An environmental justice organization and a Bedouin village are attempting to create a model of sustainability in the Negev desert.

Qasr Al-Sir: on the verge of momentus change.

After a volunteer accidentally burned down its office, Bustan, an environmental justice organization based in Israel’s Negev desert, decided it was time to make some changes. “That was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” says Bustan Director Ra’ed Al-Mickawi. With the help of a strategic planning consultant, the organization embarked upon an intensive soul-searching process. “We had to figure out what our role was in the community,” says Al-Mickawi.

To that end, Ra’ed Al-Mickawi conducted a series of interviews with people connected to Bustan’s work, in order to get a sense of the organization’s impact. He concluded that, while Bustan had been making headway, it needed to better focus its efforts. “The choice was between concentrating on one specific field, like agriculture or Permaculture,” he says, “or choosing one model village and working on a variety of projects there.”

Bustan chose the second option, and began looking for a community that might be interested in building such a model. The search led the organization to the Bedouin village of Qasr Al-Sir, an informal settlement in the process of being formally recognized by the state. With participatory democratic structures already in place and a population eager for change, it seemed like a natural fit. And, as the village was no longer considered an informal settlement, building there did not carry the risk of demolition by the authorities.

Today, Bustan and Qasr Al-Sir are planning to create a new model for Bedouin settlement in Israel, one that sets a new standard for sustainability while empowering the community to shape its own future. Their first major project will be the construction of a large community center, built using a combination of traditional and modern green methods. Construction is scheduled to begin later this month.

Kids playing in Qasr Al-Sir.

Qasr Al-Sir today still looks like an informal settlement. Located in a windswept basin, the village lacks basic services such as electricity, sewage, paved roads and water. However, the first signs of new development are already beginning to appear. A new complex of schools was built a couple of years ago, and other public buildings are also going up.

Ra’ed sees great potential in the field of green building. The new community center, he says, will be built by a handful of young people from the village, who have already attended workshops on green building methods. In the future, he hopes the villagers, who will all be rebuilding their homes as part of the redevelopment project, will chose to do so using sustainable materials and methods.

In order to help make that happen, he plans to set up a committee, comprised of a green architect, a social worker and an engineer, to advise residents during the rebuilding process. Green building, he says, will also be an economic solution for the villagers, providing at once a more affordable option for their own homes, as well as new employment opportunities for local youth.

Bustan hopes to leverage the construction of the community center in order to develop a series of additional projects, including attracting solar energy companies to the village and setting up an indigenous tree nursery, run as a women’s cooperative.

The people I met in Qasr Al-Sir, whom seemed genuinely enthusiastic about the changes planned for their village, said they hoped the process would help revitalize their society by restoring the place of the village’s elders and women, bringing back lost values and traditions and providing a positive horizon for the village’s young people.

Asked about the dramatic changes in store, Atiya, who lives next to the future site of the green community center, grinned. “I would be happy living out in the desert, but my children can’t tell the difference between a horse and a donkey. I’m looking forward to the future here. I think everything that’s happening here is for the best.”

Bustan, which defines itself as a Bedouin-Jewish Israeli organization, will hold workshops, tours and conferences as the project progresses to share the lessons of their work and spread the word about ecological initiatives in the Negev. Construction of the community center is expected to last between 3-4 months.

Originally posted at TreeHugger.com. Photos by Daniel Cherrin.

“In every man there is a poet, and in the city in which he lives there should be mystery, secrets, and surprises.”

After 9 months of work, ten architectural firms presented their proposals for a “Grand Paris 2030″ to French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Friday. Sarkozy had asked the firms to “project 20 years into the future and dream up the world’s most sustainable post-Kyoto metropolis,” according to an article in the Telegraph. France 24 noted that three themes were common to all of the plans: sustainable development, transportation, and connecting central Paris with its suburbs.

Some of the proposals include:

Building 20 “sustainable towns” of half a million people each in the Paris area, while doubling the amount of forested land and integrating agriculture into the landscape on the city’s outskirts.

