Author Abstract
Two trends are likely to define the 21st century: threats to the sustainability of the natural environment and dramatic increases in urbanization. This paper reviews the goals, business models, and partnerships involved in eight early "ecocity" projects to begin to identify success factors in this emerging industry. Ecocities, for the most part, are viewed as a means of mitigating threats to the natural environment while creating urban living capacity by combining low carbon and resource-efficient development with the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to better manage complex urban systems.
Paper Information
- Full Working Paper Text
- Working Paper Publication Date: December 2010 (Revised March 2011)
- HBS Working Paper Number: 11-062
- Faculty Unit(s): Organizational Behavior
I would however start building such projects focussed on people and the communities and will assess the needs and then match each need with social, mangerial, design and technology aspects before designing the project. I would definitely not go for a uniformly designed city but would focus on smaller communities and make them self sufficient and sustainable proviing linkages only to those needs that cannot be met locally.
There seems to be a lack of understanding (by the project leaders, not the authors) that the social and economic lives of cities are inseparable. There is much talk of business models, but much less of community models. Will these cities welcome the poor as well as the affluent? Will they embrace the challenge of solving social problems or simply ignore them in hopes that they can be relegated to legacy cities?
The developer-centric model is one cause of the problems in many exisiting cities. Specialized business, residential, and shopping districts may be efficient for developers but they are horribly inefficient for those whose urban experience includes working, living, and shopping. For urban dwellers, these are intergrated aspects of their lives not discreet activities.
There is great detail in the paper of those organizations invovled in funding, designing, and building these cities. I'd like to see something about the citizens who will inhabit them and the processes for getting their input into the design process. Perhaps that can be the subject of another paper.