THE GRADUATE INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL AND DEVELOPMENT STUDIES

Ecovillages and Healing Biotopes: Holistic Approaches to Sustainable Community Development in Urban Spaces and Rural Hinterlands
MASTERS THESIS In partial fulfillment of the Master in Development Studies (MDev)

by Michael Karner (France)

Geneva 2011

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A city is composed of different kinds of men; similar people cannot bring a city into existence.

-Aristotle

The late Aldo Leopold remarked long ago that man does not perceive organic behavior in systems unless he has built them himself. Let us hope it will not be necessary to rebuild the entire biosphere before we recognize the worth of natural systems. -Eugene Odum

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................................... 4 INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................. 5 I. Situating Human Settlement Patterns in a Global Context ................................................. 8 1) The Elusive Concept of Sustainable Development ............................................................ 8 2) The Urban Space: Free-Floating or Entrenched in Local Realities? ................................ 11 II. The City and its Natural Environment : Theoretical Approaches ................................... 15 1) The Natural City ........................................................................................................... 15 2) The Metabolic City........................................................................................................... 18 III) Greenwashing the City.............................................................................................. 21 1) Commodifying Alternatives: the Example of Ecodistricts ............................................. 21 2) Technological Messianism : the Example of Masdar (Dubai) ......................................... 25 IV. Alternatives for Sustainable Living: the Example of Ecovillages.................................. 27 1) Defining Aspects of the Ecovillage Movement ............................................................... 27 2) Tamera Healing Biotope (Portugal) ................................................................................. 32 2.1. Technology: Beyond the Technocratic Framework ...................................................... 33 2.2. Ecosystem Restoration: Creating Sustainable Regional Economies ............................. 36 3) Limitations of the Ecovillage Model ................................................................................ 40 V) Sustainable Urban Habitats: Imagining the Ecopolis ................................................ 42 1) Rising Awareness of Holistic Approaches to the Urban Space ....................................... 42 2) Community Action for Sustainable Urban Lifestyles ...................................................... 44 3) The Ecopolis and the Emergence of Ecological Cultures ................................................ 47 CONCLUSION .................................................................................................................... 50 APPENDIX .......................................................................................................................... 51 APPENDIX 1: Ebenezer Howards Garden City ................................................................. 51 APPENDIX 2 : the Permaculture Flower ............................................................................. 52 APPENDIX 3 : The Solar Power Village ............................................................................. 53 BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................ 55

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ABSTRACT

This paper describes mainstream and alternative approaches to sustainable habitat development, using the rural ecovillage and the urban ecodistrict as examples. Creating sustainable living spaces for humanity is an urgent necessity. It is argued that conventional visions of sustainable development fail to integrate ecological and social (eco-social) criteria in their appraisals of what sustainability actually is. This is especially clear when one examines technology-based, economistic approaches to sustainable living. An overview of theories linking the city and its natural environment illustrates that eco-social criteria are fundamental to holistic understandings of sustainable habitats and to the relationship between humanity and nature. Such holistic strategies are already at hand in ecovillages. This analysis seeks to illustrate the ways in which the latter may be applied at the scales of cities and entire regions in Northern and Southern settings alike.

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INTRODUCTION

Less than five years ago, a historical threshold was passed by humanity. In 2007, around half of the worlds population was living in urban areas for the first time in human history (The Cities Alliance, 2007: 1). This civilizational shift towards a humanity of cities presents tremendous ecological and social (eco-social) challenges. About 1 billion people, nearly one third of the worlds urban population, lived in slums or slum-like conditions in 2005. About 25 million people join their ranks every year. These numbers are bound to surge in the coming decades: recent United Nations projections state that between 2050 and 2100, the world population is likely to exceed 10 billion inhabitants. Accordingly, the worlds largest urban areas are sprawling to gargantuan proportions, swallowing up valuable tracts of urban and rural hinterland. For the time being, cities occupy 2% of the Earths total surface, and consume around three-quarters of all resources used by humanity every year (Blanc, 2009: 234). Given that an ever increasing proportion of humanity will settle in urban agglomerations, what are the possibilities for large-scale sustainable habitat development today, if any?

In this paper, we reflect upon the potential applications of current experiments in sustainable habitat development in urban spaces and regions. An essential aspect of sustainable habitat development lies in an appraisal of the links that connect urban areas to their natural environment and rural hinterland. At the same time, the day-to-day conception and construction of such habitats is an eminently social affair, interpenetrated by economic, socio-political and cultural considerations. This may explain why sectorial appraisals of such complex issues fail to achieve a good understanding of what sustainable habitats actually are. This calls for an interdisciplinary and holistic framework of analysis that draws upon the natural and social sciences. Basing itself on secondary literature as well as fieldwork1, this analysis will focus on two specific concepts that are rapidly spreading around the world: the
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My ecovillage fieldwork consisted of a 15-day stay in Tamera peace research village in the rural Alentejo region of southern Portugal. I followed the villages one-week Introduction Course which introduced students to Tameras work in ecology, political activism (peace work), spirituality and human relations. I stayed an additional week during which I followed this routine as a trainee while deepening my understanding of Tamera through numerous informal interviews. I was also able to visit the well-known Vauban ecodistrict in Freiburg, Germany. The visit provided me with valuable insights into the ecological build-up and spatial organization of this well-known ecodistrict.

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(mostly rural) ecovillage and the urban ecodistrict. Ecovillages asserts the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN), are human-scale settlements, rural or urban, in the North or in the South that strive to create models for sustainable living. They emerge according to the characteristics of their own bio-regions and typically embrace four dimensions: the social, the ecological, the cultural and the spiritual combined into a systemic, holistic approach that encourages community and personal development (Dawson, 2004). Ecodistricts are urban experiments in sustainable habitat development. Seeking inspiration from such models is essential at a time when the question of sustainable living has attained a degree of urgency unknown in the history of humankind. Indeed, business as usual approaches are not adapted to holistic appraisals of how humanity is to deal with the imminent energy descent future (Holmgren, 2004). Thus, our analysis also provides a broad critique of mainstream approaches to sustainable development, coupled with an overview of several alternatives already at hand. Generally speaking, it seems that grassroots and mainstream tendencies in sustainable living have much to exchange: Aujourdhui, lesprit de la dmarche des marginaux dhier est devenu un mode de pense qui irrigue les orientations de la ville venir. (Butaud, 2009: 6). Perhaps the time has come to allow for a more open dialogue between
the mainstream and the marginal, and between the urban and the rural.

Thus, the main research question that forms the backbone of our analysis is the following: How can holistic current experiments in sustainable living further our understandings of sustainable community development, and how may these findings be integrated into urban development policy? This analysis is divided into five main parts. We begin with an outline of the contested concept of sustainable development, and describe how conflicting understandings of the latter crystallize in the field of sustainable habitat development. The following section will depict theoretical approaches to the relations between the city and its natural environment, which indicate that urban spaces are necessarily embedded in the latter. Following this, we will apply these findings to the examples of the urban ecodistrict and to the so-called ecocity of Masdar (Dubai). It will illustrate to which extent both of these examples omit eco-social considerations and perpetuate flawed understandings of the relation between human settlements and their environment. This will be contrasted with the ecovillage movement, which aims at developing sustainable habitats inspired by a holistic approach to the

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relationship between humanity and nature. The final part will discuss the potential applications of ecovillages holistic experiments in sustainable living in the urban space.

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I. SITUATING HUMAN SETTLEMENT PATTERNS IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT

1) THE ELUSIVE CONCEPT OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

The issue of sustainable habitats for humankind currently revolves around the buzzword of sustainable development, defined as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. (WECD, 1987) 2. Since its inception in 1987 by the Brundtland Commission, the expression has become increasingly devoid of meaning. Despite the ubiquity of the concept of sustainable development today, global inequalities and environmental degradation have surged unabated3. Before the emergence of sustainable development, the idea of eco-development emerged at the 1972 Conference of Stockholm. Eco-development failed to gain public recognition at the time, but emphasized values such as self-reliance, satisfaction of basic needs, and a form of development that did not rely on limited stocks of fossil fuels (Sachs, 1980). These criteria are still all-important today. However, the Brundtland Commission enlarged eco-developments definition by including consumption of finite fossil fuel stocks in its definition of sustainable development. The concept was thereby boiled down to a form of ordinary, fossil fuel reliant growth combined with eco-social objectives incompatible with maintenance of a fossil fuel based economy. Sustainable development paradoxically suggests a form of development that maintains unlimited, fossil fuel dependent growth as its main focus, while encouraging this new growth to be more ecologically and socially attuned. By contrast, ecological sustainability emphasizes economic growth that is compatible with

Broadly speaking, the mainstream definition of sustainable development can be equated to current understandings of dveloppement durable in French. 3 Global inequality is such that the upper quintile of the worlds population owns 86% of global wealth, while the lower quintile owns 1,3 % (UNDP, 1998). 40% of the global population shares 5% of global revenue, while the richest 10% share 54% of this revenue. (UNDP quoted in van Griethuysen and Arruda, 2008: 41).

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eco- social criteria 4 . It can be defined as the existence of the ecological conditions necessary to support human life at a specified level of well-being through future generations. (Ll, 1991: 609-610). These ecological conditions necessarily imply truly sustainable forms of economic growth that no longer rely on the depletion of the biospheres5 fossil fuel stocks.

Mainstream visions of growth, including the Brundtland Commissions, depend on ever increasing inputs of human, natural and financial capital to maintain the global economic system in place:
la mondialisation capitaliste saccompagne de lessor dune socit hyperindustrielle (Erkman 1998), moteur de lexpansion mondiale du dveloppement capitaliste et grande consommatrice de ressources minrales non renouvelables. Cet essor industriel requiert un renouvellement technologique permanent, commencer par des technologies de transport et de communication lchelle plantaire, ncessitant des infrastructures toujours plus consquentes, consommatrices de quantits toujours plus importantes de ressources humaines, financires et naturelles. (van Griethuysen and Arruda, 2008: 39)

In this configuration, technology is essential to the stability and further expansion of a global network of trade and capital, itself dependent on fossil fuels. Technological innovations are researched and adopted at a large scale depending on their chances of generating large incomes. Thus, technology is submitted to economic rationality alone instead of assuming or eco-social functions as well:
Nous savons depuis longtemps comment amliorer nos performances cologiques peu prs dans tous les domaines. () nous ne les ralisons pas parce que cette amlioration de la qualit de vie ne correspond pas au critre de la rationalit conomique, qui slectionne les innovations technologiques et organisationnelles selon leur impact sur la valeur montaire de la proprit engage, et non pas selon leur impact sur la qualit de vie. (Steppacher, 2006: 11)

Such criteria comprise notions of social equity and justice, as well as indicators of the impact of human populations on their natural environment in terms of waste production, greenhouse gas remissions, biodiversity preservation, and so on. 5 The Biosphere is le systme cologique global intgrant tous les tres vivants et les relations quils tissent entre eux, avec les lments chimiques de la lithosphre (les roches), de lhydrosphre (leau) et de latmosphre (lair), dans un mtabolisme global qui transforme sans cesse la surface de la Terre. (Grinevald, 2002 : 3). This definition corresponds to the Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadskys original approach to the term, which has been ascribed varied and occasionally erroneous meanings. On the history of the fundamental Biosphere concept, see Grinevald (1987).