Extending the city all the way to the Channel port of Le Havre via Rouen along the Seine, thus maximizing the potential of the Seine waterfront and realizing Napoleon Bonaparte’s idea of a city with the Seine as its main street.

Uniting cut-off communities by replacing the rain lines that separate them with green spaces to bring them together, while filling the city with renewable energy production and redesigning areas so as to limit commute times to a half hour.

Paris architect Roland Castro, whose team included a sociologist, a writer and a philosopher, said:

“We applied the philosopher’s concept that in every man there is a poet, and in the city in which he lives there should be mystery, secrets, and surprises.”

At this point, the proposals are all very conceptual (Sarkozy reportedly gave the planners “the absolute freedom to dream”), but as Nicolai Ouroussoff notes in the New York Times: All forsook flashy imagery for a deep analysis of the city’s diverse communities and the fraying tissue that binds them together… all of the projects recognize the strong link between urban policy and social equality.”

Next, the plans will be presented to the public, and a public exhibition of the plans will open April 29.

Via The Telegraph, France 24

Groundbreaking PBS series available for free web viewing.

This beautifully produced and truly eye-opening series can be viewed for free at www.e2-series.com.

Episodes are under webcasts. Watch the podcasts for a bit of additional info afterwards.

E2 is probably one of the most significant series to be created in recent years, and one of my favorites. For starters, I recommend checking out “Harvesting the Wind.”

New “personal rapid transit” electric taxis will be in operation by the fall.

PRT car designed by Zagato, unveiled in January at the World Future Energy Summit.

The designers of Masdar City, Abu Dhabi’s new post-petroleum city, are not bound by the usual set of rules and constraints. Money is not really an issue, and the political leadership is always willing to try out innovative ideas that the rest of the world regards as unproven, unorthodox or just plain fantasy.

One of them is PRT, personal rapid transit, a system of transportation featuring compact, driver-less “podcars.” In Masdar, where the streets will be entirely free of automobiles, a network of these compact electric taxis will provide clean and quiet transportation to the city’s residents, as well as commuters. The first PRT cars are set to begin running later this year. Admittedly intrigued, TreeHugger sat down with one of the system’s designers recently at the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi to hear more about the project.

Luca Guala is a transportation planner with Systematica, the firm that drew up the plans for Masdar’s PRT system. According to Guala, Systematica’s planners spent months working with Foster + Partners, the city’s architectural planners, to integrate sustainable transport solutions into the city’s design.

In addition to PRT, he says, a light rail line will snake through Masdar, most likely running between Abu Dhabi’s international airport and the city center, some 20 km away. Although no cars will be allowed into Masdar City, nine multi-story parking lots will be scattered along its perimeter. Residents, commuters, visitors and buses will all have dedicated parking spots there, allowing them to own and use cars outside the city walls.

Jesse Fox: Would it be fair to describe PRT as a system of transportation which combines the sustainability of a light rail with the convenience of the private car?

Luca Guala: The PRT system in Masdar City will be a complementary system to the light rail, which will cross the city. PRT is not a system that can move huge masses of people, for that you need a light rail or a metro. A metro can move 60,000 passengers per hour – that’s equal to about 20 lanes of highway.

One of the differences between car travel and public transportation is the experience of traveling at rush hour. On the highway, you may be stuck, but you’re sitting in the comfort and privacy of your car. Meanwhile, on the subway you’re in motion, be you’re packed in with hundreds of other people.

Masdar City’s PRT system will have no rush hour congestion. When the computer sees that the network is approaching capacity, it will simply not allow cars to leave stations. This will not happen frequently, and when it does happen, passengers will be asked to wait for a few minutes.

Generally we foresee no more than a three minutes wait for passengers at a station, but there may be special occasions when the wait time is longer. If the Rolling Stones have a concert in Masdar, an event like that is bound to create congestion, and you may have to wait for more than three minutes. But we do not expect anything like that on a normal workday morning. You won’t be late to work in Masdar City because of traffic.

