Creating an Ecocity Zoning Map for any American city:

On an up-to-date map of your town, which will be Map #2, locate the present city, town, and neighborhood centers and draw concentric circles indicating distances from these centers. These will look much like the concentric circles of a target. On about one-fifth to one-third of the land area of the town, in the zones closest to the centers, the density of development should be significantly greater than is the case presently. On about half to three-quarters of the land area of the town, in the zones farthest from the centers and most dependent upon automobiles, there should be much less density of development in the future and, ultimately, only natural or agricultural land uses. The lower the [present] density of the whole town, the smaller should be the percentage in the increasing density area and the larger the percentage in the decreasing density area. Everywhere the mix of uses should become far more complex, even in the restoration areas on the future fringe; all sorts of diverse agriculture and networks and patches of nature corridors and zones can be established in time.

Richard Register, Ecocities: Rebuilding Cities in Balance With Nature, "Chapter 10 - Tools to Fit the Task."

If you plan to read this book, I'd recommend you maybe hit Chapter 1, and then skip to about Chapter 8. If you're reading this, you've probably already read your Kunstler, and don't need further rehashing of the role of automobiles and land use patterns in our impact on the environment - the first two-thirds of the book are mostly a mix of making that case and fannishly praising Paolo Soleri. Skip to the prescriptive parts. Ch. 10 and 12 ("Toward Strategies for Success") could be a useful excerpt for a course in planning theory or environmental planning.

Register's fundamental premise is that our built form locks us into unsustainable ways of life. Simply putting solar panels on your roof, closing down one block to cars, or building one infill development is not nearly enough - while you're doing that, a dozen new street blocks are being built for cars around the edges of your city, and a dozen new sprawl houses and strip malls are going up: do the math. Nor is simply infilling three- or four-story buildings in the downtown of Berkeley or a similarly-sized college town (say, Ann Arbor) going to be enough - you're still not going to build the density of uses and users or network of dense nodes to be able to go carfree. A truly ecological built form will require much more radical changes. (Keep in mind he's using arcologies as inspiration here...)

If Register were asked for a prescription for downtown Ann Arbor, you'd probably end up with a skyline 10-30 stories tall - but the 10-story and 20-story buildings would all have rooftop gardens and plazas, with foot bridges connection the buildings at those heights so that you end up two new "street" levels in the sky. Kunstler or Steve Bean might argue here that 30 story buildings will be unusable in a post-peak oil world, without enough electricity to heat/cool/light them, let along run elevators up and down reliably all day long. Register's answer would be that this criticism operates on the assumption that these buildings will be contemporary uncreative blocky modernist edifices lacking, say, operable windows - an architecture designed to take advantage of ambient sunlight, airflows, etc, could come up with a workable 30-story building. Besides which, with enough density, you won't need to go up and down every day. You might spend days at a time living, working, socializing, and meeting all of your other needs above floor ten, through the wonders of sufficient density, and furthermore, these buildings could generate much of their own energy, with interior space used for air shafts with turbines generating electricity from rising warm air, and ground level energy plants capturing 30 stories worth of waste and converting it to power, whether through methane capture, or simply heat extracted from composting.

He's got quite the city/region-level whole-system thinking, and this is an interesting book to read in parallel with Little House on a Small Planet, which focuses on the microlevel of personal living space.

But how do we get there? How do we undertake such massive reclaimings of functional land use such as, say, converting everything on the Washtenaw Ave corridor between Stadium and Hewitt into working farmland and natural space or daylighting Allen Creek? His implementation chapters, with the socio-political lessons he's drawn from 30 years of activism in Berkeley, make me a little wistful for the combative days of the Three Site Plan. Register specifically calls out greenbelts as useless without significantly increased density - leapfrog development will just increase car travel through the greenbelt. The idea of a four-story height limit as a "human-scaled" built form is specifically named as a romantic fallacy - Americans who look at Paris for inspiration don't realize that four-story buildings only create carfree density when you have everything within a mile radius or so built up uniformly to four stories of mixed use buildings. The Sierra Club? Register cites a Sierra Club leader, "Our members say, 'sprawl very bad. Cars? Pretty good!'" - because, with our current sprawl patterns, you can't ever get out to natural spaces without driving. No matter how "green" a Sierra Clubber's house and yard are, they still own that Subaru for driving up to their cabin on weekends.

Developers are not the problem. Developers will build what you tell them to build (or let them build). The major hindrance to building a ecologically sustainable city, says Register, is "neighborhood activists and architectural conservatives". Most of these sprawl-abettors are not evil, of course - they just haven't been provided with a real vision of what a sustainable city looks like. They don't understand what's being proposed, and therefore fear it - they're holding tight to the bird in the hand of their current pleasant neighborhood because they don't know what that rustling in the bushes is . . . and they're afraid it might be a velociraptor. Therefore, what true environmentalists need to do is provide a clear and consistent vision for change. The Ecocity Zoning Map mentioned at the beginning of the entry is one of the tools that Register recommends built form activists create, both to help themselves stay focused and consistent, rather than haphazardly staking out positions here and there, and also to communicate to other stakeholders just what it is they're talking about.

So, how do we revert Arborland to farmland, or convert the Allen Creek floodplain back to natural space? These are, of course, 100-year projects, and Register's key tool is "double TDR". Rather than a simple "transfer of development rights", which preserves current open space by subtracting the development rights from that parcel and adding them to some other parcel, a "double TDR" operates by scooping up development rights that have already been used. Yep, that's right. You can have 20 stories on a downtown Ann Arbor lot currently zoned for 10 stories - but you have to buy up a dozen existing parcels in the Allen Creek floodplain (from willing sellers, of course), remove those structures (perhaps moving them to infill vacant lots nearby), and rehabilitate the lots to rain gardens and streambed. Alternately, buy up some gas stations and strip malls around the edges of town and revert those lots to habitat or farmland. Bonus points if the rehabilitated sites are contiguous with already daylighted sections of creek or existing natural space.

He's a little grandiose, to be sure. (But, of course, he is an architect/urban designer, so it comes with the territory.) I think, though, that he does a fair job of both describing an post-peak oil, sustainable end state (which doesn't involve bunkering down in little wilderness encampments and killing each other for scraps of food) and also outlining tools and strategies for pursuing such a sustainable built form. I'd consider it a good case of "aim for the stars, and you'll hit the sky even if you fall short", and worth at least reading parts of.