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Such is the fixation on economic rationality that in neoclassical economics, the ecological or social consequences of any economic process are defined as non-quantifiable externalities. As such, they do not figure in conventional cost-benefit analyses and are rarely taken into account by economic actors. This shortcoming has led some academics to suggest that the shift from empty-world to full-world economics is urgent (Daly quoted in Rees and Wackernagel, 1996: 224): economics can no longer remain a science freed of any environmental or social constraints. Until then, such external imperatives will remain secondary concerns for a great majority of the worlds (unaware) population: This failure of global markets to transmit signals about resource depletion and environmental degradation has insulated consumers against the need for developing more self-reliant lifestyles, and disabled the drive for public policies which might assist these necessary adaptations. (Holmgren, 2004: 4-5). At present, solutions to the all-embracing issue of climate change are of a technocratic nature, involving technological inputs and the top-down use of market forces (such as carbon taxes or biofuel subsidies) to alleviate environmental problems. Thus, nature is being appropriately managed in terms of natural capital and neo-classical economic policy. This semiotic shift towards the capitalization of nature is apparent in many mainstream discourses on the environment. Its degradation and resource exhaustion are seen as management problems, and not as system breakdowns, thereby becoming a renewed source of dynamism for capitalism (M. OConnor, 1994):
we will enter a world in which capitalism does not merely appropriate nature, then turn it into commoditiesbut rather a world in which capital remakes nature and its products physically and biologically (and politically and ideologically) in its own image. (J. OConnor quoted in Goldman, 2000: 566)

A mainstay of this approach to nature is technological messianism or technology seen as the vector whereby all hurdles to humanitys further development (in whichever direction) will be allayed (Steppacher, 2006). Economic rationality applied to technological messianism is instrumental in defining which strategies are acceptable in terms of sustainable development. Accordingly, the issue of sustainable habitat development is also framed in terms of this technocratic and economistic system.

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2) THE URBAN SPACE: FREE-FLOATING OR ENTRENCHED IN LOCAL REALITIES?

Cities have been the main drivers of economic growth since the beginning of the thermo-industrial revolution6 in the late 18th century (Grinevald, 1990). Indeed, todays cities are necessarily mineral, meaning that their functioning and very existence depends on nonrenewable stocks of fossil fuels. From the thermo-industrial revolution onwards, a fraction of humanity living in the worlds most industrialized countries fundamentally changed the biospheres biogeochemical cycles (Steppacher, 2006:6). Thus, one may distinguish the Holocene (the postglacial geological epoch of the past 10 to 12,000 years) from the epoch of the Anthropocene, beginning with the thermo-industrial revolution and the accompanying shift from rural to urban civilization. Since then, humans have increasingly become a global geophysical force, apparent in global warming and climate change (Steffen, Crutzen and McNeill, 2007).

Cities can be seen as the main drivers of unsustainable growth trends through their economic role in the global economy. Urban areas account for the majority of global resource consumption, as well as enormous amounts of waste. Not only has this factor perturbed the biospheres biogeochemical cycles; it has also led to the appearance of hazardous urban habitats:

By the time this century passes its first quarter, more than a billion and half people in the worlds cities will face life and health threatening environments unless we can create a revolution in urban problem solving. (United Nations Conference Habitat II quoted in CIFAL, 2005:1)

Awareness of this enormous challenge is still lacking, or the latter is simply misrepresented by the mainstream approaches to development outlined above: Successful cities should offer investors security, infrastructure (including water and energy) and efficiency. It should also put the needs of its citizens at the forefront of its planning activities.
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The prefix thermo describes that fact that from the 18th century onwards, the transformation of thermal into mechanical energy became the basis for industrial equipment and processes. The increased use of limited fossil fuel stocks to fuel the latter signaled the beginning of an anthropic (man-induced) perturbation of the atmospheres thermic equilibrium (Grinevald, 1990).

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A successful city recognizes its natural assets, its citizens and its environments and builds on there to ensure the best possible returns. (The Cities Alliance, 2007: 22). This quote adequately embodies the concept of global cities, which sustains that cities are, at present, engaged in a worldwide race to attract transnational investments rewarding the most competitive and attractive amongst them. This also explains why this specific report mentions a citys investors first, its citizens second and its natural environment last, while applying the same economist jargon to all three. A citys environment is treated as an asset that may ensure satisfying returns if efficiently managed. Only then will it prove efficient enough to attract investors and capital. In a nutshell, we observe a curious inversion of logic in this definition of cities, which seems to that suggest that cities derive their sustenance from a worldwide network of investors that will, in turn, enable the needs of citizens and environment to be addressed. Historically, the relationship seems to be quite the opposite. Globalization is seen as having encouraged the development of global networks of trade and finance connecting the worlds great metropolitan areas, thereby bypassing the nation-state and extracting the city from its natural environment and rural hinterland. However, these peripheral spaces from which global cities are supposedly detached are being used more intensively than ever before in order to fuel the expansion of urban areas in terms of human and natural capital. As Rees and Wackernagel pointed out, the ecological locations of highdensity human settlements no longer coincide with their geographic locations (Rees and Wackernagel, 1996). For instance, Tokyo currently requires a biological zone three times superior to the total land mass of Japan for its consumption needs (Earth Council quoted in Davis, 2009: 76). In this sense,
Cities necessarily appropriate the ecological output and life support functions of distant regions all over the world through commercial trade and natural biogeochemical cycles. Perhaps the most important insight from this result is that no city or urban region can achieve sustainability on its own. (Rees and Wackernagel, 1996: 236)

Consequently, a prerequisite for sustainable cities is sustainable use of the global hinterland. Thus, any study of the city should also delve into the issues of its integration into the surrounding region, and analyze its worldwide exchanges with other locations on the planet. In sum, urban landscapes are the main obstacles to, and potential drivers of, sustainable habitat development. However, the dominance of techno-industrial approaches to growth hinders the implementation of alternatives to current development trends: ~ 12 ~

dans le cadre de la mondialisation capitaliste et industrielle, lomniprsence des critres de la proprit rend le dveloppement des alternatives extrmement difficile. Dans le cadre de cette slection culturelle quasi-permanente, toute tentative de valoriser des critres alternatifs, comme la qualit de vie, un mode de gestion coopratif ou lagriculture biologique, font lobjet de discrimination. (van Griethuysen and Arruda, 2008: 64)

In order to foster a coherent approach to sustainable development, it is necessary to re-embed economic rationality into human activities by positing a series of eco-social criteria. Eco-social criteria do not guarantee sustainability or social equity, but form a mode of social organization that is compatible with these principles (van Griethuysen and Arruda, 2008). Thus, sustainable cities could ultimately be equated to the following definition: A sustainable community enables its citizens to meet their needs and to enhance their well-being without damaging the natural world or endangering the living conditions of other people, now or in the future. (Girardet, 2000: 3)

At a theoretical level, creating sustainable communities within the urban space raises the question of scale. Scale refers to the spatial and temporal level of analysis applied to the object that one is studying. The discipline of political ecology7 has extended the findings of human geography in order to address the problematic issue of scale. Two of the first political ecologists elaborated the nested set of scales (Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987, pp.65-6). This method takes a given region as its fundamental unit of analysis. It will appear that this is an appropriate unit for sustainable habitat development. For instance, Lewis Mumford suggested forms of regional planning, in which the needs of the town and those of the countryside are planned together. The following set of scales is but one example of an appropriate framework for sustainable habitat development in a given region:

i)

The first scale provides a predominantly physical and technical description of the region, inspired mainly by the natural sciences. For our purposes, urban ecology, metabolic analysis and industrial ecology provide good lenses of analysis for this scale. A scale that takes into account settlement histories and the spatial unfolding of

ii)
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The phrase political ecology combines the concerns of ecology and a broadly defined political economy. Together, this encompasses the constantly shifting dialectic between society and land-based resources, and also within classes and groups within society itself. (Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987:p.17)

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political economy which are important in explaining the variations of the social relations of production within the region. This scale focuses on the historical heritage of the area. More specifically, it seeks to understand how the organization of human settlements is indicative of the socio-economic differentiation processes that underlie them. The socio-economic landscape of the city or of an urban region can be analysed from this vantage point. iii) An analysis of non-place based...networks of economic, social, political relations. This supra-regional level of analysis refers to the national, international and global scales of analysis, which directly or indirectly affect the inhabitants and natural environment of the region in manifold ways.

As the figures mentioned in the introduction illustrate, sustainable habitat development is a global issue that directly or indirectly involves the overwhelming majority of humanity. At the same time, its realization is necessarily defined by local ecological, socio-economic and cultural factors. Sustainable communities are sustainable precisely because they are attuned to the natural environment in which they are embedded. Thus, sustainable habitat development is intimately related to the catchphrase Think Globally, Act Locally:

Local character' is thus no mere accidental old-world quaintness, as its mimics think and say. It is attained only in course of adequate grasp and treatment of the whole environment, and in active sympathy with the essential and characteristic life of the place concerned. (Geddes, 1915: 397)

The following section will outline theoretical approaches to the city and its natural environment, illustrating the fact that a city, however global, is necessarily entrenched in local ecological and social realities.

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II. THE CITY AND ITS NATURAL ENVIRONMENT: THEORETICAL APPROACHES

Seeing the city and its natural environment as interconnected is essential to the development of more sustainable settlement patterns. This section provides a brief overview of theories of the city and its natural environment, which are useful starting points for holistic understandings of urban, suburban and rural areas seen as an indivisible totality.

1) THE NATURAL CITY

Attempts to green the mineral city have accompanied urban expansion since the thermo-industrial revolution, in line with increasing awareness of the environmental degradation and dangerous working conditions that plagued urban spaces. In the 18th century, Hygienist doctors sought to eradicate rampant insalubrity in dense city centers by eradicating the central slums and run-down areas inhabited by worker populations. Thus, the suburb emerged as a means to resettle working class populations while cleaning Europes industrial capitals city centers, which thereby became attractive for the urban bourgeoisie. One of the more ambitious attempts to improve the workers livelihoods resided in Ebenezer Howards concept of garden cities, which aimed at developing affordable housing in clean environments for the British working class (Howard, 1902). Workers were intended to find employment in their place of residence, which also offered culture and entertainments. Garden cities were designed to be compact, symmetrical within their own borders, with a surrounding green belt of agricultural land ensuring the citys food sovereignty. Howard argued that in this way, the positive points of the town and the countryside could be combined into a third magnet, the Garden City (see Appendix 1). The concept influenced British urban policy significantly, as the New Town Act of 1946 illustrates (Lambert, 2004).

The United States experienced some of the worlds fastest rates of urbanization throughout the 19th century. The Chicago School of sociology of the first half of the 20th century provided valuable analyses of these recent developments. Fundamentally, its theorists ~ 15 ~

thought of the city as a social laboratory in which human beings attempts to create a world in their own image crystallized. The school believed in qualitative methodologies that allowed for a naturalistic and nearly ethnographic exploration of this urban laboratory. Thus, the city dweller was equated to a human in his/her natural habitat:
For the city and the urban environment represent mans most consistent and, on the whole, his most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in after his hearts desire. But if the city is the world which men created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live. (Park quoted in Rudolf, 2008:55)

It is of note that these words were written at a time of rampant urban expansion in the United States. The kaleidoscopic complexity of the city encouraged a form of awe at the grandeur of humanitys ambitions and realizations. However, it often yielded to disorientation induced by a pronounced sense of loss of identity and contact with the wider human community8. The Chicago Schools naturalistic focus implied that ecological models and biological metaphors were appropriate devices for understanding urban social relations (Lutters and Ackerman, 1996). These social systems were compared to ecological systems progressing towards maturity, or climax states. Different urban zones characterized by specific forms of land use were considered to be either in symbiotic or competitive relationship to each other. Viewed as an inseparable whole, land, population and culture were seen as expanding and maturing in mutual, dynamic interaction:
Si on observe un cosystme, on constate quil volue de faon spontane et autoorganise dun tat juvnile, caractris par un surplus de photosynthse par rapport la respiration, vers un tat de maturit (climax) o le systme trouve un quilibre. Il arrte de grandir, mais continue voluer dans une grande complexit. Le vivant soriente vers la maturit et corrige les prolifrations inappropries par un processus volutif permanent. (Steppacher, 2006:8)

From this perspective, current efforts to green cities are an integral part of the maturing of urban spaces. However, these elaborate and homogenous models could not capture the nearinfinite complexity of the urban fabric (Lutters and Ackerman, 1996: 4). An aspect that was lacking in the Schools reflections was the degree to which the city is embedded in its immediate natural, human and ideational environment. All too often, it was assumed to be a self-contained and self-sufficient environment functioning in autarky:
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For instance, the alienating power of the towering modern city was aptly described by John Dos Passos in Manhattan Transfer, set in 1920s New York. It became a recurrent theme of twentieth century art: the urbanite human being had condemned himself indeed.

