped when I was a young city council member in

Raleigh, North Carolina, lacking a practical vision to guide me in making

decisions big and small. It would have helped me as a citizen activist fighting

against highways and for endangered species. In each of these, I would

have done a better job with these principles in my hand, in my mind, and

in my heart. I will use this book to improve my efforts. I hope this book will

help each of you create places where ecological democracy can grow and enrich

many lives.

This book is for students of ecological democracy. Eventually, that will

include all of us.

Introduction 13