Excerpts from the 1975 novel Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach. Twenty years earlier in 1955, California, Oregon, and Washington seceded from the US to form a sustainable environmentalist utopia. Since then there has been a cold war and little contact between the US and Ecotopia. Now an American journalist goes to Ecotopia to report on its conditions and the possibility of reunification. (There’s no possibility.) This article takes a look at Ecotopia’s transportation and urban forms, a retro-future vision from fifty years ago. The rest of the book has much to say about Ecotopia’s industries, economics, politics, education, and family structures, but this article won’t get into that.
William Weston flies to Reno, and takes a taxi across the border to Lake Tahoe. He has gotten special permission to bring an internal combustion engine into the country 20 miles to the nearest train station. He rides a train to the capital, San Francisco, and emerges from the main train station.
Market Street
What I found, when I had gotten over my surprise at the quiet, was that Market Street … had become a mall planted with thousands of trees. The “street” itself, on which electric taxis, minibuses, and delivery carts purr along, has shrunk to a two-lane affair. The remaining space is occupied by bicycle lanes, fountains, sculptures, kiosks, and absurd little gardens surrounded by benches….
Scattered here and there are large conical-roof pavilions, with a kiosk in the center selling papers, comic books, magazines, fruit juices, and snacks…. The pavilions turn out to be stops on the minibus system…. These buses are comical battery-driven contraptions, resembling the antique cable cars that San Franciscans were once so fond of. They are driverless, and are steered and stopped by an electronic gadget that follows wire buried in the street…. These buses creep along at about ten miles an hour, but they come every five minutes or so. They charge no fare. When I took an experimental ride on one, I asked a fellow passenger about this, and he said the minibuses are paid for in the same way as the streets — out of general tax funds…. Down Market Street and some other streets, creeks now run….
Ecotopians setting out to go more than a block or two usually pick up one of the sturdy white-painted bicycles that lie about the streets by the hundreds and are available free for all. Dispersed by the movements of citizens during the day and evening, they are returned by night crews to the places where they will be needed the next day….
As I waked about, I noticed that the downtown area was strangely overpopulated with children and their parents, besides people who apparently worked in the offices and shops…. The great downtown skyscrapers … had been turned into apartments! … The former outlying residential areas have largely been abandoned…. The residents now live downtown, in buildings that contain not only apartments but also nurseries, grocery stores,and restaurants, as well as the shops and offices on the ground floor….
I saw a group of hunters, carrying fancy bows and arrows, jump off a minibus, on which they had loaded a recently killed deer…. The group had been hunting just outside town — where, apparently, deer are numerous…. [–Chapter “The Streets of Ecotopia’s Capital”]
New Towns
While the inherited cities are still used and have to some extent been broken up into neighborhoods, the ideal pattern are the new minicities such as Alvisio, a former village on the southern shores of San Francisco Bay.
You get there on the interurban train, which drops you off in the basement of a large complex of buildings. The main structure, it turns out, is not the city hall or courthouse, but a factory. It produces the electric traction units — they hardly qualify as cars or trucks in our terms — that are used for transporting people and goods in Ecotopian cities, and for general transportation in the countryside. [Individually-owned cars are prohibited in dense city areas, which are served by minibuses.]
Around the factory, where we would have a huge parking lot, Alviso has … restaurants, a library, bakeries, a “core store” selling groceries and clothes, small shops, even factories and workshops — all jumbled amid apartment buildings. These are generally of three or four stories, arranged around a central courtyard of the type that used to be common in Paris. They are built almost entirely out of wood, which have become the predominant building material in ecotopia, due to the reforestation program. [A small amount of steel is produced for vehicles and such. Plastic and synthetic materials are not produced at all.] … The apartments themselves are very large by our standards — with 10 or 15 rooms, to accommodate their communal living groups….
