Adapting Ecovillage Practices to Urban Areas for Sustainable Development

• In Event: Sustainability Transformations: Walkable Suburbs, Environmental Justice Advocacy, Ecovillage Adaptations, Grass Lawns, and Fashion

Abstract

Ecovillages are communities across the globe that foster productive human growth and development while decreasing their negative impacts on the environment through sustainable practices. They usually consist of 50-150 inhabitants living together in a rural area. Though they tend to be successful in their approaches towards both environmental and social sustainability, these villages are not realistic solutions to climate change. With the influx of migrants moving from rural and suburban areas to urban settings, it is unlikely that city-dwellers would be willing to relocate into ecovillages, which would also be unable to sustain large populations. However, ecovillages can still serve as a valuable resource for sustainable development. Since cities account for the majority of the Earth’s population, emissions, and energy consumption, climate attention needs to be focused on urban areas. Ecovillages should be used as a model to re-design greener cities, and this paper focuses on how their environmental infrastructure should be implemented and scaled for urban settings.
Through a survey of academic and scientific journals, research papers, and case studies, this paper reviews numerous sustainability practices that are utilized successfully in ecovillages, oftentimes exploring how they have also been initiated in individual cities. The paper is divided into a section on specific methodologies that can be used to employ different projects, and then four sections on various infrastructure that allows cities to be more sustainable with regards to their energy, water, waste, and food practices. The paper also pursues the economic, structural, and overall feasibility of these applications and how they can be applied in cities across the globe.
The extent of existing environmentally-sustainable infrastructure and their successes in cities reveals that fighting climate change is a feasible pursuit in densely populated urban areas, though it should be addressed more holistically. By approaching sustainable development in cities as an overall project (instead of focusing on individual practices),the creation of greener cities becomes more attainable. This paper proposes a combination of these different practices and methodologies, so that cities can implement and benefit from research and projects already completed. Though this paper does not present direct solutions or explore the feasibility of environmental infrastructure in specific cities, it demonstrates the achievability of employing the sustainable practices of ecovillages and paves the way for future research.

Author

• Bronwyn Rose Rafieyan, New Jersey Scholars Program