The PRT vehicles will travel at speeds of approximately 7 meters per second, with the longest routes in the city being perhaps 2.5 km. So let’s say you reach a station, wait maybe 1.5 minutes for your car to arrive, travel for 5 minutes if your destination is relatively far away, and then exit the station, which will take around a minute. So the longest trips in the city will be around 7, perhaps 10 minutes long.

PRT cars will move along rights of way, approximately 6 meters under street level. [Masdar City’s streets will be raised off the ground, but buildings will be built at ground level, with the first couple of stories serving as basements and space for technical equipment.]

We decided not to build elevated tracks in Masdar. Elevated tracks would put the cars between the first and second floors of buildings, and no one wants to see cars, even silent ones, zooming past their window. Plus a spaghetti grid network might not be so nice to look at from below, and could become a real visual issue in the city’s narrow streets.

What will it be like to travel on the PRT system in Masdar?

Guala: Passengers would descend a flight of stairs or an elevator to the station – perhaps an escalator in larger stations, but we decided to use only a few escalators, since they are more energy intensive. Elevators are necessary for the mobility disabled.

You will swipe a smart card through a machine, and a welcome message will appear. One option is that the system will recognize you and greet you personally: “Good morning, where do you want to go today?” Perhaps the system will remember your usual path, and offer it to you as an option. After you click on your destination, the system will say something like, “Your car is arriving in 2 minutes at platform number 3.” You may have to stand on a line, and you will be able to identify your car by its number.

The second option is that you will enter your destination into the system when you are already sitting inside a car.

Initially, the system will be very simple, with only a couple of stations. During this period, the system will function kind of like an elevator – you press a button and go to the third floor. Think of it as a horizontal lift. Later on it will be more sophisticated, and passengers will be able to get within 100 meters of any destination.

The cars will not run on tracks, but will operate within a kind of grid network, and take the shortest paths to get where they need to be. The cars will have wheels, and will be battery powered.

What kind of history does PRT have in practice?

Guala: PRT systems have had problems with things like cost overruns in the past. Few systems have actually been fully built and implemented. The one in Morgantown, West Virginia is the only one currently in existence. There is also one under construction in Heathrow airport in London.

Morgantown was built some 30 years ago, and was extremely expensive. They had to invent many of the components of the system from scratch, including the computer system. It was a prototype in every sense. Today, the computerization aspect is almost trivial. If your laptop had been around back then, it would have been powerful enough to implement Morgantown’s control system.

The only pure PRT systems going up today are the ones in Masdar and Heathrow – different systems which work according to similar logic. One of the companies involved in developing the system here in Masdar, 2getthere, has developed a system for transporting freight containers in the Rotterdam port in the Netherlands that works exactly like PRT. In Masdar, cargo will also be transported by PRT, using special freight cars.

How was the system planned out?

Guala: We used the same “predict and provide” models that are used to plan new roads. We had rough data about things like population size, arrival times, etc. We ran a few models and found that a few areas came out congested, so we interacted with the town planners and tried to get the best placement for various land uses.

For example, something like a conference center, which attracts a lot of people all at once, could become a local generator of congestion. So we said: let’s move it slightly to the side. The end result is a large patchwork of land uses, with none of the city’s districts clearly defined by a single use, like offices, residential and so on. That is ideal from a transit perspective, because it diffuses demand [traffic.]

In Masdar, you will be able to live very close to where you work. The districts will be in use at all hours. There will be nodes of activity at the intersections of routes, but the trick is that each nodes does not serve people doing the same thing and traveling at the same time – thus no traffic is created.

How did the specific cultural context in Abu Dhabi affect the planning?

Guala: Well, I am Italian. I bring with me a certain cultural model – namely the good parts of the Italian city. I think it is possible to apply the Italian city model in Abu Dhabi to a certain extent. But you can’t just transplant something to another culture and make it work.

The classic Arabic city has many similarities to the Italian city. There was a common way of living in the Mediterranean Basin, in Christian as well as Muslim areas. From a town planner’s perspective, the classic Arabic “medina” [dense Middle Eastern city with narrow streets and interior courtyards] and Venice are similar. Masdar City takes its inspiration more from the Arabic medina than from the Italian city.