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La perspective privilgie est celle du microcosme urbain, abstraction faite de la place de la ville dans un processus plus global, dont lhorizon pourrait tre le monde, la plante, ou encore la modernit. Cest donc bien lenvironnement de la ville qui fait dfaut, par consquent, dans leurs [lcole de Chicago] analyses du phnomne urbain. (Rudolf in Hamman, 2008: 51)

Additionally, the elaboration of normative theories aimed at improving the urban space did not concern the Chicago School. Other thinkers of the period were more concerned with this question, particularly Patrick Geddes, who sought to develop a vision of the organic city (Geddes, 1915). Inspired by Pyotr Kropotkins work on forms of cooperation in nature, Geddes considered that the organic city required mutual aid and cooperation between the inhabitants and institutions of an urban space. This transpires in Geddes conception of civics, the study of urban societys laws of development. This new urban sociology was not only to register change (as the Chicago School did), but also to develop tools encouraging positive evolutions within the urban community. According to Geddes, town planning was also to concern itself with civics, thereby becoming the affair of the entire citys community (Schalk, 2007). More specifically, energy use and the organization of economic production were to be optimized: how could a paleotechnical (or mineral) city, fueled by centralized coal and steam power infrastructure, become a neotechnical one, in which new norms for hygiene and decentralized production were facilitated by more efficient and small-scale methods of electricity production and supply (Lambert, 2004) 9 ? In many ways, these concerns are an integral part of the challenges facing sustainable urban development to this day. For Geddes, the true town plan, the only one worth having, is the outcome and flower of the whole civilization of a community and of an age. (Geddes quoted in Downton, 2009: 56). Such a holistic, all-embracing conception of urbanism is a far cry from the sectorial representations of the discipline one observes today. Indeed, Geddes (as well as his disciple Mumford) developed their overarching theories of urban society before increasing academic

In Technics and Civilization (1934) Lewis Mumford, a great disciple of Geddes, considered that technology should figure in a framework similar to Geddes civics. For Mumford, the dominant techno-industrial civilization of the 20th century was monotechnic. In this configuration, technology is used for its own sake. It eventually develops its own trajectory that may be harmful to humanity and to the Biosphere itself, as we have seen in Section I. This megatechnic system emphasizes constant, limitless expansion of the production and replacement capacities of standardized technological consumer goods. Mumford believed that a polytechnic configuration (a complex framework of adaptive and diverse technologies) was more adapted to humanitys needs. This could encourage the spread of biotechnics, or technology inspired by organic systems that would emphasize qualitative richness through self-regulation and self-correction (Mumford, 1934).

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specialization led academics to consider such holistic and interdisciplinary approaches as obsolete:
The advancement of modern scientific disciplineswas a process of compartmentalization of knowledge and specialization, without serious awareness of the unity of living Nature as a whole. Organicism and holism were despised by the scientific establishment. (Grinevald, 1987, 201)

Recently, holistic theories that transcend narrow academic specialization are enjoying renewed interest from academics and non-academic alike. Indeed, the creation of sustainable habitats also involves the production of more holistic knowledge that links the sciences and humanities so as to appraise the multidimensional links between human society and nature. This is, for example, is the purpose of global ecology, the science of the Biosphere, seen as the total ecological system of the Earth (Grinevald, 1987). Several disciplines mentioned in this analysis, notably political ecology and eco-urbanism, share similar concerns.

2) THE METABOLIC CITY

As explained above, the Chicago School did not develop an ecological understanding of the city. It was only in the following decades that eco-systemic analysis (Hutchinson, 1970; Lindeman, 1942) and urban-industrial metabolic analysis developed systematic methodologies for urban ecology. Metabolic methods quantify the matter and energy flows that characterize a given living system (Wolman, 1965). These flows represent a citys resource inputs and outputs in terms of production and negative externalities, such as waste or pollution (Odum, 1969, 1971). For Odum, metabolic analysis revealed that the city was a parasitic ecosystem dependent on other ecosystems, which it progressively deteriorated to sustain its own growth. Thus, cities are characterized by an urban morphology, in which metabolic units form the artificial structure of the city, seen as an aggregate of material components (Da Cunha, 2005). Therefore, one aspect of creating sustainable cities can be seen as making precise changes in urban morphologies through metabolic analysis. One may distinguish the parasitic, linear metabolism of cities from a sustainable, circular metabolism: A city with linear metabolism takes what it needs from a vast area, with no thought for the consequences, and throws away the remains. Input is unrelated to outputIn a city with a circular metabolism every output can also be used as an input into the production system... (Girardet, 1992: 23). This closed-circuit logic also inspired industrial ecology in which ~ 18 ~

different industrial units are connected in a circular metabolism (Erkman, 1998). The waste or excess energy produced by one industrial unit can be used in the production process of another, instead of being disposed of. For instance, Stockholms Hammarby Sjstad ecodistrict pioneered the idea of eco-cycle in public provision services. Energy production, water provision and waste management are integrated into one system providing heating, airconditioning, energy production and wastewater treatment. In this manner, external inputs are minimized, while waste is recycled for production purposes (Catry et al., 2009). Circular use of inputs and outputs is also an essential component of ecovillages approach to resource consumption. A concept that greatly expanded the scope of metabolic approaches to the urban space was ecological footprint. The idea of ecological footprint is based on the concept of carrying capacity: An environments carrying capacity is its maximum persistently supportable load. (Catton quoted in Rees and Wackernagel, 1996: 224). Carrying capacity is seen as central to understandings of environmental sustainability, since it quantifies the degree to which an environment can be (safely) exploited by any species or natural process. Human-induced environmental degradation results from the fact that humans are characterized by a biological as well as an industrial metabolism. While other species around the world may also be described as industrious, humanity today stands out as the species which engages and depends on entropic10 processes for its survival. In thermodynamic terms, cities are highly-ordered dissipative structures (Rees and Wackernagel, 1996: 237), meaning that they are characterized by their colossal rates of energy dissipation. Thus, ecological footprint is the total area of productive land and water required continuously to produce all the resources consumed and to assimilate all the wastes produced by a defined population, wherever on Earth that land is located. (Rees and Wackernagel, 1996: 228-9). If one considers that 80% of Europes population is expected to live in urban areas by 2020 (United Nations quoted in Blanc, 2009: 234), the question of reducing urban spaces ecological deficit is of the utmost importance. Indeed, Global sustainability cannot be (ecological) deficit-financed; simple physics dictates that not all countries or regions can be net importers of biophysical capacity. (Rees and Wackernagel, 1996: 235). Global sustainability is also a colossal task: Findhorn ecovillage (Scotland, 400 inhabitants) has one of the developed worlds lowest carbon
10

Economic processes are subject to the laws of thermodynamics. In particular, the Second Law of Thermodynamics applied to economics implies that economic activities (production, consumption, distribution) require high quality energy-matter resources (low entropy), that are qualitatively degraded in the economic transformation process. (Steppacher and Van Griethuysen, 2008: 31). Therefore, low-quality energymatter waste and dissipated energy-matter (low entropy) are inevitable consequences of any economic process. See Georgescu-Roegen (1976 ,1979) for applications of the Second Law to economics.

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footprints. Its ecological footprint is 60% of the British average, while Findhorn inhabitants consume 40% less resources than the overall British population. Despite this, were the worlds entire population to have the same carbon footprint as the Scottish ecovillage, it would still require 1.8 planets, compared to Britains 3 planets (Dawson, 2010).

All in all, it is apparent that many tools exist for appraising the multi-dimensional ecological and social attributes of a city. Many theoretical attempts have also contributed to achieving holistic understandings of the latter. However, this rich theoretical background has not been absorbed by most of the actors involved in day-to-day urban planning and governance. The following section will illustrate how the complexities inherent to any space are greenwashed in a simplistic effort to improve the green image of a city while maintaining business as usual approaches through technological and financial inputs.

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III. GREENWASHING THE CITY

To date, the most concrete attempts at greening the built space of the city are ecodistricts (or ecoquarters). In essence, these ecodistricts could be the urban answer to ecovillages in the countryside. Ecodistricts have gone from a marginal, localized status to embody the ambitions of many a city seeking to greenwash its image. Since their mainstream acceptance as an effective means for achieving urban sustainability, the concept has been significantly simplified and diluted. The following section will illustrate the enduring eco-social potential of ecodistricts, and how economic rationality alone is unable to provide a good understanding of their potential. Following this, the example of the so-called zero-carbon desert city of Masdar (Dubai) will provide an extreme case of a capital- and technology-intensive project that forgoes holistic understandings of the urban space. 1) COMMODIFYING ALTERNATIVES: THE EXAMPLE OF ECODISTRICTS
11

Ecodistricts emerged as a distinct concept in the 1980s. At the time, several protodistricts appeared, the most famous one being the Quartier Vauban in Freiburg, Germany. These prototypes were community-initiated attempts to create collective and ecological urban living spaces for a group of motivated individuals. In Freiburg, middle-class citizens decided to transform an abandoned army barracks dating from the Second World War into a new type of living space. Today, the Quartier Vauban is located 2,5 km from Freiburgs center, and offers different types of housing for around 5,000 residents from a range of socio-economic backgrounds. Businesses are also on-site, located in mixed-use buildings that combine offices and housing areas. All buildings are built using ecological, isolating materials; energy is produced in a co-generation unit as well as solar panels located on nearly every building of the district. Water run-off is improved by green fingers that run through the districts built space, as well as waterways. Such green fingers allow for soft mobility (pedestrian and cycling infrastructure) as well as natural recreational spaces. Most importantly, they contribute to air and water auto-purification cycles, while increasing local biodiversity and

11

The term commodification finds its origins in Marxist political theory. It describes the process by which an object devoid of an economic value is assigned a monetary value. Once assigned an economic value, this marketable object may become the subject of economic rationality, which may replace its other eco-social properties and applications. This is the case of ecodistricts.

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reducing risks of flooding through their water absorption capacities. The Freiburg tramway passes through the area, which also benefits from very developed bicycle infrastructure. Cars may only drive on main routes at a maximum speed of 30 km/h, and 10 km/h on certain secondary routes. Around 50% of residents possess a car, parked in one of the districts two solar garages, located on the outskirts of the district. Many inhabitants have organized into cohabitat structures, in which several families decide to manage and live in a common property comprising private and communal spaces (usually an apartment building or a large house). Ecological resident cooperatives have also formed in order to design and build their own residential buildings. The city council attributes housing depending on the applicants social background, in order to encourage social mixity. And yet, Quartier Vauban is mostly inhabited by middle and upper middle class individuals: a mere 25% of the population can be described as lower-middle class. Nonetheless, this is not a bad proportion compared to other more exclusive ecodistricts that have appeared in the past years. (Emelianoff, 2004)

The early 1990s saw the creation of a number of isolated showcase-ecodistricts endowed with a pronounced educational and demonstrative function. At the time, they were not yet seen as potential building blocks for the cities of the future. Only in the mid-1990s did the concept begin to gain currency as an important component for sustainable urban development. The issue of making city habitats more environmentally-friendly was progressively taken up by actors in the public and private sectors, increasingly aware of the necessity to include environmental objectives in any urban planning and development effort. Since then, the ecodistrict concept has become so ubiquitous that in 2007, the French governments Grenelle de lEnvironnement, a high-level governmental summit on environmental issues, recommended la construction dun coquartier avant 2012 dans toutes les communes qui ont des projets de dveloppement dans lhabitat significatifs. (Souami, 2009: 9). The spread of this perspective to a wide range of mainstream urban actors and policies is certainly a positive sign, which hints at rising levels of environmental awareness amongst public institutions and servants12. However, the success of the ecodistrict has led to its simplification and commodification. In the 1980s, bottom-up participation was
12

In September 2010, I interviewed the head of the Planning and Sustainable Development section of the Euromditeranne urban restoration project in Marseille, the largest of its kind in Europe. The Second Phase of this public-private partnership will also involve the application of ecological building principles in new, green areas of Marseille. This encounter alerted me to the high levels of awareness of a high-ranking civil servant in France in terms of sustainable urban development.

