How did the idea of EcoDistricts come about?

Portland has been building green buildings really well for the last 10 years, but there’s another level after that. You have even more opportunities with green buildings that are connected with water sharing, air conditioning and other energy efficiency features.
Our strategy is based on five pilot districts. All five of the districts are urban renewal areas and they have very different typologies. We have the [Portland State] University, we have a neighbourhood called the Lloyd district and that’s primarily commercial properties, the South Waterfront, which has seen significant development in the last ten years. The last two are called Gateway and Lents. They are primarily residential, lower-income. We have done the least work to date out there.
The stake-holders in the districts are going to have very different relationships. The challenges around how you make decisions will be very different.

What are the steps that you will be taking to develop these EcoDistricts?

There are a handful of sustainable district developments in the world that we’ve looked at. But what’s unique about what we’re doing is that we’re working with existing neighbourhoods. The hope is that they become neighbourhood-driven instead of developer-driven.
We’re going to do a comprehensive audit in order to understand what the assets in each district are. The next step would be feasibility studies to figure out how realistic the project is. And then it will be a matter of finding funding. We’re imagining a three year timeline.
We see EcoDistricts working as two pieces of physical strategy: hardware and software, because it’s also an opportunity to see how people can change behaviour.

What has been the feedback from the community so far?

People have been widely enthusiastic. In the university district, for example, there’s been significant interest from professors and students who wanna do research. The Lloyd district has also received positive feedback.
The East Portland district is less known. We’ve had warnings that there have been a lot of planning development there and they haven’t seen a lot of change. We’ve been trying get our technical advisers to connect with the people who are actually living in this EcoDistrict.

The city of Portland has taken a number of groundbreaking measures over the years to increase its sustainability. How do you get the support from the public to enact such measures?

Michael Armstrong: A big part of what we do about setting a vision is setting public engagement. We do that through surveys and public workshops attended by the mayor, and we’ve also been working in small groups. We learn a lot from this, and people understand how things work city-wide.

There’s a long tradition of that here. There is this well-established institutional culture and citizen engagement. We sort of joke about this, some people say “do we really have to get people’s opinion on this issue?” Well in Portland, we do. In Portland people care and that’s how they understand the outcomes. People who have less interest in what the municipal government is doing are less likely to move to Portland than, say, Houston.

Some of these measures, like promoting local food, aim at changing people’s behaviours. How do you do that?

We actually think food is relevant to the overall strength of the community. We want these changes to have a health impact, a carbon impact, and local economics impact. The ways we can influence that are somewhat limited, but what the city can do is to support farmers markets, or community-supported agriculture. We have turned city-owned lands into public garden projects. We have a zoning code that we make sure is not getting in the way of these things. We can help people see the relationship between food choices and climate change for example. This goes back to seeing our community as a resource.

One of your newest initiatives is the Clean Energy Works, which encourages residents to renovate and upgrade their houses to reach energy efficiency. How does that work?

This is a key piece of our climate action plan. We have a goal of reducing our carbon emissions to 20% of the carbon we used in 1990, and we’ve been trying to push people to think about how this translates into their daily life.

Energy improvements are paid for by the city and the homeowner repays the loan over time through the energy bill. The key is that it’s the city that makes the investments. Our community workforce agreement has been putting in place standards for labour practices to make sure the jobs that are created by that program are quality jobs. Right now we’re in the pilot phase, doing the first 500 homes.

It's not only about the environment...

These types of upgrades can take years to pay off. How do you gather political consensus to invest into programs that may not yield immediate results?

Cities are used to make investments over periods of time. We think of Clean Energy Works as providing public service. This has value to the community, in the same way that fixing potholes in the street has value, or building a bridge over the river. The difference is that the buildings are privately-owned whereas the roads are publicly-owned. We’re never going to solve problems like climate change if we leave the responsibility to change to the people only.

Another new initiative is EcoDistricts, which aims at increasing sustainability at the neighbourhood level instead of concentrating on single buildings only.

There are opportunities to do much better by sharing resources among buildings. The big challenge there is that our whole system has been structured around not sharing things. If anything goes wrong in my building it’s my problem. This notion of sharing and thinking about ways groups of buildings can perform together much better than individually is exciting. It reminds me about the things we learned in kindergarten like sharing… This is driven by climate change, we’re taking all kinds of risks. There’s a degree of urgency. It’s a safe bet compared to the risks we’re taking with our current emissions.

Next: an interview with Naomi Cole from EcoDistricts.

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GoodGuide suggested a bunch of other products that have better ratings and offered me the possibility to buy them through Amazon or add them to my shopping list.

You can also use the GoodGuide App for iPhone to get instant information while shopping.

• The government should offer incentive for the construction of renewable energy plants.
• A new grid should be built to transport renewable energy from its production sites to cities.
• The government should give incentive to automobile companies to switch their production to hybrid cars.
• All buildings should be equipped with energy-efficient windows and lighting in order to stop pollution and reduce energy bills.
• The government should put a price on carbon emissions and lead the way to replace the Kyoto treaty by a better one.

Gore says that these initiatives will also help improve the state of the economy.
I found the section on the automobile industry particularly interesting:

We should help America’s automobile industry (not only the Big Three but the innovative new startup companies as well) to convert quickly to plug-in hybrids that can run on the renewable electricity that will be available as the rest of this plan matures. In combination with the unified grid, a nationwide fleet of plug-in hybrids would also help to solve the problem of electricity storage. Think about it: with this sort of grid, cars could be charged during off-peak energy-use hours; during peak hours, when fewer cars are on the road, they could contribute their electricity back into the national grid.

This made me think of a profile of Mitchell Joachim, written by traffic expert Tom Vanderbilt, that I read in Wired’s October edition. Joachim is an architect who focuses on reducing the ecological footprint of cities.

Among the biggest sources of waste, he argues, is the automobile—not only in energy but in the space it occupies (cars, he notes, spend more than 90 per cent of the day parked.) For nearly a century, Joachim says, “cities have been designed around cars. Why not design a car around a city?” So he did just that. One of his concept vehicles, the City Car, was named to Time magazine’s Invention of the Year list in 2007.

His various cars would  be less machine than Facebook on wheels. Instead or rpm gauges, there’d be social networking software telling drivers where their friends are and how to get there. Nade from neoprene and other soft materials, cars would no longer suffer traffic-fouling fender benders, merely what he calls “gentle congestion”—picture a flock of urban sheep grazing against one other. Like Zipcar vehicles, the cars would be shared. They would “read” potholes and send warnings to nearby drivers and city repair crews. Urban parking would be eased by intelligent real-time supply and demand management, with people bidding remotely for available spots. Of course, there’d also be more spaces to begin with, since his cars could be folded and stacked like shopping carts. The average New York City block could handle 880 of the vehicles, he says.

Al Gore, meet Mitchell Joachim.

Source: The New York Times, Nov. 9, 2008
Wired, Oct. 2008

Source: BBC News.

I’m sure the IPCC members are wise people but they are scientists studying climate patterns, not policy-makers. This recommandation is simplistic and doesn’t take into account whether people already make an effort to eat food that is produced locally or not or try to reduce their emissions in other ways. Climate change is a global problem that can’t be solved by isolated measures such as this one. I don’t think this is educating people about what they can do in a proper manner.

The article points out to something that I really liked, which is the fact that reducing our energy comsumption and our greenhouse gas emissions is really not that hard, and it certainly doesn’t ask for any drastic change in our lives (at least if you’re living in a city and can rely on public transportation and nearby stores, but I guess that’s another debate.)

These data have been released yesterday as part of an annual review of his accounts. Get the whole article On AP’s website.