There are other cultural preferences involved here as well. People in Europe are used to taking public transport. It’s not necessarily like that here. Plus there is more sensitivity here to the privacy of the family, which led us to suggest a different kind of system, more suited to the local cultural context.

Is PRT cost-efficient?

Guala: This will be an expensive system. It has to be that way, because it’s a prototype. From an energy perspective it’s extremely cost-efficient, which is what Masdar [the Masdar Initiative is the corporate body that is building Masdar City] wants. The maintenance of a system like this is more expensive than that of a system based on buses, but the level of service is absolutely unreachable by other forms of public transportation.

The huge advantage of PRT is that it is “on demand,” including during off-peak hours. During peak hours, PRT is less efficient than public transport. But PRT is a 24-hour service, just as available during off-peak hours as it is during peak hours. This is much more efficient than running empty buses all night. There are advantages in terms of personal security as well – no long waits in the middle of the night, for example.

I don’t really know about the financial aspects in detail, it’s not really part of our job as planners. It is technically possible to cover costs with ticket fees. A fee roughly equivalent to the cost of a taxi ride would cover the costs of the system. There is a huge investment cost in a system like this, but after it is prototyped, the costs will come down. The actual cost of PRT is lower than the costs for a light rail of the same capacity.

What kind of prospects are there for PRT in other places?

Guala: There is a lot of interest in PRT right now, especially in new developments. In existing cities it’s a bit trickier to make it work. The optimum place for a system like PRT could be in smaller towns and in contained, controlled environments, like hospitals, universities, new business districts, places like that.

Originally published at TreeHugger.com on February 1, 2009. Photos by the author.

City planners were on the hot seat after the screening of Nitzan Horowitz’s new film “Urban Legend” (photo by Daniel Cherrin).

Sometimes it is necessary to confront our decision-makers with what has been called “the threat of a good example” – to bring them face to face with evidence that, despite their insistence to the contrary, it is possible to do things differently.

That, in a nutshell, was the idea behind an event held last week at the Tel Aviv Cinemateque which challenged Israel’s city planners to think creatively about Israel’s cities and the many challenges they face.

The event began with the screening of “Urban Legend,” a 50 minute Hebrew film which recounts the courageous steps that various cities around the world have taken to improve the quality of life of their residents, while lessening the pressure they put on their environments.

The film was followed by a panel discussion, which included the participation of the official city planners of Haifa, Netanya and Tel Aviv. Moderator Nitzan Horowitz, who directed the film, posed them the following question: “If they can do it there, why can’t we do it here?”

The City is the Solution

Produced by Channel 10 reporter and graduate of the Heshel Center’s Environmental Fellows Program Nitzan Horowitz, the film follows Horowitz as he visits an artificial trash island turned urban park in Japan, wows over super-sophisticated 3D models of future ecocities in China and interviews elderly street car passengers in Portland in his search for the elements that create a good city.

Right: A neighborhood park in Curitiba, Brazil (photo by Jesse Fox).

The star of the film, however, is Jaime Lerner, the former mayor of Curitiba – a city whose name has become synonymous with good, sustainable urban design. Lerner, appointed mayor of Curitiba in the 1970’s (ironically, by Brazil’s then-ruling military junta), managed to completely transform his city by using simple, creative solutions to complex problems. “The city is not the problem, the city is the solution,” he likes to say.

While the list of Lerner’s achievements is too long to relate here in full, suffice to say that Curitiba, formerly a nondescript place with the usual list of environmental pressures and problems, is today a city with a 70% recycling rate, a network of expansive urban parks, zero traffic jams and an over 90% satisfaction rate among its citizens.

Left: A rendering of a BRT station in Guangzhou, China. Curitiba’s transit system has inspired similar projects around the world (source: ITDP.org).

One of Lerner’s most impressive achievements in Curitiba was the invention of a new form of mass transit, which later came to be referred to as Bus Rapid Transit (BRT). Faced with growing traffic problems, Mayor Lerner was presented with the choice between building an expensive subway system or a destructive highway system in his city. Not satisfied with either option, Lerner created a system of extended buses that functions like a subway, with exclusive lanes, frequent and comfortable service and high carrying capacity – for 1% of the cost of a subway!

