ABSTRACT
This chapter explores challenges to achieving sustainable practices, such as institutional inertia, in a world threatened by climate change using the concept of urban fractals, demonstration projects. The ecopolis is the most important, evolutionary step in urbanism: built to fit its place, co-operating with nature, a place of human culture that consciously sustains the cycles of atmosphere, water, nutrients and biology in healthy balance whilst empowering the powerless, feeding the hungry, and sheltering the homeless. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Halifax EcoCity Project (HEP) coevolved with the Urban Ecology Australia Inc. (UEA), which had convened the 1992 Second International EcoCity Conference. Although modern planning systems, including the New Urbanism, acknowledge the importance of land use they rarely apply available knowledge with the kind of practical ecological sensitivity demonstrated by McHarg in 1971. Catalysing urban cultural fractals can only occur with a high level of participation in their design, development and maintenance by the wider community.