Alvisio streets … are hardly wide enough for two cars to pass; but then of course there are no cars, so that is no problem. Pedestrians and bicycles meander along. Once in a while you see a delivery truck hauling a piece of furniture or some other large object, but Ecotopians bring their groceries home in string bags or large bicycle baskets. Supplies for the shops, like most goods in Ecotopia, are moved in containers. These are much smaller than our cargo containers, and proportioned to fit into Ecotopian freight cars and onto their electric trucks. Farm produce, for instance, is loaded into such containers either at the farms or at the container terminal located at the edge of each minicity. From the terminal an underground conveyer system connects to all the shops and factories in the minicity, each of which has a kind of siding where containers are shunted off. The idea was probably lifted from our automated warehouses, but turned backwards….
The entire population of Alviso, about 9,000 people, lives within a radius of a half mile from the transit station. But even this density allows for many park-like spaces…. Trees are everywhere — there are no large paved areas exposed to the sun. Around the edges of town are the schools and various recreation grounds….
We toured the factory, which is a confusing place…. Certain aspects are automated: the production of the electric motors, suspension frames, and other major elements…. The assembly of these item is done by groups of workers who actually fasten the parts together one by one.
[However,] much of the factory’s output does not consist of finished vehicles at all…. This plant chiefly turns out “front ends”, “rear ends”, and battery units. Individuals and organizations then connect these to bodies of their own designs. Many of them are weird enough to make San Francisco minibuses look quite ordinary…. The motor drivers are capable of no more than 30 miles per hour….
It appears that a ring of such new towns is being built to surround the Bay, each one a self-contained community, but linked to its neighbors by train so that the entire necklace of towns will constitute one city. It is promised that you can, for instance, walk five minutes to your transit station, take a train within five minutes to a town steps away, and then walk another five minutes to your destination. My informants are convinced that this represents a halving of the time we would spend on a similar trip, not to mention the problems of parking, traffic, and of course pollution….
After leaving Alviso we took the train to Redwood City…. Three new towns have sprung up there along the Bay, separated by a half mile or so of open country…. In between, part of the suburban residential area has already been turned into alternating woods and grassland. [–Chapter “Car-Less Living in Ecotopia’s New Towns”]
Intercity transportation
The train Weston took from Lake Tahoe to San Francisco travels at 225 mph, and runs hourly. Most intercity travel between cities in California, Oregon, and Washington is by train. There are no domestic airlines. International flights to all countries except the US (with which Ecotopia has no transportation links) fly from airports located forty miles outside major cities, and the flights must go around the cities’ airspace to minimize pollution.
This is an open thread.
Market Street is certainly much less car focused than it was decades ago. It’s hard to remove all vehicles though because local access is still needed for deliveries.
Since VTA built its light rail lines in slightly different places from the book (missing the Alviso neighborhood by a mile) the vision was always to have a denser spine. However, after a few decades of east-west light rail running from Mountain View to East San Jose, it still performs poorly.
It’s a good case study of how light rail doesn’t guarantee an urban village — especially if plentiful free parking exists around every station and many buildings are on the far side of that parking.
Ecotopia intentionally built walkable villages around the train station, with industry/employment (nationally needed products) mixed with housing, retail and parks. The metro line connected these together.
What happened with BART and VTA was the transit was built without walkability/mixed-use reform at the station areas. So they have the ridership you’d expect from land use like that.
Another example of small industrial manufacturers sharing floors in multistory buildings within walking distance of a subway station is somewhere in Brooklyn that was featured in an article.
The other problem is that the real east west route of the Steven creek and Santa Clara street didn’t have the light rail on it. Or the alameda
These all have density on the avenues. The north leg they built just goes through industrial lands
” the Alviso neighborhood by a mile”
I didn’t know if Alviso existed. Where is it in relationship to something I’d know like Redwood City or Palo Alto. You said neighborhood but in the book it had been a small village. Is it near Caltrain, or what is it a neighborhood if?
It’s part of the city of San Jose’s it’s at the very north end of N First St. It is where the San Francisco Bay tidal flats begin. There is a hodge pudge of mostly housing there.
I’m pretty sure it was originally a rail stop. There were several little stops between San Jose and Newark (the lone city that didn’t join together with the others to create Fremont).
Ecotopia was written in 1975. BART opened two years earlier. It’s odd the book doesn’t mention it as if there’s no existing rail. But the departure from our world was in 1955, so our 1960s and 1970s didn’t happen there. In the 1950s BART was in planning (there’s an exhibit at Diridon train station in San Jose). It was envisioned to go all the way around the Bay, like the Ecotopia metro. And San Jose was envisioned to get “streetcars returning”.