Curitiba Comes to Tel Aviv

Anyone who has ever walked, jogged, driven, biked, rollerbladed or seqwayed down the streets of Tel Aviv knows that the biggest obstacle to providing Tel Avivians with a higher quality of life is the traffic jams and the lack of a good mass transit alternative. So after traveling to Curitiba and exploring the wonders of sustainable urban design and transportation there, Horowitz invites Jaime Lerner to Tel Aviv, where Lerner (a Jew with relatives in Israel) discusses how his planning philosophy, which he calls “urban acupuncture,” could be put into action in Tel Aviv. Here’s an except:

Jaime Lerner has this to say about Tel Aviv:

“I think this city could be jewel. It is not difficult. Because it has everything, good waterfront, good street life – the only thing is the cars… when you give more importance to the car than people, it happens. They give the car the red carpet and we have to climb or go underground. But this could be fixed very easily.

Sometimes you are waiting for the subway 50 years, when you can have right now, in less than two years, a better system that is on surface. People say “no we cannot have dedicated lanes for buses, because we need them for cars. This is an egoist’s reasoning.”

To which Horowitz replies, “But this is exactly what they told me in city hall, that they need the space for the cars.”

In another scene, Lerner, while riding one of his city’s iconic buses, turns to the camera and says, “Please mayors from Israel, make dedicated lanes for public transport, please, bivakesha.”

Don’t Look at Me

The film, and especially the scenes of Lerner in Tel Aviv, made a strong impression on the audience, and, as the lights came on and the members of the panel took their seats, the sense of expectation was almost palpable. However, as one man from the audience put it: “It was like, after seeing this fantastic vision of what could be, suddenly they brought us all back down to reality, where everything is stuck.”

As Horowitz opened up the discussion, all eyes were on Hezi Berkowitz, the Tel Aviv’s municipality’s official city planner. Berkowitz, not an exciting speaker even at his best, proceeded to advocated for the status quo.

Left: Tel Aviv City Engineer Hezi Berkowitz: “Reorganization of the bus system is not under my authority” (photo by Daniel Cherrin).

Berkowitz opened by stating that things in metropolitan Tel Aviv are improving. The proof of this, he noted, is that people want to move to the cities in the center of the country.

Regarding the lack of a viable system of mass transit in the metropolis, Berkowitz stated, “I don’t think it is appropriate here to assign blame,” and then hinted that the fault lies with the Ministry of Transportation and the Treasury.

He went on to point out that a transport system based on exclusive bus lanes cannot transport more than 4,000 passengers per hour in a given direction. In Haifa, he noted, the Metronit (the city’s new BRT line, opening in 2010) is planned to carry 2,000 passengers per hour per direction. During Tel Aviv’s morning rush hour, however, the situation calls for moving around 9,000 people per hour – thus moving these people by buses is impossible.

Berkowitz did not say where he found these figures, but studies have shown that a system such as Curitiba’s, based on extended buses, can carry up to 24,000 passengers at peak hours.

This was not the first time that Berkowitz was confronted with the Curitiba model. In fact, the southern Brazilian town’s name comes up quite often in his public appearances, and is usually brought up by residents and activists as an example of what Tel Aviv could be doing. In a neighborhood event in June hosted by the SPNI, Berkowitz proclaimed: “What people don’t realize about Curitiba is that their mass transit system is based on buses. Just buses, not light rail, not subway… Give me 20 minutes and I’ll rip the Curitiba model to pieces.”

Berkowitz later fielded an avalanche of questions and comments, not all of them friendly, from Tel Aviv residents in the audience, promoting another member of the panel to remark, “This is a rare case where being the home team is not an advantage.”

Right: Nitzan Horowitz fields questions from the audience after screening his movie “Urban Legend” at the Tel Aviv Cinemateque (photo by Daniel Cherrin).

