From Ekistics to GEN
Declan takes us onto a journey through his networking life
I have been in the business of planning, building, renewing and researching ecological settlements for the last 40 years and I have the feeling that I'm just starting every time I think about it. It is a complex and demanding task and we have already such an incredible richness of experiences. In order to come to grips with this topic, I want to give you a brief historic perspective. Then, I want to share my dream about ecology with you in a way I think one can only in an autobiographical way.
After I finished my work as assistant editor of EKISTICS, the journal of the science of human settlements, in the early 1970's, ecology in Central Europe meant becoming aware of the fact that we had built settlements in which the air, the water, energy and other materials were used in linear ways. We were using them and discarding them and the waste products were building up. The solution seemed to be to get all of these elements to work in a cyclical way, re-using energy, water and waste, and saving materials.
Almost 40 years later, lots of our ecological ideas have been implemented, some have even become standard practice and have been built into building laws - in many countries of Europe, especially Germany.
However, what I'm going to show you is a far cry from what I actually envision ecological settlements to be. It is like the aeroplane that Leonardo da Vinci designed - compared to today's super jets. So I'd like to share my dream about ecology with you because I think it's important to have a vision of where we want to go. After each part of the dream, I want to make a positive affirmation: those of you who feel that this is also part of your dream, please, join me in this positive affirmation.
The most important part of this dream is that, in the not too distant future, we will have communities that are structured in such a way that people can live complete and fulfilling lives - and that all their physical, emotional and spiritual needs are fulfilled. These words could have come out of the mouth of Dinos Doxiadis, in the late 1960 when I worked with him on Ekistics. And now I know: 'We can do it'
The sensual part of my dream is that the very elements that we are made up of - the fire, the water, the air, and the earth - will be an integral part of our communities so we can be in contact with them every day and experience their worth, their dignity and their beauty. And I now know: 'We can do it, and we will do it'
I'm dreaming that the technologies that we are just developing will become so simple, so refined and available to everybody, that the whole world can afford them. This way we can make sure the planet is inhabitable for still many generations to come. I dream that one day we can share our visions, in this way, everywhere. I think it is a very powerful tool for implementation if many people can share a vision and affirm it on a regular basis. This way it will be much easier to materialize our visions on a large scale. And I know 'We can do it, we will do it and we ARE doing it.'
My work in the ecological movement started for me (and for many others) in the Athens Center of Ekistics in 1963. In the minds of the future thinking Ekisticians, there were 300 new cities to be planned and 300 old cities to be renovated. The urban structure we had to deal with; at the time; was quite bleak, almost everywhere. I was working primarily in Germany on the rejuvenation of Regensburg. When we began our work there, I thought, "if ecology can be implemented here, it can be done anywhere". Well, we have done it and are still doing it - as you can see from the following examples.
One of the groups we worked with in Berlin was ‘Oekotop'. Their attempts to bring life back into the city have been inspirational for most of the urban renewal projects in Germany in the 1980's. This group showed, for instance, how an old dilapidated parking garage, a concrete structure built in the 1960‘s, could be transformed into an ecological kindergarten. Slabs were taken out of the structure, a large glass greenhouse for plants was placed in the middle of the building and the flat roof was turned into an open green space. The heat that is collected in the centre of the glass roof is brought down in ducts, stored in a heat storage wall overnight and passed on to the rest of the building the next morning. Looking at its green facades and some trees around it, the people of the neighbourhood really love this building now, whereas it was ugly and a place of mugging and crime in 1970.
Working for the Städtebauliches Seminar im Kulturkreis im Bundeverband der Deutschen Industrie in Regensburg, I met experts who knew "everything" about energy, water, or about how to reduce garbage, green the city, and reduce noise pollution. But there were very few people who had an idea like in Ekistics about how it all would fit together. I felt that the singular reduction of our use of energy or water was not sufficient to really create something ecological. I was looking for a more synergistic concept of urban ecology and found it first in Ekistics. This search went on for years and later in Berlin in the late 70's, someone told us about Bill Mollison; that he was an agriculturist (but really an environmental psychologist) from Australia who had lived with the aborigines for many years and had developed the theory on permaculture. So we brought him to Berlin - within a half hour of meeting him, I realised I had exactly what I was looking for, the key to ecological integration. It was parallel to what Dinos Doxiadis had taught me, the expansion of the concept of integrated planning I could now learn from this man.
