What We Can Learn from African Villagers
Lessons from the Third International EcoCities Conference

by Joan Bokaer, Liz Walker, and Richard Register, interviewed by Scott Sherman

I N JANUARY 1996, 320 PEOPLE FROM 27 COUNTRIES gathered at the Third International EcoCities Conference in Yoff, Senegal, a 500-year-old fishing village of 40,000. Together they asked the crucially important question: How do we build communities in balance and harmony with nature?

Scott Sherman interviewed three of the major American organizers of the conference. Joan Bokaer and Liz Walker are cofounders of EcoVillage at Ithaca, in upstate New York. Richard Register is author of EcoCity Berkeley  (North Atlantic Books, 1987), which demonstrates how Berkeley, California, could be transformed into an ecologically sustainable community, and founder of two ecological activist organizations, Urban Ecology and EcoCity Builders. Richard was also the convenor of the first International EcoCities Conference held in Berkeley in 1990.

Scott Sherman: Could you give me a general overview of the conference?

Joan Bokaer: It really was a very exciting time where people from the industrial countries got to experience a very different way of life and discover how much the ecocity movement has in common with the traditional style villages.

Scott: So you feel that in Senegal they are already living up to the ideal of ecologically sustainable communities?

Joan:They are, but they're losing it very quickly. One of the reasons that the organizers from the traditional villages wanted us to come was to make a statement to Africans that they have something worth holding on to. In this regard, the conference was an enormous success. It really affirmed the traditional villages. What they've had for many centuries is what we're now trying to re-create.

Scott: So what do you think the lessons were for Americans who are already choosing to live in intentional communities or who are trying to create their own ecovillages?

Joan: We're on the right track! The biggest lesson was how much we have in terms of material possessions. It was really quite a shock ...

Scott:Was this a shock to the Africans or to the Americans?

Joan: Well, there were people there from 26 countries, not just Senegal and the United States. But people from the industrialized countries had the greatest shock, and were actually feeling quite guilty just how many resources we use compared to how little they use there. In Yoff, there was just a genuine feeling of well-being, of just being able to roam around in this pedestrian village of 40,000 people. It's so alive, and there's such a richness. There's a 500-year-old history of sustainable living and cooperative economies and living in close relationship to the natural world, and the social and economic structures which have evolved over all these years--you walk around in the streets, and it's densely populated, but really peaceful. People are getting along, and you feel very safe--which isn't true for some other parts of Africa.

Scott: How do you see the connection between the ideas of the conference--ecovillages and ecocities--and the communities movement in America?

Liz Walker:There's a lot in common in terms of people's intense desires for a sense of community and a sense of living in harmony with the natural world. I think that ecovillages and ecocities are an attempt to carry that to a grander scale than most of the intentional communities that already exist. We have two major issues that we're trying to address here in the human dilemma. One is the sense of isolation that so many people in the modern world face, and therefore there's a need for a sense of community and a sense of belonging. The other is the accelerating environmental crisis, and the need to do something about it, to live more lightly on the Earth, and to do that on a village-wide and city-wide scale. So it's building on the ideas that bring people to intentional communities, and just expanding them to a larger audience.

Yoff is remarkable because there are 40,000 people living together and there's no police force, and nobody who goes homeless. People don't go hungry either because the villagers have a very strongly ingrained custom of hospitality, and typically, when any family is having a meal, anyone can just walk in the door and join them. They have a very highly evolved social system, from which we can learn a lot.

Scott: What was the main purpose of the conference? Was it to build an international network of support for the ecocity idea, or was it to focus on the problems encroaching upon these traditional villages?

Liz:There were three major purposes: first, to study the traditional villages from all over the world--to study how they have lived lightly on the earth and have developed social systems which are very much community-based; and second, to look at emerging modern ecovillages and ecocities. There was a wonderful presentation by Jeff Kenworthy from Australia. He's been studying ecological city designs around the world and he had a great slide show on different examples of cities that were either successfully implementing new planning techniques, or ones that were total disasters. The third purpose was to develop a network of people who are working on these issues and who will stay in touch. This is especially important because of the upcoming UN Conference on Habitat Two which which will be focusing on the environment. That's in June in Istanbul.

Scott: As I talk to you, I'm on the 46th floor of an office building in Seattle, looking out over suburbs stretching far away to the horizon in all directions. How can the concepts of ecocities apply to a major urban metropolis like this which is already in place with millions of people? How can we retrofit existing cities and transform them into ecocities?

Liz:We talked about that a lot at Yoff. There are a number of issues to look at: zoning; land-use planning; drawing an urban growth boundary around the outskirts of the city so as to create an urban greenbelt; withdrawing from sprawl; trying to create zones of pedestrian activity in the downtown area which will revitalize these areas; creating whole centers of a city that are pedestrian-focused and multi-use so that there are commercial buildings mixed in with residential; and creating transit corridors that really work, so that public transit is subsidized and is the driving force (so to speak) of getting around.

One of our keynote speakers was Cleon Ricardo de Santos from Curitiba, Brazil. We saw in his slide show how his city's recycling programs are tied to a barter system which provides homeless people with essential resources. He also showed Curitiba's transit corridors, and their 24-hour downtown areas that keep the heartbeat of the city always pulsing. They've done wonderful educational efforts with children as well, on how to live more sustainably in their city.

Scott: Could you say more about the atmosphere in Yoff itself? How is this village of 40,000 people different from typical towns and cities and communities in the West?

Richard Register:The village has very narrow streets, which are all made of sand. What is unique in Yoff is that they have compounds--they have extended larger families, where there are six to 12 rooms around a central courtyard with a tree or two inside. A lot of their social life centers around this larger extended family in this open space. So it has a sense of enormous openness. (This is different from most fenced-off and gated-in American housing tracts, but is increasingly found in intentional communities and cohousing developments.)