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essential to the success of the Quartier Vauban: the neighborhood prides itself on its inclusive, bottom-up methods to this day. Indeed, ecodistricts are not only intended to be sustainable urban spaces, but also collective ones in which shared gardens, open spaces and a wide range of community activities allow residents to create a vivid and dynamic urban community together. When one walks through the Quartier Vauban, it becomes clear that immaterial elements of political and ecological culture reflect the eco-friendly built space of Vauban. This immaterial aspect is not addressed by most ecodistrict projects today. Urban planners and developers prefer to focus on the latters environmental aspects, while foregoing the more problematic and time-consuming social aspects that actually form the community glue of a cohesive ecodistrict. In this conception, ecodistricts are simply another vector of environmental modernization, in which technology and capital are seen as the fundamental inputs to any environmental development process:

Les approches par les technologies demeurent marques par les modles de dveloppement et de progrs des annes 1950-1960 : le changement y est conu comme une rupture technique dont la mise en uvre permet des progrs rapides de performances et de confort. Ainsi, les amliorations dans la ville, de lhabitat et ses usages se font dans ce modle, par des sauts qualitatifs importants, successifs et non continus. (Souami, 2007: 11)

At present, technical kit ecodistrict have come to replace holistic projects akin to the Quartier Vauban. Consequently, the transformational impact and accessibility of the ecodistrict has been reduced. Many current projects are used as communication tools, or as means to render undeveloped or ailing parts of an urban area more attractive for market players and private developers (Souami, 2009). They are usually new, state of the art constructions, which have little in common with the rehabilitation of pre-existing built spaces such as Vauban. When one considers that the total infrastructure stock of France and most of Europe increases by only 1% per year (Souami, 2007), it becomes obvious that newly-built ecodistricts cannot make a large-scale contribution to the development of sustainable cities. As vectors of urban regeneration and information dissemination, they can be more effective if created in pre-existing infrastructures. Ecodistricts can also revitalize abandoned industrial or brownfield sites, thereby contributing to the densification of cities threatened by urban sprawl. But according to economic rationality, this is not an attractive option, despite its positive ecosocial effects. Indeed, creating ecodistricts in extant infrastructure is not about designing and selling a green product to buyers. It is a social affair, in which participatory processes ~ 23 ~

amongst different actors lead to the emergence of the ecodistrict, and to the resulting application of appropriate environmental technologies. Nonetheless, devising ways for preexisting neighborhoods to organize more sustainably is essential, especially in the rapidly expanding cities of many Southern areas, in which expensive ecodistricts will remain a luxury for the wealthy. By 2000, about two-fifths of Africas and Asias populations and threefourths of Latin Americas populations were concentrated in urban areas (United Nations quoted in Satterthwaite, 2003: 73). In sum, ecodistricts can either function as environmental showcases or seriously address sustainability issues at the scale of a single city district. They cannot, however, replace a holistic vision for sustainability at the scale of an entire city. Achieving a green ideal-type in terms of sustainable housing does not address the wider environmental issues at hand in the rest of any urban space, save in terms of insular exemplarity. Similarly, creating car-free zones in a tiny sector of a city does not significantly reduce its total automobile arsenal. It concentrates cars in other parts of the city if appropriate public transport and soft mobility infrastructure outside the ecodistricts boundaries are not at hand13. But the most significant problem surrounding the issue of insularity is of a social nature: implanting exclusive green areas creates yet another invisible barrier between those who can afford such luxuries, and those who cannot.: Lcoquartier fonde un entre-soi qui procde parfois dune logique insulaire reproduisant, lchelle de la ville, leffet NIMBY [Not In My Backyard], par lequel les externalits ngatives sont rejetes loin de ceux qui les produisent. (Bonard and Matthey, 2010: 3). If misappropriated, ecodistricts can become another short route towards gentrification, thereby further accentuating inequalities and divides within the urban social fabric. Due to their high market value, they may increase property prices and ultimately become the object of rampant real estate speculation. Indeed, such capital- and technologyintensive living space can ultimately lead to forms of green exceptionalism. In this case, access is limited to an exclusive public of middle- and upper-class residents who have chosen to live an eco-friendly lifestyle, far from the dreary realities of the ordinary city. This use of ecodistricts does not encourage intermingling between different socio-economic and ethnic groups. It may do the very opposite, as is already the case in South Africas largest cities. In Johannesburg, private promoters have included green technology in securitized green gated communities for wealthy white populations. Similarly, the much-discussed eco-city of
13

By contrast to this piecemeal approach to transport, the creation of public transport networks at the scale of entire urban regions is a more holistic approach. Karlsruhe (Germany) has been running such a high-speed tramway network with success for many years.

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Dongtan (China) has never seen the light of day. At present, it is likely to become a greenwashed suburb for Shanghais elites, built in the middle of a natural reserve (Obringer, 2009). All in all:
Il semble lgitime de sinterroger sur le profil social de ces nouveaux ensembles " haute qualit de vie" et de se demander si les efforts raliss pour obtenir initialement une mixit sociale, grce un ratio de logements sociaux, suffiront endiguer les processus probables de sgrgation () Les quartiers ferms construits par des promoteurs privs, qui exploitent le double argumentaire de la scurit et de la qualit environnementale, constituent une menace plus srieuse en matire de sgrgation cologique et sociale. (Emelianoff, 2004: 29)

Given the small amount of ecodistricts that currently exist, these fears may seem overblown. But if one considers ecodistricts as the first timid step that cities take towards becoming sustainable, these efforts best not be misdirected. The insularity of high-end ecodistricts can ultimately become the insularity of exclusive, green cities, separated from their ordinary polluting counterparts by a barrier of capital and technology. The following example will show that this scenario is already in the making. 2) TECHNOLOGICAL MESSIANISM : THE EXAMPLE OF MASDAR (DUBAI)

The city-project of Masdar is one of the most impressive examples of the trends affecting conventional approaches to sustainable urbanism. Located in the desert on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi (Dubai) Masdar is to become the worlds first zero-carbon city. Its total population is planned to reach 90,000 inhabitants. The ventures architectural partners have apparently blended ancient construction techniques and high-tech design: Masdar is inspired by old Arab settlements of 16th century such as Shibam (Yemen) or Aleppo (Syria). The city will be raised on a 23-foot-high base in order to benefit from desert breezes, a form of natural temperature regulation. Wind towers will funnel air down to the narrow streets, built at an angle to the suns east-west trajectory in order to increase airflow through the city. The company predicts that through such techniques, Masdar may feel as much as 70 Fahrenheit cooler than the actual air temperature, thereby halving the citys electricity consumption. All streets on the surface will be pedestrian, while driverless electric cars will circulate underground; combustion-engine vehicles will be banned from the city. 90% of the power is expected to be solar energy produced in a 54-acre photovoltaic field located on the ~ 25 ~

outskirts of Masdar. The rest will be drawn from a waste incineration plant (a technique which emits less carbon than waste landfills), also located on the periphery. The dream of a sustainable city built with funds from the international petroleum business shows to what extent sustainable urbanism is perceived as a showroom and potential market for technology- and capital-intensive developments. In essence, Masdar is yet another attempt to parachute green ideal-types onto alien ecosystems. It is unclear how the citys population will produce food, if at all. In this case, it will have to import all of its food and water from distant locations, a highly unsustainable practice itself. Furthermore, it is likely that becoming a resident of Masdar will remain an expensive privilege indeed. Therefore, the educational virtues of the concept seem limited, since it is reserved to a tiny, wealthy percentage of the worlds population. Of course, Masdar may be treated as an experiment in sustainable living, but experiments must be reproducible and affordable if they are to fulfill their demonstrative purpose. Thankfully, some parts of mainstream media recognize the flaws inherent in the Masdar mirage: What Masdar really representsis the crystallization of another global phenomenon: the growing division of the world into refined, high-end enclaves and vast formless ghettos where issues like sustainability have little immediate relevance. (The New York Times, September 25th, 2010). Indeed, these formless ghettos are often more exposed to environmental hazards (whether man-made or natural) than insulated residential areas for wealthier populations. Far from being a vector of technological messianism, sustainable urbanism engages with the day-to-day, often uncomfortable realities of ordinary cities, be they developed mid-sized ones like Freiburg or composed of sprawling ghettoes interspersed with high-end gated communities and business districts. The commodification of the ecodistrict concept and the example of Masdar illustrate how fragmentary approaches to sustainable habitat development fail to address several essential aspects of sustainability. Economic rationality and technology are important aspects of this goal, but must be coupled with eco-social considerations in order to ensure holistic understandings of what sustainable living actually means, in all of its human and natural dimensions. The following section will explore the ecovillage movement, which is currently seeking to develop and apply a holistic ethic for sustainable living around the world.

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IV. ALTERNATIVES FOR SUSTAINABLE LIVING: THE EXAMPLE OF ECOVILLAGES

At present, we will explore several experiments in sustainable habitat development that are currently mushrooming around the world. Far from being isolated initiatives, these alternatives share a common set of aims that lie in stark contrast to the conventional approaches illustrated in Sections I and III. Of course, many ecovillages are recent; the oldest amongst them date from the 1960s. This makes hindsight difficult, and precludes any definitive assessment of their ultimate success or failure. For ecovillages are not end-states, nor are they ideal types. They are ongoing experiments in holistic sustainability that engage with eco-social challenges the world currently faces: Ecovillages are not isolated enclaves of
escapists; rather, they are dynamic nodes of the information society. (Litfin, 2007: 7). Therefore,

some strategies for urban sustainability are perhaps being addressed by people who have consciously decided to step out of conventional wisdom in order to initiate socio-cultural transformative change.

My fieldwork in Tamera was supplemented with an appraisal of the available literature pertaining to ecovillages. Given the recent emergence of the ecovillage movement, little literature exists, and is often the work of individuals directly affiliated to ecovillages in one way or another. Relatively few analyses of ecovillages have been produced by academic circles. At best, they appear in socio-anthropological discussions of alternative community living. Comprehensive studies on the topic are nearly inexistent, but awareness of the concept is spreading in line with the rapid development of the movement itself. Therefore, most of the accessible literature directly concerned with ecovillages has been taken into account in this study. 1) DEFINING ASPECTS OF THE ECOVILLAGE MOVEMENT

The first ecovillages appeared in the 1960s and 1970s without ever using this term to describe themselves. This is the case of Findhorn Community (Scotland, 1962), Auroville (India, 1968), and the Farm (Tennessee, USA (1971). The ecovillage movement only truly appeared in the 1990s, with the emergence of a transnational network of ecovillages engaged ~ 27 ~

in experiments in sustainable living and education. The main pillar of this network is the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN), founded at the 1996 World Habitat Conference in Istanbul. This NGO currently serves as a global nexus for ecovillages by running an internet database of ecovillages around the world. GEN also organizes seminars and training workshops relating to all the themes connected to ecovillages: The mission of the GEN is to help the worldwide transformation toward sustainability, by supporting ecovillages, joining with like-minded partners, and expanding education and demonstration programs in sustainable living (Dawson, 2010). At present, GEN is divided into several regional sections14, and has consultative NGO status at the United Nations. UNITAR (United Nations Institute for Training and Research) and GEN are cooperating to develop Findhorn villages ecovillage design course. Around 400 ecovillages are currently listed in GENs directory, while some estimates consider that around 15,000 communities around the world could qualify as ecovillages. What strikes one is the immense diversity present in the movement. Is it even possible to speak of a movement when some ecovillages are open to the public while others are very small communities seeking to attain some form of isolated self-sufficiency?