But in the BART vote, Santa Clara County and San Mateo County voted it down, saying Caltrain was enough for them, and it wanted to use its federal money on expressways instead. (Never mind that BART runs every 15 minutes and Caltrain ran every 1-2 hours, a major difference.)
And VTA light rail when it appeared, went through a car-oriented greenfield area north of downtown San Jose. When I took it to Tasman Boulevard in the 90s or 00s, then the northern terminus, a new street and future office park lots were under construction. My friend in Santa Clara said few residents took the light rail because it was three miles away from the residential areas. And when I attended a conference in Santa Clara in the 2010s, I rode the train looking for a supermarket, and the first one I saw was a half hour away in downtown San Jose (an urban-format Safeway). All this is unlike Ecotopia’s land use.
Yeah Santa Clara County cities have done a poor job with light rail station land use. They also have done a poor job in the long run at encouraging higher density housing and dense, walkable areas — preferring to go for large suburban office campuses in their boundaries to generate more valuable (and taxable) real estate. The result is not only bad for walkable urbanism, it’s resulted in ultra-long commute distances because there just isn’t enough affordable housing near these jobs.
The structural problems have been known for decades, with many attempts to slightly change the circumstances. However the reforms needed in the Bay Area to rectify things are still not ambitious enough to make significant progress.
Ecotopia is a science fiction Mike. Never happened, never will.
The voters of San Mateo and Santa Clara never got to vote on the BART bond. The Supervisors of both counties along with Marin County (the later more reluctant), decided not to join. Santa Clara left first, right at the beginning of the process, while San Mateo and Marin left just a year before the vote. San Mateo had good reason to leave, as the BART plan as it was would’ve closed down over half the existing stations on the Peninsula corridor.
My mom grew up in Vallejo/San Francisco and moved to San Jose in the 1950s. When I talked to her about Caltrain and me using it in the 80s-00s and its recent improvements, she didn’t recognize it. I said, “The train between San Francisco and San Jose. You told me you used to ride it.” Apparently it wasn’t called Caltrain then.
So Caltrain or whatever it has been called has been running for a century and it was running on the 1950s and 1970s, yet Callenbaugh doesn’t mention it, and makes it sound like there was no train until the Ecotopian one. So that’s one odd thing.
Mike, it was “the SP” before it was Caltrain. When freight moving on the line decreased to a trickle, the railroad sold the line to the State. UP (now) still has freight pickup and delivery trackage rights for what’s left. It’s basically some switchers in a couple of industrial clusters and one train per night each way between South San and San Jose.
I took a stab at applying Ecotopia-sized towns to Pugetopolis. There are two premises: (1) Large cities are broken up into neighborhoods of their dense areas, and their single-family areas are returned to nature. (2) Outside the cities, new minicities are built with 9,000 people in a compact area, with a half mile of open space between them.
In Seattle I wouldn’t subdivide existing villages, so the villages are the neighborhoods. My sense of an ideal village is probably larger than Callenbach’s: Center City (greater downtown) and the U-District work so well because they’re so large and have so many destinations together, that you don’t have to leave them more than once a month except maybe for work.
For the minicities, I looked at Kirkland to Renton, and how they were in the 1950s as a starting point, though with some nods to how they were in the 80s and are now. The minicities would have to be on a north-south corridor, so the natural place is the Bellevue Way-Lk Wash Blvd-Market Street arterial, which was originally a state highway. I assume it continued south of South Bellevue P&R but that’s been obliterated. I’m guessing the continuation was 118th/Coal Creek Parkway/Duvall Ave because they’re larger than surrounding streets.
So which of our villages/towns are closest to 9,000 people? I first tried the Spring District. That’s 2,000; so it would have to be five times larger. But some midrise buildings would be converted from offices to mostly housing, so it doesn’t mean five times more midrises.
Then I looked at Columbia City. 13,000; too high. Othello? It must be smaller. No, Othello is 84,000. What??? How is that possible? Center City had 50,000 in the early 90s. I don’t know what boundaries they’re using for Othello, maybe including both MLK and Rainier and NewHolly.
