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| <back | home A Report on the Car-Free Cities Conference in Hungary... What's to Learn from the Rest of the World? by Daniel Lerch As we face the imminent challenges of global climate change and the collapse of the oil economy (see James Howard Kunstler’s writings on “peak oil” in the last issue of HopeDance - click here), many of us have looked toward Europe for solutions to our sustainability problem. Europe, after all, is the land of trains, organic farms, wind-powered electricity, and relatively sane politics. Others have looked to the Global South, arguing that we must reduce our consumption of energy and goods to the levels of at least Mexico — if not Thailand or India — if we are to sustain our society into the future. Last month I attended the fifth international “Towards Carfree Cities” conference, held this year in Budapest, Hungary, on behalf of The City Repair Project (see the last issue of HopeDance). It was an inspiring week: lots of great presentations, inspiration all around. I came away buzzing, and on returning to the States and all problems we face here, I had one clear thought: We’re wasting our time looking to the rest of the world for answers. Not that the rest of the world has nothing to teach us; actually, there’s an enormous amount that we need to learn. But that’s the problem. It’s so easy for us to focus on the inspiring things we see in other countries — high-speed trains, bustling local markets, vibrant public spaces — that we often ignore the context of what makes these things possible, and how they fit into the larger framework of those particular places with their particular societies and cultures. The U.S. experiment with pedestrian zones in the 1960s and 70s is a perfect example of this. Cities around the country closed downtown streets to cars in hopes of creating cafe-lined, European boulevards full of stylish shoppers. Within a few years, nearly every single one of these pedestrian zones failed, and for generally the same reason: unlike in Europe, the middle class in the U.S. was actively fleeing downtowns for the suburbs (for a complex mix of economic, political and cultural reasons). Planting “European” pedestrian zones into this context made about as much sense as trying to plant Vermont maple trees in the Arizona desert. These days, instead of talking about European pedestrian zones (well, we still do that), we talk about Curitiba’s bus rapid transit system, the ‘appropriate technology’ village of Gaviotas in Colombia, or the “BedZED” zero-energy apartment complex in England. Don’t get me wrong; these are all incredibly important projects that we should study thoroughly and learn from as much as we can. But, to borrow a biological term, we must also recognize them as endogenous entities — that is to say, they’ve risen out of particular conditions and fit into particular contexts. Even if we can transplant these things into our own “ecosystem” of the United States’ political, cultural and socio-economic structure, this will have done little to change our system itself. But that’s just what we need to do if we want to weather the coming challenges with a minimum of suffering and injustice: Change the system, and change it fast. With only 10 to 20 years to work with, we need to be doing more than just transplanting with mixed results. Permaculture can convert barren land into a veritable food forest in just a matter of years by intelligently building new cycles, building on what’s already there, and slowly but persistently changing the underlying soil structure. What can we do to convert the barren soil of our hyper-capitalist, oil-driven, plutocratic* garden into a sustainable “food forest”? City Repair works in a kind of systems-informed permaculture model, which I think is partly why we’ve captured the imaginations of so many people. Our projects — small gathering places that we help neighbors design and build in the public right-of-way, as well as big community celebrations and other events — are like an ongoing acupuncture treatment on our city. And just as the acupuncture needle itself doesn’t cure the disease, but instead spurs the body to do the curing, our projects themselves don’t “build community.” It’s the informed process that creates them and the relationships they help build — the way they work with and on the system — that softly, slowly, almost imperceptibly, change the world around us. Where will this leave us 10 years from now? We in City Repair may have dreams of vibrant local culture, sustainable economics and strong community relationships that will equip our future Portland to deal with Kunstler’s “long emergency”; but of course, we really can’t know what the future will bring and how we’ll deal with it. I look at the growing fruits of our work, however, and at like-minded efforts across the country with their own acupuncture needles, and I have some hope. * Plutocracy = government by the wealthy. Daniel Lerch is the Board Director and co-founder of The City Repair Project in Portland, OR. HopeDance wrote extensively about City Repair and its Village Building Convergence in its #51 issue. For city repair activities please go to www.cityrepair.org. <back | top^ |