Permaculture and the Global Eco-village Network
Permaculture is a design system for agriculture and human settlements. It is also action and non-violent, or better, compassionate communication with and a full awakening for Nature while producing food, shelter and happiness for the benefit of human and all sentient beings.
My wife Margrit has illustrated this key to our understanding of permaculture in two diagrams in 1982. They have been used in many publications since. The first shows our present situation in the agricultural field, which is typical for all of our large linear centralized systems - whether they be our electricity or heating or drinking water or sewage systems.
We produce food today in very specialised systems, with an energy input to output of about 100 to 1. As a result we have soil erosion, monotonous work, unhealthy food, poisoned air and unusable wastes. This system creates chaos, hunger and death. This analysis was done in the early 1980's - but it still is true today - and maybe even worse as the recent Austrian film We Feed the World shows quite vividly.
We can transform the current system into something permanent by making sure that every element in the system fulfils many functions and every function fulfils many elements. By adding a glass house onto your home, for instance, food can be produced without poisons, energy consumption can be reduced, water recycled, organic wastes, (which make up half of household waste) can be recycled, and a new living space can be created.
In our community Lebensgarten in Steyerberg, Germany, it has been the most rewarding experience to actually implement these ideas. In contrast to the usual reductionist concept of ecology (in main stream thinking), where using less is associated with less quality of life, we try to show that ecology can enrich our lifes and make it much more beautiful. What we wanted to create was something that everybody would come to and say 'Ah, this is what we want too.' And then spend their surplus money on ecological technologies instead of, for instance, gold knobs for their bathrooms, racing new huge cars or flying to the tropics to eat mostly polluted food, etc. etc.
As the Global Eco-village Network (GEN) International Secretariat was preparing for the Habitat II, 1996 UN Conference in Istanbul, Heidi Wrighton, a Scottish woman living in Denmark did the graphics for the GEN stand at the NGO Forum at the University of Istanbul. This was the start of an immense amount of fluttering of that butterfly. Up the present day, when any of the GEN Board are at international meetings, people come and say "oh, you are part of that group that had the stand with the straw-bale wall, the circle dancing and that beautiful butterfly all around" at Habitat II. The idea of the transformation from the cocoon to the butterfly still holds in our work of self-transforming the consumer orientation to a new consciousness of sustainability in all aspects of human settlements. We exchange information amongst settlements and eco-villages, making 4000 or more demonstration sites known to more and more people around the world. The butterfly flies from the different ideas on education, ecology, spirituality, eco-business development and eco-tourism. It also brings its colourfulness from one eco-village to another. It is now learnable in the Ecovillage Design Education (EDE) being offered a a 4 week intensice cours in many parts of the world.
In the meantime, we know that ecology can work - not only if it is done from the grass-roots level up, non only when people have the power to decide what they want and how they want it. We have many models that are working beautifully. But is there not enough time for everyone to awake? Therefore, the question is: Can we impose ecology from above? Can we actually implement ecological models among people who just want a house to live in, who are not really that much interested in ecology?
To answer these questions, a group of us carried out a research project for the European Academy of the Urban Environment, Berlin in which we looked at examples of ecological settlement projects in six European countries. It is documented in our book Designing Ecological Settlements, Berlin. And I would like to tell you about a few examples where ecological housing has been implemented "from above" and where it has worked very well.
The oldest one was Puchenau, a housing settlement with 1000 units in Linz, Austria, which started in the late 1960's, designed by Roland Rainer. He fought for high-density development without traffic. He organised two public transit stops on either end of the settlement and saved half of the cost on sewage and roads by simply putting the houses close to each other so that the length of services was cut. By giving every house its own small private courtyard or garden, he found (on the average) that residents will leave one weekend in four to drive to a park or leisure area, while in those multi-storied apartments without any private green space, people stay home only one weekend in four, thereby cutting down on air and noise pollution.