I then resorted to the microburbs. Medina has 2,956; so it would triple. ClydeHill has 3,100; slightly higher. Beaux Arts is a tiny 313.
So, there we go. We take the populations of Medina, Clyde Hill, and the Spring District, move them to Bellevue Way & NE 24th, pretend nobody else is living there, and give them midrises like the Spring District, and a strategic industrial/jobs base. Presto, one minicity. The next minicity south would start where downtown Bellevue does (NE 12th). The next one north would be around where 520 is, maybe subsuming the existing Yarrow Bay business cluster on the north side.
“My sense of an ideal village is probably larger than Callenbach’s: Center City (greater downtown) and the U-District work so well because they’re so large and have so many destinations together”
And this is why the Ecotopia vision is so flawed. The whole point of urban areas is aggregation. Break up the aggregation by trying to make each neighborhood an island in a sea of nature and you are giving away the best part of the city. Instead of reducing travel you are increasing it (frequency and/or distance) by making people leave their minicity to get to things they want or need. As you note there are some examples of almost minicities in the Puget Sound region, but the part you find the best is the opposite: a continuous urban fabric of a dozen square miles, not three-quarters of a square mile.
Ecotopia is a prime example of the “back-to-the-land” environmental thinking that is so common on the left – and that does so much to make things worse for the environment. 9k people in a half mile radius is only 11.5k/sqmi. For comparison Santa Monica has a population density of around 14.5k/sqmi, SF and Cambridge about 18k, Brooklyn is 38k, Barcelona is 41k, Paris is 54k. A string of Alviso’s around the Bay would have a fraction of the current population-where do all of the other people go? They move somewhere there are homes; someplace building on cheap land that used to be farms or open space. This isn’t a hypothetical, in actual environmentally conscious SF protests over displacement have led to rejecting an apartment building on a parking lot – even though there was no one to displace and SF is nominally a “transit first” not “parking first” city. Then when rents go out of control people move to Phoenix or Houston.
A Market St with minibuses every few minutes and taxis and electric delivery trucks wouldn’t be quiet, and neither could it handle all the traffic needed with two lanes if all of the surrounding skyscrapers were apartments. Breaking up a central business district like that would be terrible for transit, since areas with very centralized employment have the highest transit usage. See Calgary vs Dallas.
The way to get environmentally friendly urban spaces is to allow widespread medium density/mid-rise mixed use neighborhoods everywhere/as widely as possible (Ecotopia got the mixed use part right), with transit use rewarded by well defined business/commercial corridors and a strong CBD as a hub. The places with great urbanity, pedestrian scale, and transit use (cities I mention above, plus Montreal, Amsterdam, etc.) are all like this. Trying to build your cities as a collection of rural villages surrounded by natural open space just ends up being exurbs with extra steps, Corbusier’s failed towers-in-a-park urbanism scaled up to fail even greater.
“Marin County” environmentalism is a whole different offshoot that’s only partly related to the broader environmentalism movement. It’s all over the Bay Area but its most iconic moments have come from Marin County. They don’t just want to clean up the air and water; they think cities are unenvironmental and everybody should ideally live in farms. That dovetailed with other trends in the mid 20th century:
1. When the suburban movement started on the east coast, it was called “living in the country”. I saw that phrase in 1950s books set in the 1920s-1950s when I was little: it described what was essentially a small town that had become a bedroom community, but it didn’t use the word suburb. I guess that hadn’t become common yet. They felt like a country house was half as good as as a rural house or farm, or the best of both the urban/rural worlds.
2. My mom says San Jose wanted a “town and country” feel, meaning one-story buildings. I guess that was a phrase in the 50s. “We don’t want to be dense like San Francisco.”
So the California environmentalists entered this milieu where these trends were already happening, and they somehow got the idea “city bad, farm good, suburban house is almost like a farm”. So they end up living in suburban sprawl in a house that looks exactly like #1 and #2 that their parents had, and thinking they’re being environmentally sustainable unlike those awful city folk in apartments.
