Ecourbanismo

Neighbourhood scale sustainability and ecourban districts are appearing in cities around the world. They are promoted as part of urban sustainability plans and strategies within formal government, advanced by private developers driven by profit and niche marketing motivations, and advocated for and by citizens groups as part of sustainability, climate change, and affordable housing action strategies. In modern times, efforts to construct sustainable alternative neighbourhood scale developments date to isolated voluntary initiatives in 1970s Europe and the United States. Since about 2006, they have increased rapidly in popularity. They now go by many names: ecodistricts, écoquartiers, eco-cities, zero/low-carbon/carbon-positive cities, ecopolises, ecobarrios, One Planet Communities and solar cities. They have become frames – sometimes the dominant frame – used to justify and orient the construction of new pieces of city in a growing range of countries worldwide. This review documents our work to catalogue and classify such ecourban developments worldwide.
Despite numerous standardization efforts, the field of ecourban neighbourhood planning and practice lacks a consistent cross-cultural understanding of what constitutes meaningful ecourbanism in specific economic, political, ecological, social and design-based terms. At the same time, ecourban neighbourhood projects also respond to strictly local challenges and opportunities and express themselves in fragmented ways in different local contexts. This article presents an original typology of seven extreme types of ecourbanism, each advanced as a key principle based on with theoretical grounding in sustainable development and planning and urban studies. We define and present a limiting case for each of these extreme types. As projects with integrative goals, focusing too much on any of these seven dimensions on its own will soon limit the success of the ecourban neighbourhood overall. Our catalogue and new typology of ecourban developments will serve as tools to facilitate orienting ecourban neighbourhoods to within a common set of principled boundaries, as they are developed around the world.

New sustainable neighbourhood developments are multiplying worldwide. Embedded in these model neighbourhoods are not only particular ideas about better urban form, but also particular ideas about better organization of urban life and social development. Frameworks, certifications, and labels to organize the practice of sustainable neighbourhood development are proliferating almost as rapidly as the developments themselves, and each holds a different mix of such ideas. Beginning from a typology of seven extreme types of ecourbanism, we consider the implications of pursuing each extreme for the key actors who assume different roles in planning, building, and living in these new neighbourhoods. We then consider two different ecourban neighbourhood frameworks, the Living Community Challenge and EcoDistricts Protocol. We examine these frameworks in terms of our seven extreme types of ecourbanism, as technologies of ecourbanism that have emerged in order to facilitate the mainstreaming and generalization of experimental ecourban development practices.
Building upon a conceptual framework of transition theory and urban assemblages, we see the emergence of such new frameworks as mobilizing different assemblages of actors, via the crucial work of intermediary institutions, in order to move ecourban neighbourhood development from a niche practice to the mainstream. Better understanding the mixtures of actors’ roles and responsibilities, and expectations and practices promoted in different frameworks, will help us better understand the prospects of ecourban developments under different frameworks, in different urban contexts, at different stages of development, and different scales of experimentation and standardization.

Este atlas tiene como propósito comunicar, conforme a una colección sistemática de mapas temáticos, un conjunto de dimensiones de la sub-región Valles del Tuy para su información, compresión y análisis. Se hace énfasis en temas de interés investigativo y de planificación desagregados en dos grandes ejes temáticos; la morfología físiconatural y la morfología social.