Admittedly, some communities present specific properties that cannot be transposed elsewhere. But in order to extend the ecovillage concept to other settings, it is necessary to distinguish those criteria which may apply to other forms of habitat. According to Jonathan Dawson, one of the initiators of GEN, ecovillages are a microcosmic manifestation of what sustainable living units could resemble in the future: un principe essentiel dans notre dfinition des covillages et des communauts durables est quils soient conus de telle sorte quune socit pleinement fonctionnelle pourrait tre principalement composes de telles units. (Dawson, 2010: 31). This transpires in the five central aspects of ecovillages that are generalizable to other rural or urban settings. Ecovillages:

1) Organize around the idea primacy of community in terms of socio-political organization. While many definitions of community exist, the one most reflective of the ecovillage ethic was produced by the American farmer and poet Wendell Berry:

If we speak of a healthy community we cannot be speaking of a community that is only human. We are talking about a neighborhood of humans plus the place itself: its
14

ENA (Ecovillage Network of the Americas), GENOA (Oceania and Asia), GEN Europe (including the Middle-East), GEN Africa, and NEXT GEN (an educational division concerned with children and young peoples education).

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soil, its water, its air and all the families and tribes of the non-human creatures that belong to it ... if this community is healthy, it is likely to be sustainable, largely selfsufficient and free of tyranny. This means that it is they and not the central government that must control the land, the forests, the rivers and the seas, from which specific communities derive their sustenance. (Berry quoted in Goldsmith, 2006: 50)

2) Are citizen-led, grassroots initiatives characterized by properties inherent to ecovillages themselves: decentralized, non-hierarchical, participatory and, above all, place-specific and entrenched in local realities. Ecovillages invest extant infrastructure (such as the restored mountain ecovillage of Torri Superiore, Italy) or engage in the construction of an ecological, community-enhancing built space using ecological construction techniques (such as the Italian Damanhur federation of 5 villages, which totals 1,000 inhabitants). The largest ecovillage is the spiral city of Auroville (Pondicherry, India), which counts several thousand inhabitants and plays an important role in regional sustainability policy.

3) Seek to regain control of resource-production consumed within the community, in terms of energy, raw materials and food consumption. In this sense, ecovillages adopt social and solidary economic practices, defined as hybrid economic forms (monetary and nonmonetary). These are voluntarily elaborated by individuals who thereby seek to reinforce social cohesion, democratic practices and to satisfy true needs rather than make profits (DAmours in Silvestro, 2005). For instance, Siebenlinden (Germany) is seeking to become self-sufficient, and produces 75% of its own food for its inhabitants, while the rest is purchased from nearby organic farms. It has built one of the largest straw-bale houses in Europe, and is militating for land legislation to recognize straw-bale houses and other ecological construction techniques as valid, mainstream techniques. According to a study by the University of Kassel 15 , Siebenlinden emits 28% of the German national average for greenhouse gases, while 10% and 6% of this amount is due to heating and construction, respectively (Dawson, 2010).

4) Share a large set of common values relative to ecology, spirituality and human relations (cf. the Permaculture Flower in Appendix 2, which is a fairly good overview of the practices and values adhered to in ecovillages). In this sense, they are indeed intentional
15

The University of Kassel has run pioneering program in straw-bale and ecological/organic construction for several decades. Straw-bale is a cheap and simple method of construction that has very high isolating properties.

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communities that crystallize around a specific purpose. For the American ecologist Aldo Leopold, an ethic has its origin in the tendency of interdependent individuals or groups to develop modes of co-operation (Leopold, 1949). Thus, ecovillages are not simply locations in which new ways of green living are tested. They are also settings in which a group of individuals organizes around a community ethic focusing on human-nature relationships and sustainable living. Parallel to this aspect, the inevitable conflicts that arise in any community are played out and resolved around this very ethic, using a plurality of conflict resolution techniques. In this sense, ecovillagers practice a form of what Anthony Giddens coined life politics 16 (Giddens, 1991). Such forms of political lifestyle action are accompanied by normative discourses encouraging transformative cultural change linking the self to the world at large in an ongoing glocal (global-local) dialectic.

5) Are research centers that engage in educational and demonstrative activities, both within the community and the wider public. Education is one of the main goals of most ecovillages, and one of their main sources of income. Most of them run courses on a wide variety of subjects, such as ecovillage design, permaculture ecological construction and conflict resolution. For instance, Ithaca (New York) ecovillage is running an exchange program with the University of Ithacas Department of Environmental Studies. Findhorn (Scotland) runs a series of programs in cooperation with UNITAR, as well as courses that have been attended by public bodies and private enterprise alike. One of the objectives of Tamera peace research village is to develop an institute for Holzer Permaculture (see below). Ecovillages also call for, and indeed embody, an end to the human exemptionalism paradigm (Catton and Dunlap, 1978), which holds that humanity and nature are ontologically distinct categories. Within this paradigm, humans can extract themselves from their original natural state in order to rise above certain natural phenomena. Taken to its logical conclusion, it suggests that the human is entitled and indeed expected to dominate nature. As Lynn White argues, this belief finds its roots in the founding myths of JudeoChristianity and Islam: Christianity, in absolute contrast to ancient paganism and Asias religions (except, perhaps, Zoroastrianism), not only established a dualism of man and nature
16

Giddens defined life politics as a politics of self-actualisation in a reflexively ordered environment, where that reflexivity links self and body to systems of global scope. (...) Life politics concerns political issues which flow from processes of self-actualisation in post-traditional contexts, where globalising influences intrude deeply into the reflexive project of the self, and conversely where processes of self-realisation influence global strategies. (Giddens, 1991)

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but also insisted that it is Gods will that man exploit nature for his proper ends. (White, 1974: 4). This human/nature divide is apparent, for instance, in the creation of natural parks that place the human outside of their boundaries. This form of conservation only widens the rift between swathes of pristine wilderness and anthropomorphic cultural landscapes: The wilderness area mentality invariably advocates the deep-freezing of an ecology, whether San Gimignano or the High Sierra, as it was before the first kleenex was dropped. (White, 1974: 2). By contrast, ecovillages encourage their members and all of mankind to appraise the world in a holistic manner. In this view, nature and human society are inseparable and, in essence, mutually constitutive. This has relatively little to do with the myth of the noble savage or utopias of life in complete harmony with nature, since:

Unless human beings are differentiated from other organic and inorganic forms of being, they can be made no more liable for the effects of their occupancy of the ecosystem than can any other species, and it would make no more sense to call upon them to desist from destroying nature than to call upon cats to stop killing birds. (Soper quoted in Carolan, 2005:395)

Rather than embodying back to nature ideals, the ethic embodied by ecovillagers has more to do with the idea of voluntary natural stewardship. How can the human become an active healing component of the natural environment, in order to heal the damage done by past generations? Voluntary natural stewardship has much in common with James Lovelocks Gaia theory. Gaia is :
une unit complexe, comprenant la biosphre terrestre, latmosphre, les ocans et les sols; lensemble constituant un systme de rtroaction ou systme cyberntique qui vise crer le milieu physique et chimique optimal pour la vie sur cette plante. (Goldsmith, 2002: 120)

In Lovelocks vision, Earth is a self-regulating and self-healing system, to which humans could potentially contribute through the new science of geophysiology (Lovelock, 1979). Ecovillages, amongst others, attempt to be catalysts of these healing processes: the ecological aspects of community life are balanced when...people live in synchrony and harmony within the ecological system of which they are a part...[and] human life-styles regenerate, rather than diminish the integrity of the environment (CSA quoted in Litfin, 2007: 6). Harmony does not imply that humans have succeeded in attaining a utopian relation with nature devoid of any impacts or negative forms of extraction. Indeed, any economic ~ 31 ~

process is entropic (see Section II). However, many of these processes may be modified so as to minimize their eco-social impacts. Thus, human settlements can actually become healing biotopes. These are attempts at sustainable living that positively contribute to ecosystem regeneration in a given bioregion, while working to spread these activities through information dissemination and education. At present, we will analyze Tamera Healing Biotope in order to achieve a broader understanding of sustainable habitat experiments conduced in ecovillages. This example will also illustrate how the latter may be applied at the scale of a city or of an entire region

2) TAMERA HEALING BIOTOPE (PORTUGAL)

Tamera is a 134 hectare settlement of around 170 inhabitants in the rural Alentejo region of Southern Portugal. It was created in 1995 by a group of Germans who sought to create a space in which they could engage in peace research. Portugal presented more tolerant land legislation and lower land prices than Germany and came, through a series of encouraging signs, to be the appropriate destination for the group. At present, Tamera encompasses many different aspects in its work. Its overall approach advocates the creation of acupunctural points around the world that serve as central nodes for information and research transmission. These acupunctural points have been coined healing biotopes by Tamera. Their overall aim is to blend ecological restoration, political peace-work and conflict resolution in human relations so as to heal ever-expanding areas around the healing biotope through education and information dissemination. As such, healing biotopes are intended to be models and laboratories for sustainable living and culture. Tamera is not a classical ecovillage as such: some of its activities go beyond the scope of our definition. However, it is currently researching many areas falling under the latter, particularly in the fields of technology and ecology. But the daily functioning of the community derives from its research into what a human community actually is. This warrants enquiries in the areas of human relations and spirituality which provide the very backbone of Tameras vision. Without wanting to minimize their importance, I will not further discuss these aspects in this analysis, as they go beyond the purposes of this study. We will restrain ourselves to the more prosaic aspects of Tameras work in terms of solar energy production, water landscape management, permaculture, and ecosystem restoration.

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2.1. TECHNOLOGY: BEYOND THE TECHNOCRATIC FRAMEWORK

The development, testing and implementation of technologies is a defining feature of ecovillages. Some experiments are resolutely low-tech, striving to develop cheap, costeffective technologies that can be easily mastered and transferred to other settings. These technologies are ecologically friendly in their use of resources, often using second-hand or recycled materials. Other technologies have more in common with the high tech solutions adopted by mainstream actors. Nonetheless, the freedom of action enjoyed in ecovillages encourages extensive testing of the latter, as well as attempts to truly organize human settlements around them. By contrast, many green technologies acknowledged by mainstream discourses still consider them as somewhat risky, exotic and secondary alternatives to the dominant megatechnic configuration in place. In the developed world public subsidies have overwhelmingly encouraged the widespread development of high-tech, resource-intensive and expensive clean technologies controlled by a handful of large energy companies. Such strategies further cement the techno-industrial global configuration described in Section I. In essence, these solutions are not chosen for their technological value, but for their economic potential in terms of financial returns. A good example is biofuel, which enjoys huge political and financial support from governments around the world. It provides a new source of dynamism for the ailing global car industry, while forests and agricultural land are disappearing in many Southern countries, yielding to fields destined to biofuel production. Economic rationality dictates that biofuel is a technology with potentially enormous returns for the car industry and large industrial agriculture complexes. But from an eco-social viewpoint, the livelihoods of millions, the food sovereignty of entire nations and large swathes of natural habitats (and carbon sinks) are being threatened by this green technology17. We must ask ourselves if the most powerful, high-tech systems are actually the most efficient in their overall effects on fossil fuel dependency. Once again, economic rationality is but a fragment of a given systems overall rationality. A prime condition of the latter is that a clean technology must be adapted to its local context of use, as well as affordable and intelligible to its actual users. Agro-business biofuel is produced in Southern settings (with negative eco-social consequences) and indexed on the international commodities market as an environmentally-friendly product.

17

See The Biofuel Delusion for an in-depth critique of the biofuel agro-business (Giampetro and Mayumi, 2009).

