Twenty years ago, Joan Boaker was just a young woman with a vision similar to our own – to build an ecological city. Today, her dream is a reality in the form of Ecovillage at Ithaca. Armed with only a bold vision, supportive friends and a flood of enthusiasm, Joan was able to create a self-sustaining community of 160 people that exist in harmony with the environment. This small village in rural New York serves as proof that our post-carbon city is attainable. While we are still in the planning stages of our own community, we can learn from Joan’s story and adopt some of the ideas that have made her village so successful. However, we must also develop our own innovative ideas to account for differences between a rural ecovillage in Ithaca and our urban village in San Francisco.
After envisioning her project, Joan collaborated with Liz Walker to bring it into fruition. They began by determining the five main aspects that their ecovillage should entail: green building, alternative energy, local food production, a strong sense of community, and education. From the beginning, their main focus was on fostering community. Although the women served as the official co-directors of the ecovillage, they did not make any decisions alone. They instead relied on participatory politics by always consulting with the people who would be living in the community. Rather than being leaders, Joan and Liz considered themselves coordinators of the community. The community members themselves chose the land the village was built on and planned how to use it, and now run the village through various voluntary Work Teams. These groups allow residents to participate in every aspect of the village, from finance and governance to cooking and cleaning. This is an important factor to the success of the village; the people are happy because they are truly the ones making the decisions and running the community.
We adopted this idea of Work Teams into our own village because we, too, feel that community is the most important aspect of a post-carbon city. In our vision, each resident over the age of 13 is required to serve on at least one Work Team on a weekly basis. This will not only build community by allowing residents to work together to make decisions and complete tasks, but will also ensure that all areas of the village are taken care of. We will have Work Teams for Government, Cooking, Cleaning, Trash Collection, Maintenance, Child and Senior Care, Art, and Outreach, and imagine that more will develop in the future.
After envisioning her project, Joan collaborated with Liz Walker to bring it into fruition. They began by determining the five main aspects that their ecovillage should entail: green building, alternative energy, local food production, a strong sense of community, and education. From the beginning, their main focus was on fostering community. Although the women served as the official co-directors of the ecovillage, they did not make any decisions alone. They instead relied on participatory politics by always consulting with the people who would be living in the community. Rather than being leaders, Joan and Liz considered themselves coordinators of the community. The community members themselves chose the land the village was built on and planned how to use it, and now run the village through various voluntary Work Teams. These groups allow residents to participate in every aspect of the village, from finance and governance to cooking and cleaning. This is an important factor to the success of the village; the people are happy because they are truly the ones making the decisions and running the community.
We adopted this idea of Work Teams into our own village because we, too, feel that community is the most important aspect of a post-carbon city. In our vision, each resident over the age of 13 is required to serve on at least one Work Team on a weekly basis. This will not only build community by allowing residents to work together to make decisions and complete tasks, but will also ensure that all areas of the village are taken care of. We will have Work Teams for Government, Cooking, Cleaning, Trash Collection, Maintenance, Child and Senior Care, Art, and Outreach, and imagine that more will develop in the future.
The unity of EcoVillage at Ithaca is also noticeable in its neighborhoods. There are currently two – First Residents Group (FRoG) and Second Neighborhood Group (SoNG). Each neighborhood accommodates 30 homes for families, singles, retirees and students. However, community members also have countless opportunities to socialize and build kinship with their neighbors; each neighborhood contains a Common House with a kitchen, dining room, children’s playground and sitting room. Community dinners are hosted several times a week in the two Common Houses and provide the perfect environment for bonding among neighbors. There are also community gardens throughout the village, where collaboration by community members supplies them with nourishment both in food and relationships.
Our community differs somewhat in this regard, because we do not want to divide our village into separate neighborhoods. Although we will offer different forms of housing, we plan to only have one main Community Center for all residents of our village. Our Community Center will include a library, amphitheater, computer room, kitchen and dining hall, re-skilling workshop spaces and Generations, our childcare/senior center. We believe that having only one central gathering place will allow for more communication and collaboration and avoid division among community members.