There is an extraordinary peacefulness which perhaps has to do with the closeness, and the sandy streets, and the fact that Yoff is totally pedestrian--you feel very safe there. And it's very dark; they have electricity but they don't use much. So you see all these beautiful stars at night. Because of the lack of cars, there's not much air pollution or haze, and there are few street lights, so you can always see the stars and moon at night in the desert air. You walk along these rather dark canyons with the close-in walls and you occasionally open on a square, and you're always walking on this very soft sand. It's kind of a dream-like environment that you're floating through at night.

In the daytime, the children are absolutely guileless--they'll go up to you and smile and laugh and want to shake your hands. There are no material things in the way. With the adults too, there's a warm, genuine presence. They extended a very open reception with celebrations, dancing, and drumming, and they fed 175 of us for eight days.

Scott: What lessons might there be for intentional communities here in the West?

Richard:Yoff is not an intentional community in the traditional sense that you get together with people with similar minds and dispositions. Yoff is a traditional fishing village community into which people have been born for generations.

Intentional communities like to adopt ecologically healthy and sustainable practices. A lot of these details are excellent: appropriate technology, the intention of becoming much healthier vis-a-vis the environment, living lightly on the land, caring for one another, sharing life experiences, being peaceful and just towards one another and towards nature--that's all there. But the physical structure seems to be almost not dealt with.

By physical structure, I mean not the buildings but the physical structure of the community. So what's needed here are the streetscapes, the buildings organized with a great deal of diversity close together, a sense of this "access by proximity"--that is, you get access not by driving somewhere or by walking a long distance; you have access because things are close to you. So that seems to be missing in most intentional community and eco village work. That's a wonderful thing to realize, because it's just a small addition to what's already there, which is very profound and important--it could be the missing element that pulls all the other pieces together. We're at a very interesting juncture right now.

Scott: Currently, in Africa as well as much of the rest of the world, people seem to be going away from communities. They are following the Western industrial model of development which often leads to urban sprawl and cities out of balance with nature. Do you fear that this is happening in Africa?

Richard: Absolutely. The Africans fear that as well. The city of Yoff is being overwhelmed by Dakar, the capital city of Senegal. The old tribal land is being sold off to developments. The Dakar sprawl is consuming all the land around this little village. The agriculture is disappearing. Meanwhile, the population is growing and the African national debt is so large that each person on the continent would have to work an average of 42 years for nothing other than paying off their debt! It's ludicrous. It hobbles them so badly that they are trying to find any way out of this mess. There's an air of desperation when you're broke. It's difficult to know what to do about this, but I'm glad they're still sincere at exploring ecologically healthy ways of living in the future.

Scott: Do you think that the ecovillage movement can become more widespread in the future and serve as an alternative model to the Western industrial urban sprawl?

Richard: Well, I'm hopeful, because there are so many growing signs of change that are worldwide now--appropriate technology, better transport, and a strong concern for democracy. Plus the growth of the intentional communities movement, and other people looking for cooperative solutions: the legacy of the anti-war movement, the people working to bring labor and the environment together. There are so many good things in this movement towards more democracy and cooperation. Currently, there's about 20 to 30 percent of the people who are very aware of environmental issues, who are concerned about restoration of natural habitats, biodiversity, the ozone hole, collapsing fisheries, etc.

So we have a kind of a readiness for the next step which is the one that integrates all the pieces--so I think that's where the ecovillages come in. But I think people have to get over their addiction to the automobile, and face up to the fear of the change in their own neighborhoods. They'll have to stop escaping to the country, they'll have to think about reshaping the inner cities and even the suburbs. They'll have to start creating more density and diversity toward the centers of cities. If people do go to the country, they should do it like some of the intentional communities are doing--for example, what Albert Bates is doing at The Farm--around the idea of building a real full-bodied village: not just a residential area with gardens, but a place where people have employment, where they trade with people in neighboring communities. If all these things start coming together, I think things are quite hopeful. If you put it all together, you see there's a whole system, and then you're empowered to do an awful lot.

Scott:How did the ecocity conference at Yoff build on the recent Ecovillages and Sustainable Communities conference at Findhorn in November 1995?

Richard: It didn't build on it much at all. There were only four people at Yoff who attended both conferences. There wasn't much of a connection--at Yoff, we were dealing with the urban scene as well as the rural scene. That was very different about Yoff--it was a direct effort to bring the city and the village together and an effort to deal with the city itself. There was some of that at Findhorn, but not much.

In Findhorn, almost all you saw were white faces. There were maybe a couple of people from Hawaii, and one from Africa. But at Yoff, it was 70 percent nonwhite. Many people were from local villages in Senegal, but we also had people from Borneo, Malaysia, Indonesia, Ghana, Mali, Zaire, Tunisia, Mozambique, South Africa, and from all over Europe--they came from about 27 countries in all.

Scott:At Yoff, did many people come from intentional communities?

Richard: At Findhorn, most of the people who came either lived in intentional communities or wanted to live in intentional communities. At Yoff, it was the minority. I'm not sure if there were any. Many people lived in modern sprawling urban centers and were just interested in transforming the social and economic structures of the cities that existed. Perhaps that's symptomatic of the fact that the two camps--people building ecovillages and people in intentional communities--haven't been in close enough touch. We need to bring the two movements together.

Scott Sherman is an attorney who has studied sustainable architecture with Sim Van der Ryn. He is currently working on a book on sustainability issues, and is planning to enter the doctorate program in the School of Natural Resources at the University of Michigan.