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For Fritz Schumacher 18 and the Intermediate Technology Development Group, intermediate technologies (small-scale, affordable and decentralized) are essential to the evolution of more human-scale and community-based societies (Dawson, 2010): La dmocratie de participation suppose une technique de faible consommation nergtique et, rciproquement, seule une volont de dcentralisation peut crer les conditions dune technique rationnelle. (Illich quoted in Lambert, 2004: 180). Such decentralized models transcending expert-driven discourses and policies were also encouraged by the Club of Romes Limits to Growth report in the 1970s (Meadows et al., 1972). The Solar Village of Tamera is precisely one of these free-lab testing points. It was developed and built by the German inventor Jrgen Kleinwchter and his team, as depicted in Appendix 3. Portugal has the most sunshine in Europe, but ranks second on the European continent for oil dependency. Thus, it is an ideal location for testing new approaches to clean energy production. The Solar Power Village is an open-source complex of low-cost, low-tech elements running on solar power alone. Put briefly, it allows electricity and heat production, enabling the villages different components to pump water, cook, grind grains, disinfect water or other substances, grow non-native plant species and cool certain areas. In the summer of 2011, 50 members of Tamera will live in the Solar Village, trying to fulfill all of their energy requirements from this source. The potential applications of the concept are manifold, and illustrate how decentralized installations adapted to their local context of use can be applied at a regional scale:
The Solar-Power Village can be implemented as a cooperative, where the user as member pays for the services rendered heat, water, electricity. The cooperative possesses the installation and is responsible for maintenance and funding the venture. Jobs are created in the region, the buying power of the local community is increased and a low-cost energy supply provided. The cooperative structure could be enlarged by further economic activities such as food production and distribution, so that a decentralized and independent development based on self-help is supported. (Kleinwchter, 2004:7)

In settings where sunshine is ubiquitous and nearly perennial, solar cooking technology provides a valuable alternative to conventional cooking methods involving the use of firewood, and the resulting deforestation that occurs. The villages solar water pumps may also drastically reduce energy consumption. For instance, nearly 50% of Indias national
18

See (Schumacher, 1973).

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energy production is used for pumping water in rural areas (Kleinwchter in Dregger, 2008: 60): a large proportion of this energy could be saved by implementing Solar Power Village principles.

The Solar Village concept is a systematic attempt to introduce simple renewable technologies and sustainable forms of resource-use in Southern village settings. The networks that could generalize such ideas are already at hand. For instance, the Sarvodaya network of Sri Lanka connects over 15,000 Sri Lankan villages (encompassing 11 million residents) in an effort to develop an overarching model for village self-governance, development and conflict resolution based on Buddhist and Gandhian principles. The Ladakh Ecological Development Group is also engaged in environmental technology transfer in the region of Ladakh (India), and collaborates with the regional government on a wide range of projects. GEN has several branches active in the South, namely the Ecovillage Network of the Americas (ENA), GEN Oceania and Asia (GENOA) and recently, GEN Africa. The ecovillages of Mbam and Faoun
(Senegal) are already engaged in threatened mangrove ecosystem restoration along the entire Senegalese coast. This has not gone unnoticed by the Senegalese government, which created

the Ministry for Ecovillages, Retention Lakes and Pisciculture in 2008, along with the ANEV (Agence Nationale des Ecovillages), which is closely cooperating with GEN along the following lines:
The Global Ecovillages Network (GEN) approach to African development rests on the recognition that villagers are treasured teachers rather than less developed project beneficiaries. The ecovillage paradigm transforms the remoteness and lack of modern infrastructure of African village life from the development problem to an important piece of the answer. It alters the power relationships in North - South exchanges and attracts partners to share in and learn from the timeless cultural riches of rural Africa. This holistic approach to development enhances village culture, community and spirituality, while introducing sustainable livelihoods and benefits of modern technology. (GEN and ECOYOFF, 2006:1)

To date, ANEV is conducting pilot projects in three ecovillages, and aims to encompass around 14,000 villages into its activities:
Each of Senegals 14,000 rural villages could claim to be an ecovillage in the sense that these villagers consume less energy and natural resources, live in more natural habitats and participate in a closer relationships with nature and with each other than urban and industrialized populations. Nevertheless, ecological consciousness is a

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new concept to rural villagers, and many out of extreme need are depleting rather than protecting their threatened environments. Therefore, the education and sensitization process to prepare villages for membership must be broad based. (GEN and ECOYOFF, 2006:4)

Ecovillages have particular value in rural Southern settings, which present more tightly-knit social structures, and draw most of their subsistence from surrounding ecosystems. As such, they are more attuned to the possibilities and constraints immanent in their environment. Traditional knowledge pertaining to agriculture and land-use is also better preserved than in developed countries. However, rural exodus is slowly draining younger generations from rural areas in most of the worlds developing countries, while large-scale monocultures are replacing smaller forms of traditional agriculture. Therefore, alternatives must also be developed in such areas. One such alternative lies in the creation of sustainable regional economies through ecosystem restoration, a valuable strategy in Northern/Southern and urban/rural settings alike. 2.2. ECOSYSTEM RESTORATION: CREATING SUSTAINABLE REGIONAL ECONOMIES

Ecosystem restoration aims at revitalizing a given ecosystems natural cycle through the activities of human populations in the system. It can be declined in two independent steps that, once combined, provide a holistic strategy for Lewis Mumfords idea of regional planning (see Section I). STEP 1: Permaculture and water landscapes The first component of ecosystem restoration as applied by Tamera is permaculture. The term was created by the Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in the 1970s. It
describes:
Consciously designed landscapes which mimic the patters and relationships found in nature, while yielding an abundance of food, fiber and energy for provision of local needs. People, their buildings and the way they organize themselves are central to permaculture. (Holmgren, 2004: 1)

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In this sense, permaculture is not only about sustainable agricultural techniques: it also aims at providing stepping-stones for the emergence of sustainable cultures19. Since its inception in the 1970s, it has flowered into many different locally-defined variants. Holmgren and Molissons vision of permaculture can best be observed in Crystal Waters Permaculture Village in Australia, which effectively puts permaculture into practice at the level of an entire community. This ecovillage is an important vector of permaculture education throughout the world, and was awarded the 1996 World Habitat Award for its efforts. One of the main permaculture tendencies to have emerged in the past few decades is Holzer permaculture, named after the Tyrolean mountain farmer Sepp Holzer. The rising fame of this method not only derive from the fact Holzer creator manages to grow organic citrus at 1,400 meters altitude in the Austrian Alps. He has also developed more large-scale and extensive methods for landscape management, which does not refrain from occasionally using machine tools (such as bulldozers) to lay the foundations of an ecosystem restoration project. In Tamera, permaculture and the villages thriving gardens would be a shadow of what they currently are without Holzers suggestion to develop a water landscape. In 2007, he visited the site, observing that Tamera had an abundance of rainfall (equivalent to yearly rainfall in Berlin) in the winter followed by severe aridity in the summer. Due to the absence of humus on the site in and the surrounding hills, this rainfall was simply drained from the area and did not seep into the soil, leading to the slow disappearance of the regions forests. Holzer suggested the creation of an edible permaculture landscape in Tamera, for humans and fauna alike. Edible landscapes provide food for humans and for natural predators of pests that may damage the gardens. The first step of the process began with the digging of a network of water retention basins (15 upon completion of the landscape)20:
Water retention basins are the most important measure to heal sick trees, to regenerate ailing landscapes, and to prevent desertification. The earth must soak itself up with water. Following this, freshwater sources will flow once again and biotopes will become abundantThis countrys [Portugal] drought is not a natural catastrophe. It is the consequence of wrong management, wrong methods of water use, deforestation, over-grazing and monocultures, which all induce progressive desertification. (Holzer in Dregger, 2008: 29-30, my translation).

19

The permaculture flower can be found in Appendix 2. It presents the same inter-linkage of ecology with other domains as Tamera, and provides a glimpse of what elements could figure in sustainable culture.
20

See www.tamera.org/fileadmin/user_upload/files/SPV.../SV_Ecology_en.pdf for satellite images of the water landscape.

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Such basins are not the centralized reservoir lakes used in traditional water management. These decentralized networks of customized lakes follow the water flows of a zones topography. They are built in the deepest recesses of an area towards which water naturally flows (such as a valley or a depression in the ground). They are devoid of sharp angles, and may not be completely circular: this induces stagnation by impeding water movement dynamics. The lakes do not contain any form of water-tight isolation, since water is supposed to seep from the lake into the surrounding earth21. Since 2007, Tamera has been building these lakes which filled up in two years, despite many members original skepticism. At present, they are surrounded by lush permaculture gardens which provide around 30%-40% of the communitys food consumption, a proportion that is bound to grow in the coming years. The ecology team is now seeking to heal the areas dwindling forests, while using them for agroforestry. Pigs are used as natural plows in order to uproot undergrowth, in line with Holzers permaculture (this corresponds to montado culture, a traditional Portuguese method involving the use of pigs in forests for agricultural purposes). In addition, Tamera has planted around 10,000 trees in the entire site. Other ecovillages are also involved in tree-planting and ecosystem restoration. In Scotland, Findhorns Trees for Life project has planted 500,000 trees and protected 150,000 of them from deer over-grazing, one of the main obstacles to forest self-regeneration. Auroville (India) has planted two million trees. A good example of the potential of such seemingly small reforestation measures is Las Gaviotas village, located in an arid, war-torn zone of Columbia. 19,800 hectares of Caribbean tropical pine were planted in soil widely considered to be too dry and acidic for cultivation 22. The trees now form a dense forest, rainfall has increased by 10% in the region, and Las Gaviotas is now a net supplier of drinkable water (Dawson, 2010). The pines resin is used as natural biofuel used for energy production in the village, an alternative to the agro-business biofuel previously mentioned. The shade provided by the pines has allowed tropical fauna to reappear in this once tropical region (Las Gaviotas, 2009). Following natural ecosystem restoration through the creation of water landscapes and adoption of organic system permaculture techniques, many new socio-economic opportunities may appear, leading to the potential creation of sustainable economic networks at the scale of entire regions.
21

Similar water retention systems are being developed by Sepp Holzer on a large private property in the equally arid Estremadura region of Spain. 22 The forest could not have been planted without a specific type of fungi, which entertain a symbiotic relationship with the Caribbean tropical pine and allow this wood species to grow in dry areas (Las Gaviotas, 2009).

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STEP 2: Sustainable Regional Economies Tameras water landscape is the foundation of the communitys aim to develop a sustainable regional economy in Alentejo. Beside its own organic produce, Tameras remaining food supplies are purchased from nearby farms. What cannot be obtained from these sources is produced in other regions of Portugal. Alentejo farmers have found a secure market in Tamera offering fixed demand and prices, by contrast to the floating indexes of the international food commodities market. Several farms have already adopted organic production methods in order to produce food for Tamera. It is further hoped that some farmers will decide to integrate the water landscape concept into their farms in the coming years. In this case, Tameras advisory role will have been precious in expanding the process of ecosystem restoration at hand in the village. For the predicted desertification of the Iberian peninsula has nothing inevitable, Tameras members believe, provided that water resources are managed in an informed and sustainable manner. This positive outlook is a welcome relief from more pessimistic predictions concerning the water crisis in Portugal and Spain. During the villages open day, I experienced the impact of this powerful image of water abundance on a large group of Portuguese visitors. They were not being told that their country was debtridden, bankrupt, and dependent on international funding for its survival. Instead, Bernd Mller, Tameras water specialist, painted a realistic picture of natural abundance and food self-sufficiency for Portugal. This had nothing to do with utopian ideas or false promises, for this abundance in nature is in becoming in Tameras water landscape itself. Such efforts to revitalize the regional economy in every sense also provide a welcome form of cooperation for the Alentejo region, one of Portugals most remote and poorest. This overwhelmingly agricultural region has been strongly impacted by rural exodus. As the youth leaves for the cities, Alentejos farms are condemned to stand empty once the older generations have died out, along with their traditional agricultural knowledge. Overall, Tamera is well-regarded in the region, as the testimonies of several local authorities illustrate. The President of Odemira commune, Alentejo states that: since it began its continuous efforts, Tamera has shed light on a path for the revitalization of structurally fragile regions such as Alentejo. Southern Europe, currently threatened by desertification and rural exodus, needs these kinds of alternatives. (Guerrero quoted in Dregger, 2010: 5, my translation). Small-scale efforts such as Tameras may be seen as minute steps towards the creation of the regional economies depicted in Section I. They provide valuable strategies for rural eco-social revitalization and stimulation of rural ~ 39 ~

economies. These rural strategies are also an integral part of re-establishing sustainable urbanrural linkages:
To reduce their dependence on external flows, urban regions and whole countries may choose to develop explicit policies to invest in rehabilitating their own natural capital stocksThis would increase regional independence, thus creating a hedge against rising international demand, global ecological changes, and potentially reduced productivity elsewhere. (Rees and Wackernagel, 1996: 241).

