12. Eco Cities

How are cities being rethought and rebuilt around the planet for a flourishing, sustainable future? 

In this podcast conversation, Richard emphasizes an organic and evolutionary whole-city perspective to draw attention the ways where we can evolve our approach to city development.

How do we make our design organic and evolutionary? Think about the function of cities. The city is the economic engine that pulls together all sorts of creative energy by having a lot of diversity close together. It's kind of like the whole evolutionary theory that you have stars condensing out of gas clouds and then exploding and throwing more material into space...and planet becoming smaller units in space with much more complex environments and so on.

Cities follow that pattern too. You have cities throughout history pulling together ideas, technologies, and art. There are principles that ancient cities have been built upon throughout history that still work and that we can draw upon.

Learn more about eco-cities in our podcast with Mary Evelyn Tucker and Richard Register.