GreenCities

Reprinting the Adelaide Green Cities Handbook

The original Green Cities Handbook was first published at the end of May, 1991 by FoE Nouveau.

It as meant to be a discussion starter on how we might change cities to be better for people and the environment.

It was published a year before the Ecocity 2 conference held in Adelaide, and was inspired by ideas from Peter Berg (Planet Drum Foundation), Richard Register (from Urban Ecology in the US, convenor of the first ecocity conference), and Peter Newman, who identified the benefits of a low energy, car-free city.

Paul Downton, architect of Christie Walk, a fragment of eco-city, was involved with the Green Cities Project team, comprised of students from the Mawson Graduate Centre of Environmental Studies at the Uni of Adelaide.

The Handbook has been out of print for the last two decades, and the only copies available were photocopies of photocopies. Adelaide Friends of the Earth decided they would reprint the original, as a start to revising and updating the handbook for the new millenium. We scanned the original copies, OCRed the scans, then edited and corrected the resultant text. We’ve tried to format it similar to the original, as close to the 1991 version as possible. Some things have changed since it was published, but a lot of the information in the Handbook is still relevant.

We invite you to peruse the original, and share your thoughts on how we might improve and update it. Adelaide FoE will be holding a number of workshops to discuss the update: let us know if you’re interested in getting involved.

View the reprint here: GreenCities Adelaide draft