Following is the third in a series of interviews with world’s top designers and scholars who will participate in the Herald Design Forum in Seoul from Oct. 5 to Oct. 6. ― Ed.


Richard Register is an American specialist in ecological city design and planning who created the term “ecocity” in the late 1970s.

Under the concept of an ecologically healthy city, he believes “cities can run on about one-10th the energy they use now and cover about one-fifth the land.”

“People around the world have delayed very long before setting that goal. But I don’t think it is ‘too late’ to save the Earth,” he said in an email interview.

“How good we can make cities may be very much dependent on how quickly we can proceed in that direction now.”

Register was an artist who made sculpture and drawings in his 20s. But he found cities were doing so much damage to the world and decided to redesign a much bigger sculpture ― cities around the world. 

Since then, he has been dedicated to the battle against urban sprawl for more than 30 years. He is currently president of Ecocity Builders, a nonprofit organization for the eco movement he founded in 1992.

Q: What is your impression of the cities of Korea based on your ecocity theory?

A: I think the cities of Korea are far ahead of most cities around the world in providing an infrastructure of very dense development. Like China’s cities, Korea’s also seem to be growing ever more automobile dependent and both countries do not have the fine grain, very high levels of diversity of activity close together as they move toward more automobile dependence. In some neighborhoods yes, and in others definitely the major functions are quite scattered. Much better than in the United States, and almost as good as European cities in terms of the walkability of many special areas.

Q: In terms of designing and planning ecocities, at what level does Seoul stand?

A: It is very important to restore natural environments and even restore features that are not quite natural but educate about nature and have some if not all aspects of natural environments in cities. The Cheonggyecheon River project in downtown Seoul is a beautiful example. Seoul has very good density and good transit, but I’d like to see yet more nature and that kind of architecture.

Q: You asserted that live roofs, live walls, live yards and live bridges are the key to future cities. Could you give specific examples?

A: Changwon (in South Gyeongsang Province, Korea) has a remarkable development called City 7 that is extremely high mixed use, with housing in 30 story towers, six or seven stories of commercial development, rooftop gardens and sculpture gardens, shops of all sorts, some offices (associated with the shops anyway) a hotel and conference center all together and connected by bridges. This is a good example of pulling pieces together in a complete design.

I could add that public plazas, especially smaller ones add enormously to the livability and happiness of cities and we see some of these and some pedestrian streets in Korea. People enjoy such spaces and they are often commercially successful.

Q: How can design be expressed in ecocities?

A: I might add there are all sorts of design features to make the city healthier and more exciting in terms of better train and transit stations ― associated some of them closely with public plazas and natural features, for example. Bicycle path design has real potential. I’ve drawn pictures going back 25 years of elevated bicycle paths three or four stories over the ground for dense parts of cities, that I thought of as rather “far out” back then. Then more recently I was looking up on the Internet the history of the Pasadena Freeway, also known as the Arroyo Saco, first freeway (or “limited access” highway) in the world, which opened in 1940 between Pasadena and Los Angeles, California. It turns out that part of that exact same route was built as an elevated wooden bicycle freeway 40 years earlier, 1900. It was called the California Cycleway. We could do much better with such designs now! That it was once done ― and 111 years ago at that! ― proves we can do it again if we want.

Q: When creating ecocities, how much weight is put into designs?

A: Design for ecocities is all important. We need design as highest priority. It is as basic as this: people these days are clamoring for “adapting” to climate change, to extending trends ― better trends for sure, but giving trends a good deal of attention and investment. Resilience is a very big word in environmental and planning circles. All of these can be good in some degree, but design works from basic principles toward an integrative vision ― that’s far better. We need to go beyond responding to creating something, and creating it healthy by design. To get to a healthy future we need a whole systems design approach. To work with fractions of the whole system is often disastrous.

For example, Los Angeles solved about 90 percent of its smog problem in the 1960s by putting smog devices on cars. They fixed the car, not the city. The city is the whole system and involves cars, low density development, paving and lots of energy ― whole rivers of gasoline to make that kind of city operate. That’s the whole system we were designing without talking about it directly. So we solved a local air pollution problem ― and gave the world climate change ― a real disaster on an almost incomprehensibly large scale. Thousands of cities followed in that bad design pattern. They adopted smog devices generally but nobody was watching CO2. So we need to understand not just the high importance of design but design for whole systems, not just parts of whole systems.

Q: Which world city do you consider as an exemplary ecocity?

A: I don’t consider any city in the world an exemplary ecocity. There isn’t even a city with a solid and consistent over time commitment to the goal. There are bits and pieces of cities from old ones like pedestrian Kathmandu, Nepal, car-free Venice, Italy; Zermatt, Switzerland; Goulongyu, China; Istanbul, Turkey with its very large covered pedestrian street commercial area the amazing Grand Bazaar, and there are cities like Curitiba, Brazil; Vancouver, Canada; Portland, USA; Wytakere, New Zealand that have several good things going at the same time, if not a complete list of ecocity features. London has many good policies such as its car restricted center ― very expensive to enter by car ― and many European cities are expanding car-free areas.

Q: What values does your organization Ecocity Builders embody?

A: Treasure ecological health, of course! Work hard now for greater pleasure later, and especially for our children and grandchildren. Enjoying nature is a great pleasure. Democracy, but with proper education about highest priority issues, which are those that can bring us and all living things a healthy future. If the people don’t know and discuss the deeper future than profits for the next quarter we are going to have a total disaster democracy. The courage of our convictions: it is possible to be a small minority and have a good idea ― stick with it!

Q: Please offer some advice on the direction the Herald Design Forum should take.

A: Well one thought about design, as you are already noting from what I’ve already said, would be to emphasize whole systems, future oriented design. The future oriented part is important because we need to amortize investments for the long haul, which people don’t tend to want to do, but if we are concerned with the future we should.

Most healthy changes require moves toward higher quality so things can last longer, which generally requires a higher investment at the start and few people talk about that in a world where people are trying to maximize profits in the short term. They are not taking a whole systems view ― because the deeper past and future are part of the whole system of healthy life systems on Earth. The whole city needs to be seen as such if we hope to solve its many problems.

By Lee Ji-yoon (jylee@heraldcorp.com)