Written by Sally B. Woodbridge

This densely written and wonderfully illustrated book seeks answers to questions such as: what is wrong with the cities we have created and what can be done to correct our mistakes? The answers that Randolph Hester explores in chapters headed centeredness, connectedness, sensible status seeking, sacredness, selective diversity, everyday future, reciprocal stewardship, and pacing—among others–come from his many years of working as a political and environmental activist, landscape architect, urban designer, and farmer to improve the physical environment through the creation of forms that celebrate everyday life.

The depressing trends of today’s world: climate change, the loss of cultural and biological diversity, economies that exploit backwaters to create international cities, and the inequities of developing countries, are critical issues of urbanity. Hester observes that, “We sanitize our suburbs, but we still cannot make places where we feel safe. We have lost the balance that makes a city clean enough to be healthy and dirty enough to be happy.”

Through technology, standardization, and specialization, along with freedom from environmental constraints, we have obtained privately many things that were once only available if shared. In Hester’s view, the social cost of privatization which has altered public discourse and limited the exchange of information needed by the public for responsible actions must be addressed by forging new relationships between the community and the environment.

Our lack of ecological literacy has led us to ignore natural factors in urban design. According to Hester, if cities capitalized on their regional characteristics, they would realize significant income from energy, water, and waste disposal processes while providing their inhabitants with amenities and a sense of place. Instead, we have blurred the vegetative patterns, microclimates, air-movement patterns, and hydrologic cycles that distinguish urban areas and robbed them of any special meaning. As a result we have mistakenly labeled the wildfires, energy shortages, and flood damage in urban areas as “natural disasters.”

The ecological democracy Hester advocates is government by the affected citizenry through hands-on involvement. Since the form of our cities influences our daily lives, the creation of meaningful landscapes for our cities requires a participatory, scientific, and adventuresome design process. Though not likely to produce a quick fix, ecological democracy offers a comprehensive way to act and think about the future.

The preoccupation of cities with raising their status to gain recognition and attract tourism to validate it has been, by Hester’s lights, a considerable waste of time, energy, and money. Blurring the line between healthy self-expression and unhealthy striving has produced the malls, markets, festivals, and historic districts, which are cobbled together and often infused with an ersatz history that obviates genuine needs. Design should help people take root by increasing users’ knowledge and experience of everyday features in which they may take pride. Designers should look beyond project boundaries to reveal nearby connections. Indeed, Hester says, “Connectedness in the urban environment is the most fundamental contribution of applied ecology.”

One example of the benefits of looking beyond project boundaries is Big Wild, which Hester’s and McNally’s young firm, Community Development by Design, began work on in 1985. The client, a state agency called the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, was originally mandated to acquire land in the Santa Monica Mountains Recreational Area. One Conservancy acquisition, the 1000-acre Mulholland Gateway Park, turned out to lack ecological integrity because of its fragmentation. Effective planning required larger boundaries. But even as more acquisitions enlarged the project area, Hester and McNally found it to be ecologcally connected to national forests two valleys away.

Over the course of the next decade, the concept of a greenbelt around Los Angeles evolved. But since the concept of a large region is too abstract to connect to most people’s daily life, the creation of greenbelts requires incremental implementation. A citywide campaign of education and research in conservation biology was instigated to deepen people’s experience of wilderness.

The story of Big Wild features such dramas as the battle to stop a freeway that would sever a wildlife corridor, the expansion of the Mulholland Gateway Park into a 20,000-acre Big Wild and its connection to the creation of a sustainable habitat for mountain lions.

Many victories are described in this book; enough, in fact, to turn designers into environmental activists. But before enlisting in this growing army they might want to consider what they are in for, to wit: varying success in bringing people together to discuss urban environmental issues and managing their heated interaction, defeats and/or long periods of inaction, improvising ways of bridging the doldrums, and never giving up!

In the Epilogue Hester explains how he has interwoven ecology and democracy into a theory of good city form. His theory, he confesses, is “more like a mass of mating salamanders than a regression analysis.” Urban design theory must adjust to the realities of implementation until it becomes meaningful. This process may be unending.

Always modest, Hester describes his projects as having advanced small increments of ecological democracy; they have put project design in an overall framework with a long term vision.

In the book’s last paragraph Hester reveals the secret of his success: fearless optimism. “Optimism,” he affirms, “will help us to shape healthier places to dwell and create the most fulfilling lives we can achieve. And optimism will keep us cheerful along the way.”

The Book at Amazon…

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 6th, 2008 at 10:30 am and is filed under Designer Activism, Environmental. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.