Members of the audience quizzed Berkowitz about several prominent municipal issues, including:

Ayalon East, a new highway, planned to run through the eastern part of the Yarkon Park. Berkowitz responded that, according to surveys and simulations, the number of cars on the road is constantly rising, leading to more cars on the same amount of roads, thus leading to congestion and the need to build more roads.”Widen a river, and the same amount of water flows though it. When we open a new highway, we relieve the pressure on exisiting roads.” He did note, however, that conservation of the park was also an important consideration. To this Nitzan Horowitz replied that every year another 60,000 cars are added to the roads in metropolitan Tel Aviv, and that, in the absence of a mass transit alternative, the roads will just become congested again in another few years, no matter how many new roads are built.

The continuing renovation of Ibn Gvirol Street. One member of the audience pointed out that the new bike lanes on the street were built at the expense of decades-old trees, which were uprooted by the city in one of the most polluted stretches of Tel Aviv. Every month or so, he noted, the city advances north, cutting down another few blocks of trees. Worse still, the bike lanes that were built are barely even usable, as they were built on the sidewalk with all kinds of obstacles standing in the way of bikers. Berkowitz responded that Tel Aviv today has almost 100 km of bike lanes (a figure which drew laughter and catcalls from the crowd), and that according to the Ministry of Transportation it is OK to build bike lanes on the sidewalk.

In Haifa, Things are Moving Forward

The panel (from left): Netanya City Engineer Paul Vital, Haifa City Engineer Ariel Veterman, Tel Aviv City Engineer Hezi Berkowitz, Arik Tapiero of SPNI, Dr. Yishai Blank of Tel Aviv University (photo by Daniel Cherrin).

A slightly more optimistic picture was painted by Haifa city engineer Ariel Veterman. The Metronit, Haifa’s own BRT system which is slated to begin operating in his city in 2010, will have a headway of 5 minutes and is expected to bring about a revolution in the city center, which he said will be unrecognizable in a few years. “Maybe in ten years we can make a movie about urban renewal in Haifa,” he offered, only half in jest.

Arik Tapiero of the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel observed that, while public transportation plans exist on paper, in reality Tel Aviv is building roads and promoting policies that favor the private car over public transport. He called for the creation of a metropolitan transport authority saying, “The pubic needs to organize and fight for good public transportation in Tel Aviv. This is the only way that it will happen.” The defeat of the Safdie Plan for Jerusalem’s westward expansion, noted Tapiero, was only made possible by broad public mobilization.

A different perspective was provided by Dr. Yishai Blank, of Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of Law, who argued that public transport alone will not save the city, especially if the city neglects to build affordable housing and mixed use streets. He noted that, due to less central government involvement in funding local governments, cities are now forced to get most of their funds from developers, which weakens cities’ ability to impose design guidelines on them. The result is that new construction in the cities mimics suburban forms instead providing quality urbanism.

Conspicuously absent from the discussion was the voice of A City for All, Tel Aviv’s new political actor, whose representatives have declared that, if elected, Curitiba’s programs would serve them as a model for developing Tel Aviv. Last week, A City for All’s candidate for mayor, Dov Khenin, proposed a network of BRT lines with free transfers between them as an interim transportation solution, until the subway and light rails finally materialize in Tel Aviv.

So what does the future hold for the residents of metropolitan Tel Aviv? Will quality of life in the “Big Orange” ever rival that of Portland or Curitiba? Horowitz sums it up well in the closing scene of “Urban Legend”:

“The solution to the city’s problems is not found in massive budgets, nor in complicated plans. The solution is found in the basic understanding that the city is a space for social progress. And when someone who understands this takes charge of the city – the change is very rapid.”

Nitzan Horowitz’s film “Urban Legend” is part of a series entitled Haolam Haba, which features several fascinating short films on topics related to changes in the world’s economy, environment and society that will make the current century different from the last one. All of the episodes can be viewed for free on Channel 10’s website (apparently more compatible with Internet Explorer than with Firefox). Highly recommended!

Originally published at GreenProphet.com on September 2 2008.