Indeed, permaculture, water landscapes and ecosystem restoration may all be applied in urban settings, provided the political will to allow for such alternatives is at hand. Thus, the ecovillage movement is directly involved in what Downton called universal regionalism at a community-scale level23. In this configuration, entire regions comprising urban and rural spaces organize internally so as to create sustainable resource production and use cycles. Coupled with urban agriculture, sustainable regional economies can be imagined in most of the worlds areas. Some authors consider that self-reliance, in the sense of an urban area producing half or more of its nutritional requirements, is possible in all but the harshest climates. (Smith and Nasr, 1999: 227). Such scenarios cannot be the work of grassroots citizens initiatives alone: they imply the large-scale reconfiguration of urban governance and land-use practices, which ecovillages currently have no power to change. 3) LIMITATIONS OF THE ECOVILLAGE MODEL

Ecovillages are works in progress that encounter inevitable contradictions with the ideal-type they seek to attain. The contradictions between the theory and practice of any ecovillage highlight the difficulties involved in creating sustainable habitats. Indeed, there is no ideal-type for sustainable habitats, just as there is no end-state or ideal-type to be found in any ecosystem, or nature itself. This precludes the possibility of any model ecovillage emerging in a material sense: the built environment and resource-use of every community is

23

Numerous urban bioregional initiatives already exist. For instance, Frances AMAP (Association pour le Maintien dune Agriculture Paysanne) directly echoes ecovillages efforts to develop sustainable regional economies. In this configuration, farmers no longer produce bulk quantities that are sold on the international commodity market, but have a list of local (usually urban) customers to whom they sell a given amount of seasonal produce every one or two weeks. Many AMAP farmers have also endorsed organic agricultural methods. Such is the success of the model that demand far outstrips the capacities of AMAP farmers, thereby providing a secure market opportunity for others. The Rseau Cocagne is an AMAP that employs jobless or struggling adults, a practice called bio-insertion.

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also defined by local conditions. Applying the solutions developed by ecovillages in different contexts requires a great deal of creativity and experimentation, for these communities have never aspired to having all of the answers. For all their achievements, eco-villages also face important challenges (Dawson, 2010). Many ecovillages struggle to gather the resources and funds necessary to the fulfillment of their holistic vision. Therefore, contradictions exist: Tamera is also connected to the Portuguese electric supply grid, and uses natural gas for some of its energy requirements. The creation of organic regional economies is also necessarily fragmentary, since many of the products consumed in ecovillages are not available through such channels. Furthermore, industrial economies of scale provide a market against which tiny regional economies cannot possibly compete. Rather than discrediting ecovillages, this fact simply illustrates the extent to which even the most radical alternatives to develop sustainable lifestyles remain entrenched in the techno-industrial configuration depicted in Section I. Furthermore, ecovillagers make a conscious choice to live on the margins of society. The ecovillage ethic, however pluralistic and holistic, may be unattractive to other parts of society that do not share the same concerns. Thus, ecovillages are just starting to gain recognition amongst mainstream actors, but as interesting experiments that do not possess the scope and large-scale solutions needed to implement change at the level of an entire city, region, or country. Increased dialogue between mainstream and alternative actors is necessary to modify these views, by showing how the ideas applied in ecovillages can materialize in a myriad of ways in different locations. Indeed, the ecovillage movement is developing a consistent ecological culture that can find many applications and sources of inspiration in the immaterial and material urban space.

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V) SUSTAINABLE URBAN HABITATS: IMAGINING THE ECOPOLIS

The following section will seek to appraise the possible points of interaction between the marginal experiments of ecovillages and urban policy and development today. It appears that positive signs of rising ecological awareness are already at hand amongst policy makers and urban theorists alike. This yields new opportunities for Public-Civil-Private Partnerships (PCPPs) aimed at encouraging holistic approaches to sustainable urban development. 1) RISING AWARENESS OF HOLISTIC APPROACHES TO THE URBAN SPACE

Despite the problematic trends depicted above, the last two decades have witnessed an important shift in perceptions of urban governance and planning. The most prominent sign of this shift in mainstream perceptions is the Aalborg Charter24, signed in 1994 by 67 European urban areas and regions (Aalborg, 2004). Its predecessor, the 1942 Athens Manifesto, had very different aims. This anonymous manifesto of modern urbanism suggested that cities be organized around distinct, functional areas (residential, commercial, industrial and leisure) through zoning. This rationalization of city planning sought to create an international, unique style for urbanism and architecture, producing standardized solutions for urban spaces regardless of environment and history. Here, urban material reality was equated to the totality of the city. By contrast, the Aalborg Charter recognizes the importance of locality in its material and immaterial dimensions in order to foster local sustainable development. Indeed, locality is an essential aspect of the urban fabric. Primarily, this term refers to the material reality (or the built space) of the city and natural environment in which it is entrenched. Locality also designates the immaterial space of the city, which pertains to human relations and representations. The ongoing dialectic between the material and immaterial aspects of a city form the arena in which any reflection on how to render a city more sustainable should be embedded. This means that ecology in the city is not simply a matter of management and
24

Available at www.ec.europa.eu/environment/urban/pdf/aalborg_charter.pdf.

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technology. It is first and foremost a social matter that calls for innovative ways of political interaction and community-building in urban contexts distinguished by their own unique biographies:

Si un modle urbain mergesa particularit est de se dcliner avec une grande diversit dune ville une autreChaque ville a une biographie en propre, un caractre. Un projet bien compris de ville durable ne peut que prendre appui sur ces spcificits, sur le sens de lurbanit port par les habitants, dans une optique de rappropriation de la ville. Ce chantier-l na pas encore t ouvert, et fait partie des nombreux impenss politiques qui caractrisent le champ de la ville durable. (Emelianoff, 2004 : 34)

In this sense, lcologie nest plus laffaire des sciences de la nature, mais une affaire publique au sens o elle engage des collectifs qui doivent sentendre sur un monde commun. (Rudolf, 2008:63). Ecology has emerged as a field in which science and politics are mutually constitutive and intermingled (Latour, 1999). This is apparent in the Aalborg Charter, which hints at rising levels of awareness amongst urban governance circles. The document also acknowledges fundamental concepts such as urban-rural linkages, ecosystemic analysis and the inseparability of social, economic and environmental aspects. Local government is seen as an appropriate vector through which to instigate public sustainable development programs, in cooperation with the civil and private sectors:
In carrying out our responsibilities of local government and management, we are increasingly subject to the combined pressures of economic globalization and technological development. We are confronted with fundamental economic change as well as with man-made and natural threats to our communities and resources We face daunting challenges: creating employment in a knowledge-based economy, combating poverty and social exclusion, securing effective protection for our environment, reducing our ecological footprint, responding to demographic changes and managing cultural diversity, as well as averting conflict and sustaining peace in formerly war-torn communities. (Aalborg +10, 2004)

Most importantly, the Charter considers that cities are essential to global sustainability efforts, particularly in the developed world. At present, more than 2500 local and regional governments have become signatories of the document, applying it with various degrees of determination and success.

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Rising awareness of holistic approaches to the urban space in the public sector is also apparent in certain parts of academia. Section II illustrated the significant contrast between the naturalistic sociology of the Chicago school and the quantitative concerns of the urban ecologists. Urban ecologists often overlooked the socio-political dimensions of the city, while these were the prime focus of the Chicago School. While some discussed the anthropomorphic nature of the city, others focused on its quantitative dimension. These various analytical lenses emphasized different aspects of the city that must, at present, be understood as a whole. This is the stage at which we find ourselves today: many of the strategies necessary to the large-scale implementation of sustainability objectives in the urban space already exist. One struggles, however, to pull them into a coherent framework capable of transforming theory into policy. Eco-urbanism is but one of the recent tendencies that seek to establish such a concrete urban sustainability agenda:
Lco-urbanisme pose de manire centrale les questions de dialogue entre les acteurs de la ville, de leur participation lorganisation spatiale de leurs activits et la gestion des ressources naturelles dans une perspective damlioration de la qualit urbaine.La notion de projet est au cur de cet urbanisme participatif, stratgique, ancr dans une thique de la responsabilit, fond sur des nouvelles modalits de gouvernance des agglomrations urbaines. (da Cunha, 2005: 176)

Eco-urbanism emphasizes participatory processes and adaptive co-management in the day-today application of urbanism. Of course, participation does not imply an increase in social equity and justice, but it is a necessary precondition for the manifestation of these ideals (Ll, 1991). The long-term participation of urban citizens may be ensured through adaptive co-management, which designates the sharing of resource management responsibilities and authority between the users of given ecosystems and public bodies. This strategy can be particularly valuable in achieving forms of cooperation between local institutions and organized grassroots initiatives. 2) COMMUNITY ACTION FOR SUSTAINABLE URBAN LIFESTYLES

Alongside the radical theoretical shift from the Athens Manifesto to Aalborg, alternative urban lifestyles are also gaining visibility in urban areas. Several examples of urban ecovillages exist. The use of urban and village in the same expression may appear as a contradiction in terms. And yet, an urban ecovillage may be a cluster of homes, an ~ 44 ~

existing block of houses or apartment buildings, a co-housing development, or a complete existing neighborhood. The main difference with their rural counterparts is that these settlements are usually more constrained in their land-use options, but have more exchanges with the wider urban community. As such, they are particularly valuable as spaces for education and dialogue. Nonetheless, it is clear that such a unit can not be applied at a largescale in urban spaces, in which high levels of mobility, multiculturalism and social inequalities make it difficult to distinguish the homogenous and like-minded groups that one finds in ecovillages. The United States in particular have seen the appearance of urban ecovillages in cities that are currently in decline. Thus, Detroit, Cincinnati, Cleveland and Los Angeles all flaunt their own urban ecovillage projects. (Sizemore, 2004: 20). Cities effectively offer multiple possibilities for experimentation in sustainable living that cannot be applied in rural settings. Urban ecovillages can utilize existing housing, infrastructure, transit, local institutions, existing local job opportunities in the community, and a wealth of potential materials to be recycled (Cordivae quoted in Sizemore, 2004: 20). One of the most developed urban ecovillages is Ecovila in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Several dozen families are currently experimenting with reproducible forms of urban permaculture on a 2,6 hectare property. Solar energy, natural ventilation, green roofs, ecological construction (using bamboo, adobe, or clay) and natural water purification systems are all presented to the wider public, in order to foster environmental education and knowledge transfer. The essence of urban ecovillages can further be expanded by spreading the five defining characteristics of ecovillages listed in Section III to a wide variety of extant urban habitats and residential areas. The process of information, transmission and gradual change induced by ecovillage research centers can increase the urban sustainability multiplier by Rees (Rees 1995): addressing a single issue in a city may stimulate change in many related factors, due to the linkages that characterize complex urban systems. The Transition Town Network (TTN) is a good example of the potential of small-scale initiatives in catalyzing widespread change (Brangwyn and Hopkins, 2008). This communitybased initiative began in the British Isles in 2007. Two groups of citizens (in Kinsdale, Ireland and Totnes, England) decided to develop a Transition Plan. This document put forth a series of goals by which the local community could adapt to the effects of climate change and peak oil25. TTN is collaborating with GEN on a wide range of issues, and will also participate in
25

Peak oil is the point in time when the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction is reached, after which the rate of production enters terminal decline. See the 1956 Hubbert Curve for a graphic representation of peak oil. Estimations of this peak vary from several years ago to 2020 for the most optimistic.