That didn’t happen in the northwest or the rest of the country that I’ve seen. The suburban envionmentalists I’ve met have many reasons for preferring a single-family house in a single-family neighborhood or a half acre of land, but I’ve never heard them claim their environmental footprint is smaller or more sustainable than cities. They just think it’s more convenient, the American dream, and has better social cohesion.
Meanwhile, compact city neighborhoods use less energy and materials per capita than their low-density counterparts. And they can walk to more things, and frequent transit is easier to provide. That’s where the environmental benefits of cities come in. Living on farms has its benefits too, but it can’t scale to hundreds of millions of people.
Ecotopia is surprisingly enlightened in that regard: it’s written in the 1970s California milieu, but it favors compact neighborhoods and 4-ish story buildings. That would be antithetical to the Marin County environmentalists. It’s kind of a hybrid of urbanism, environmentalism, and the countercultural free-love, tree-worshipping mentality that had its heyday in the 1970s. It was clearly written before AIDS. And it has black cities seceding from Ecotopia, on the theory that integration wasn’t fully possible even if some cities could peacefully be integrated.
“A string of Alviso’s around the Bay would have a fraction of the current population”
One thing to remember: the total population was much lower in the 1970s. The suburban ring more or less ended at Vallejo, Berkeley, Los Gatos, and maybe Marin City. The 35-mile gap between San Francisco and San Jose was unusually large for suburban-city commutes, but that’s because the SF-Oakland-SJ triangle was a bit more populous than other metros and the distance was what it was. When I went down in 1987 on Greyhound, Vacaville was an isolated cow town far away, and suburban development really began at Vallejo. Now it has spread out beyond Vacaville to Stockton, and Pittsburg and Petaluma are major commuting origins. So the “ring around the Bay” like Alviso had a lower population too, and a chain of minicities in rural land there was more imaginable. Now the suburban sprawl dwarfs it and spreads out so far you’d have to go out a hundred miles from San Francisco to find a similar candidate place.
I don’t take the 9,000 target too seriously: Callenbach may have just pulled it out of a hat, and I don’t know how far he thought out his urban design. I’d assume a few tens of thousands would be better. It’s just a thought experiment to see what 9,000-person minicities would look like.
“9k people in a half mile radius is only 11.5k/sqmi”
He didn’t say minicities would have a half-mile radius. He said there would be a half mile of open space between them.
The quote from the book:
“The entire population of Alviso, about 9,000 people, lives within a radius of a half mile from the transit station.”
I don’t see distance between mini cities specified, but a 5 min ride between them on the inter-urban is. Pre-war interurbans (presumably the model for using that word) averaged 30-45mph, which at 30moh would be 2.5mi between centers in 5 min, or 1.5 mi between minicities if they are each 0.5mi radius. 9k in a 1.25 mi radius is a density of 1,833/sqmi. This is less than the density of the Atlanta or Jacksonville urban areas, two places known for sprawl. In 1970 SF had a population of 715k, at 1833/sqmi this would take up 390 sqmi – New York City has 304sqmi of land area.
“Corbusier’s failed towers-in-a-park urbanism scaled up to fail”
Scaled down. Le Corbusier’s towers were highrises. This is like towers in the park with a lowrise zoning limit. And Le Corbusier didn’t really account for all the parking spaces or highway lanes and interchange land that would be required, or the physical/environmental/social impacts they’d create. To be fair, in the pre-automobile age it was probably hard to comprehend all the ramifications and scale. Broadacre City’s “farm stores” became gas-station mini-marts at freeway exits. Those Cheetos and soda and beer and spaghetti cans, probably not from local farms, and probably not as nutritious.
And people in the 1950s, when they were moving to greenfield suburbs en masse and building freeways, they didn’t foresee that jobs and retail would move out of downtown, or that intercity trains and buses and local transit would be gutted, or that women would work en masse. They thought it would all continue as is, just with more space and highway conveniences.
Scaled up. Corbusier’s tower in a park was a single building or a best a partial neighborhood that was somewhat dense surrounded by open space that both made the total density lower and tore the urban fabric making that open space dead space. This is a whole mini-city of several neighborhoods surrounded by much larger open space also leading to low total density and a discontinuous urban fabric which ultimately leads to worse environmental impacts. The buildings may be smaller scale but the underlying urban planning is larger scale.