At Schafbrühl in Tübingen, Germany - a settlement with 111 residential units, the architects: Eble and Sambeth, they tried to tune in with the building forms of the old village that is next to it. The houses were built completely out of healthy building materials: e.g. bricks, wood and natural paints. The residents have space for private gardens, as well as semi-public and public green spaces. There are all kinds of corners where people can meet, children can play and community life can take place. There are places for water, too. The rainwater and drainage water (developed by John Wilkes and Herbert Dreiseitl) is led in ‘flow forms' through the community. Children can play there and explore the secrets of moving water, its colours and sounds, its force and adaptability.
The Solar Village of Lykovrissi - by architect Tombasis who is present at this conference - near Athens in Greece with 435 housing units is a large experimental site for 14 different combinations of passive and active solar technologies. The active solar homes have not been very successful economically, largely because the cost of energy has not risen as much as we all anticipated in the wake of the first oil crisis in the early 1970‘s - when the project was initiated - but that is changing rapidly since 2000 and the recognition of Climate Change. However, one additional learning process has been made here - so as not to be repeated elsewhere - and that is that the cost of "parasitic" energy, used for the heat pumps and for all the auxiliary regulatory devices that are needed in order to redistribute the stored solar energy, may consume as much primary energy (through electricity) as is saved through solar energy (which is thermal energy). However, the passive solar homes in contrast are a total success. See more in our book: Margrit Kennedy, Declan Kennedy (eds.): ‘Designing Ecological Settlements - Ecological Planmning and Building Experience in new housing and in the renewal of existing housing quarters in European countries', European Academy of the Urban Environment in co-operation with the Ökozentrum North-Rhine Westphalia, Hamm, Germany, published by Dietrich Reimer Verlag, Berlin, re-printed 2000.
Conclusions
It was not the physical design, but the design of processes that I learnt from Doxiadis. It was not just his highly organized approach to any subject on earth, but the development of the Ekistics grid that fascinated me in the early 1960's. I worked with it for four to five years (1967 - 73) once a month as assistant editor of EKISTICS, organising the articles of many ekisticians into themes for each month's issue of the journal.
These theme issues were, on the one hand, focusing on one large topic - on the other hand, holistic and/or interdisciplinary. That was before hardly anyone was talking about interdisciplinary planning, at that time.
Each year - at the Athens Month of Ekistics = July - we had a two to three hour sessions: Prof. Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, Prof. Gwen Bell, sometimes Panayis Psomopoulos and I, with Dinos Doxiadis (in his office) to set up these focus themes for the next year. Then, we left for our separate abodes in Germany or the USA to do the editing and compiling work by mail and phone, with Jackie pulling the strings together in Athens. Doxiadis had a computer roughly 512 cu.meters in size in a special building, built for that purpose - but we had no laptops, PCs, modems - not even a fax to communicate (IT had only just been invented). Editing was all or nothing - and had to be done pretty quickly so that the Journal could be produced and printed in Athens to be out every 9th of the month - it not only went to members of the WSE but to planners and politicians, business people and scientists, and universities all over the world.
Indeed, I have to thank these people and all I learned at the ACE - for my professorship - it was to a great extent this holistic thinking that clinched my appointment as Prof. for Urban Design and Infrastructure at the Architectural School of the Technical University of Berlin (West) at the age of 38. This all-round approach at seeing the urban environment from the anthropos to eucumenopolis, through the design of shelter, social and economic systems and aesthetic entities - this systems-approach that was the highlight, the break-through in our hitherto linear thinking has only been partly understood by planner and politicians - even to the present day. Why - otherwise - would the world be in such an appalling state? It was bad enough in the 1960's and 70's.
But we had a dream of a better world, a better environment, a better and more beautiful urban structure. What has happened to this dream? Was it utopian? Is it no longer achievable? Is it forgotten?
No. no, it is still there - we just left out an important piece of the pie - which Meadows et al. also left out later - but which Gandhi already warned us about - round about that time when I started into Ekistics. The difference between Need and Greed - and the exponential impossibility in our money system that makes ecology of little or no worth. Let us just say that the dream is still there - in all of us and many are contributing to the realisation of it unwittingly, undaunted and with lots of life energy.
This unwitting, undaunted, energetic approach I learned from different people but especially from Dinos Doxiadis. He was a person who empowered others to be themselves and do their own thing but in collaboration with the team.
Declan Kennedy
Steyerberg, 15.1.2009