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GENs 2011 sustainable living conference, held in Tamera. Here, we observe grassroots networks from urban and rural spaces working together to address related issues through similar visions of community action. The TTN network now includes hundreds of localities in the Isles (in small villages or large cities such as Bristol and certain areas of London), and has made some forays into continental Europe and New Zealand. The ultimate aim of a Transition Community is to establish an Energy Descent Action Plan, which takes place in several phases. The first one involves building a local resource picture that involves gathering community data for each working group (arable land, transport options, health provision, renewable energy sources, textile manufacturing capability, building materials, and so on). The idea is to create a picture of what the community may look like in 15 to 20 years, as it self-organizes and develops increased resiliency. A resilient system is forgiving of external shocks.Resilience shifts attention from purely growth and efficiency to needed recovery and flexibility. (IPCC quoted in Brangwyn and Hopkins, 2008: 14). The resilience indicators suggested by the Transition Network are wide-ranging in their concerns and effects. They assess to which extent the community is capable of fulfilling its own basic needs independently of fossil-fuel consumption. This comprises food and energy production, inventories of renewable building materials and waste production (including potential compost production), and indexes of the commuting distances of residents to their workplace. Resiliency also increases with the amount of businesses that are locally owned, and to what extent local currency circulates in proportion to total money in circulation (Brangwyn and Hopkins, 2008). Many British Local Councils have started to cooperate with their local Transition Networks in a form of community-based, public-civil partnership. Local government bodies are encouraged to develop their own Local Community Plan and Partnership Strategy explaining how initiatives such as the Transition Network relate to their own community development projects. In this sense, knowledge, local sustainability and public services are being jointly co-produced by civil and state actors (Mitlin, 2008). The idea of co-production can be closely related to that of pattern language, developed by Christopher Alexander in the 1970s, which introduced a new aspect into town planning:
celui de la participation des citoyens, auxquels il [Alexander] attribuait la capacit de parler un pattern language , un langage urbanistique issu de leur quotidien et de leurs aspirations. (Lambert, 2004: 207).

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Pattern language has little to do with expert-driven discourses on urban planning that materialize in a top-down fashion. Rather, it emphasizes experiences of locality within a given urban space, and a familiarity with the immaterial aspects of the latter. Pattern language may define the framework within which citizens assess the potential of their urban environment to become more sustainable, in conjunction with all-encompassing policies induced by urban governance bodies. An increased sense of locality could be encouraged by more flexible real estate legislation facilitating co-habitation, which directly involves citizens in the design and day-to-day running of their living space. With more flexible legislation, co-habitations, living cooperatives or urban agricultural plots could also invest idle tracts of urban land: An important legal principle here is that of usufruct, which is essentially that any citizen can use land which is idle as long as the utility of the land to the owner is not diminished. (Smith and Nasr, 1999: 228). The building industry also has an important role to play in this process. More flexible firms willing to co-design settlements with future inhabitants (as in some ecodistricts) are necessary to allow for sustainable habitats to spread in urban spaces. Firms expertise could, in turn, be enriched by other technologies (local biological wastewater treatment, green roofs, compost toilets, and so on) brought to their awareness by the future inhabitants. In sum, all the elements are present for such knowledge-transfer and co-design processes to become a mainstay of urban development. The greatest obstacle is a shift in mentalities in line with the ecological culture, to which we now turn. 3) THE ECOPOLIS AND THE EMERGENCE OF ECOLOGICAL CULTURES

One of the most recent theories of the city encompassing its material and immaterial aspects is Paul Downtons ecopolis. This approach seeks to devise strategies for the city to extract itself from its parasitic, extractive role and to become a vector of ecosystem restoration instead of degradation:
Cities need to be consciously designed and understood as living systems embedded in the processes of the biosphere and as key regulators of the global ecology. (Downton, 2009: 23)

By contrast, an ecocity merely takes account of its position within the Biosphere, attuning itself to its natural environment. For the time being, such an ecologically healthy city does

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not exist (Register quoted in Downton, 2009:20)26. This is a desirable step in itself, which may lead to a city to become an ecopolis, a sort of urban healing biotope. Etymologically, eco derives from the Greek oikos, designating the household unit. In this sense, the particle refers to the ecological purpose and economic household of an ecopolis community:
the landscape is not just a supply depot but is also the oikos --the home-- in which we must live. Until recently mankind hastaken for granted the gas-exchange, water-purification, nutrient-cycling, and other protective functions of selfmaintaining ecosystems (). Now, of course, it is painfully evident that such balances are being affected, often detrimentally. The one problem, one solution approachmust be replaced by some form of ecosystem analysis that considers man as a part of, not apart from, the environment. (Odum, 1969: 9-10)

Polis has designated the self-governing city since the days of Ancient Athens. Applied to our contemporary context, the term refers to ideas of local governance that encompass the notions of community and self-determination in the city. Indeed, self-determination is seen as essential to a potential ecopolis: it is what enables the polis to take account of and attune itself to its local eco-social realities. The ecopolis also cultivates close ties to its rural hinterland in the form of regional universalism (see Section IV). In sum, the elaborate ecopolis theory is an all-embracing attempt at reconciling aspects of the urban space which have been divided into different sectors and specializations. At present, fusing all of these strands of urban policy into a holistic agenda is above all a matter of culture. As such, the ecopolis is a manifestation of a developed ecological culture, and one of its most important catalysts:
The ability to transmit in symbolic forms and human patterns a representative part of a culture is the great mark of the city: this is the condition for encouraging the fullest expression of human capacities and potentialities (Mumford quoted in Downton, 2009:25)

Furthermore, Downton echoes Geddes concept of civics in considering that communication and decision-making structures based on mutual aid are needed in the urban space. They recognize inter-dependency within the polis, as well as direct democracy, thereby shortening
26

Paul Downton is one of the main designers of the Adelaide Central Business District Ecocity project, Australia. This 2,4 hectare mixed-use ecodistrict project is implanted in the business center of the city. It contains around 400 low-income and high-end houses, and presents most of the green technologies used in urban spaces today. Strong emphasis is placed on urban-rural links and the development of an ecological culture around the project. It has purchased 42 ha of degraded agricultural land (equal to the residents approximate ecological footprint), which it is now restoring. The project also runs a barefoot architecture program that directly implicates future residents in the design and ecological framework of their future housing (Downton, 2009).

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channels of communication, improving information flow and relating decision-making to place (Downton, 2009). In addition to the political organization of the ecopolis, its spatial organization is based on the complexity inherent to fractal organic systems: An urban fractal is a network that contains the essential characteristics of the larger network of the city. Each fractal will possess nodesand patterns of connectivity that define its structure and organization, and it will exhibit characteristics of a community associated with living processes. (Downton, 2009:27). Thus, an urban neighborhood that contains all of the arrangements one finds in the city at large (plaza, housing, shops, government, offices, schools, places of worship, natural spaces, and so on) is a fractal of this city. By extension, the ecological characteristics of urban ecovillages or ecodistricts could also serve as urban fractal models for the entire city in which they are located. The study of urban fractals as organizing principles for complex urban spaces is one of the main objects of study of New Architecture27, which seeks to escape the rigid dogmas imposed by the modernist architecture of the Athens Manifesto era. All in all, it is apparent that many points of interaction exist between the marginal experiments conducted in ecovillages and mainstream approaches to sustainable habitat development. As we have seen, local governance and urbanism structures are becoming more receptive to holistic approaches to the urban space that take into account eco-social factors, alongside economic rationality. Building upon these rising levels of awareness will render the material as well as the immaterial space of the city more attuned to its natural environment and the pattern language of its citizens. As a result, public-private partnerships are insufficient for instigating the co-management and collaborative planning structures necessary to the rapid spread of sustainable habitats in mineral cities. What is needed are PublicCivic-Private partnerships that submit urban development to holistic and long-term visions of sustainable urban policies that reconcile economic rationality and eco-social criteria.

27

See Ecology and the Fractal Mind in the New Architecture: a Conversation (Padrn and Salingaros, 2000).

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CONCLUSION

This analysis has sought to illustrate the challenges and potential inroads for sustainable habitat development today. On the one hand, dominant visions of the latter emphasize technology and capital-intensive inputs in order to green the current global economic system in place. This approach omits eco-social considerations, and is incapable of conceiving of forms of growth and development that do not rely on fossil fuels. On the other hand, approaches that integrate eco-social considerations provide more holistic assessments of the relationships between humanity, its habitat and the Biosphere. They are immanent in the academic theories of the Chicago School of Sociology, of Geddes vision of civics, and urban ecology. These views provide effective starting points for envisioning more sustainable habitat patterns in the worlds urban areas. However, the examples of the ecodistrict and of Masdar have shown to what extent dominant approaches to sustainable development simplify the complexities inherent to sustainable habitat development, generating negative side-effects and further cementing the artificial divide between humanity and nature. By contrast, ecovillages present holistic understandings and applications of sustainable living coupled with voluntary natural stewardship. This ethic materializes in the built space of ecovillages, as well as in their educational and transformational purpose. These holistic approaches are beginning to transpire in urban circles of governance and architecture, as the Aalborg Charter and the Ecopolis theory illustrate. All in all, many potential points of interaction can be imagined between the marginal experiments of rural ecovillages and the day-to-day greening of the urban space. This may led to the renewed embedding of urban areas within their bioregions and rural hinterlands, which would be a valuable step to creating sustainable cities. If taken, this evolutionary path would herald the widespread acceptance of a holistic and transformative ecological culture that has managed to overcome the human exemptionalism paradigm in town and countryside alike.

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APPENDIX

APPENDIX 1: EBENEZER HOWARDS GARDEN CITY

(Source: Howard, 1902)

Figure 1: This picture represents E. Howards three magnets along with their distinguishing characteristics. For Howard, the town-country magnet corresponded to the Garden City, the preferred destination of the People.

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APPENDIX 2: THE PERMACULTURE FLOWER

Figure 2: The Permaculture Flower aptly illustrates the different components of sustainable community development as imagined by the permaculture approach. It is also indicative of many of the values and practices adhered to in ecovillages.

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APPENDIX 3 : THE SOLAR POWER VILLAGE

(Source: Kleinwchter, 2004)

Figure 3: An artistic view of the Solar Power Village concept i) The greenhouse is covered by a fluorpolymer foil (the only high-tech element in the building) that lets in the entire spectrum of solar radiation, including UV rays. The UV rays inhibit the presence of certain pests within the greenhouse, thus reducing pesticide use while enhancing plant development. Fresnel optical lenses mounted on the outside direct solar radiation onto insulated pipes filled with vegetable oil, thereby preventing overheating in the greenhouse while extracting reusable heat. This process heats up the vegetable oil running through the pipes, which is stocked in a hot-oil storage tank.

ii) The hot-oil storage tank stores the vegetable oil up to temperatures of 220 C. A 2,000 liter tank stores about 75 kWh (kilowatt per hour) of usable heat. This corresponds to 500 kg of wood burned in most (inefficient) fireplaces. This amount of energy can meet the needs of ~ 53 ~

500 people for cooking, pumping water and generating electricity for 2 to 3 days. The oil can also be heated with biomass when there is no sunshine. The hot oil can also be used for cooking in the solar kitchen.

iii) The mid-temperature Stirling engine converts thermal energy into mechanical energy, starting at temperatures of 150 C. Provided with 50 kWh of thermal energy, it produces 1 kWh of mechanical energy for up to 10 hours. Thus, it can generate electricity for lighting, milling grain or pumping water, for instance. This electricity can also be used for cooking in the solar kitchen. iv) The Sunpulse pump is a low-temperature Stirling engine designed to pump water. It is directly powered by solar radiation, and can pump up to 4 cubic meters of water per hour at a depth of 10 meters. Combined with a hydraulic ram, it can pump to depths of up to 60 meters. It is a cheap and cost-effective alternative to fossil-fuel or electricity water pumps currently used in many Southern settings and development projects.

The Solar Power Village may use a series of smaller solar ovens for cooking. Basic solar desiccation devices can be used to dry seeds, grain and fruits. A Scheffler mirror can also be used for cooking purposes. This is a simple parabola composed of recycled mirrors, oriented in such a way that it reflects sunlight onto a horizontal mirror. In turn, this mirror reflects this concentrated ray of light onto the bottom of a black pot, which can be used for cooking at temperatures reaching 200 degrees.

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