Although the people of EcoVillage at Ithaca obtain some of their nourishment from community gardens, the majority of their food comes from two on-site farms. West Haven Farm is an organic CSA vegetable farm that thrives with the use of sustainable practices like crop rotation and composting. Residents have the choice of either purchasing a full share of the farm or a “working share,” in which the price of the share is cut in half and supplemented by the resident working at the farm. Either way, they receive an abundant supply of seasonal vegetables every week. In our village, we imagine something similar to EcoVillage’s “working share” CSA. We plan to require residents to work a set number of hours a week at the farm, and in return they will receive a fair share of the weekly harvest. However, we are aware that realistically, it will be impossible to feed our entire population with the little land we have available for farming (to compare, our entire village is situated on a piece of land less than the area of West Haven Farm). Therefore, we plan to supplement our diets with fruits, vegetables and other food from outside sources – we imagine a future dairy farm existing in Golden Gate Park that will meet all of our cheese and yogurt needs. EcoVillage at Ithaca also relies on outside sources for commodities such as dairy and meat, but they are able to supply all of their residents with more than enough fruits and vegetables due to a much larger farming space than our own.
The greater amount of land at EcoVillage (176 acres compared to our 9) also grants them much more recreational and open space. The community has preserved 80% of the land as green space in order to protect the natural environment. However, this is only an option for a rural village. The limited amount of land available for our urban community requires us to make use of every square inch we can. Therefore, we have developed an innovative architectural plan in which most of the gardening and green space is located on top of buildings as green roofs. This will allow us to maximize our residential, community and business space and our food output.
EcoVillage at Ithaca also accommodates a large 1-acre pond, which provides water for the gardens and livestock. Since our village does not have space available for a pond, we have had to develop an innovative water system. Rainwater catchment is designed into each of our buildings; once the water is captured, it is stored in the walls and acts as insulation until it is used for watering plants or flushing toilets. Some homes in EcoVillage at Ithaca utilize rainwater catchment, but it is not a community-wide practice. The village in New York also practices some of the water conservation processes that we have planned for our community, such as low-flow faucets and composting toilets.
EcoVillage at Ithaca serves as an inspiring model for energy efficiency in our post-carbon city. Through passive solar and super insulated homes, shared laundry facilities, and shared heating systems the village has lowered their natural gas and electricity usage to 40% that of other homes in the Northeast. Although that's an impressive drop, we expect to do even better. Our homes are designed without heating or air conditioning, which currently account for a whopping 46% of household energy use. The relatively mild climate of San Francisco means that mirroring the super insulation of homes in Ithaca will be sufficient for our heating purposes. Rather than turning on the heat, our residents will practice the long-lost art of layering clothing and blankets when the temperatures drop. In the case of energy usage, our location gives us an advantage over EcoVillage at Ithaca because we don’t need to prepare for severe winters.
Another important aspect of Joan’s ecovillage vision is education. The village provides many opportunities for visitors to learn about the community – they give tours of the village, hold workshops to teach visitors about their practices and allow those who are interested to stay the weekend in the village for a hands-on experience. They also collaborate with nearby collages to teach students about sustainability and ecology. However, there are no actual schools on-site, and children must attend schools outside of the Ecovillage. Although most children bike to school, some families still use cars to transport their kids to schools that are further away. Our post-carbon city will eliminate that problem by providing a multitude of schools within walking distance of our community. Within just a few blocks of our village you can find an elementary school, a middle school, a high school and even a college. We also want to mirror EcoVillage at Ithaca’s openness to outside visitors by establishing a hostel in one of our resident buildings. This will allow guests to get a taste of our community while our Outreach Work Team teaches them about our village.
EcoVillage at Ithaca acts as an inspiring illustration of our vision for a post-carbon city in action. Often, the concepts we discuss in our class feel futuristic and intangible – things we can imagine working in the future, but don’t see happening today. EcoVillage at Ithaca bridges that gap between innovation and reality. Joan’s vision and ultimate achievement of her dream are proof that with hard work, cooperation and support, our vision of a post-carbon city could become a reality.
No comments:
Post a Comment