The key to changing our cities involves the car. Cars dominate cities in the rich countries, and they are increasingly swamping poor countries as well. Big auto companies, are rapidly building car factories and highways in China and India. Many cities, like Berkeley, California where I lived for 30 years, don’t have a single pedestrian street — and their citizens don’t even notice how completely given over to the car their towns are. Only one out of 10 people on the planet actually drives cars, but drivers are causing a vastly disproportionate share of planetary damage through the automobile-sprawl pattern of development. 

The concepts behind the ecocity are fairly simple. They involve a shift in development toward centers of high diversity:

• Switch to a pedestrian and transit-oriented infrastructure, with ecocity architecture built around compact centers designed for pedestrians and transit; 
• Roll back sprawl development while vigorously restoring nature and agriculture; 
• Integrate renewable energy systems while using non-toxic materials and technologies and promoting recycling. 

A major difficulty in moving toward ecocities is that cars have influenced urban design for 100 years. Many of us caught in this infrastructure find it extremely difficult to get around in anything but the car. The distances are just too great for bicycles, the densities just too low to allow efficient, affordable transit.

Despite these obstacles, there are tools available to help us move in the right direction immediately. In many places — such as San Francisco, Chicago, and Portland, Oregon in the United States, and to a greater extent in Curitiba, Brazil — a certain amount of this “ecocity” thinking is already going on. Sometimes it’s simply a matter of recapturing the past. Cities used to be built for pedestrians. The core of some of these cities remains in Europe and China, though China is bulldozing some of these ancient city centers as we speak. Some cities like Venice, Italy, the Medina of Fez, and hilly Gulongyu, China are 100% car-free — and very successful.

Read more here.