Author(s)

P. Viswanathan & T. Sharpe

Abstract

\“We should be careful to discriminate between what the notion of the City can offer and what it's offering for us for millenniums, and which we are now making the city into which is very much what you are saying an environment which is not very conducive to, what you might call, the good society. The fact remains that if we eliminate all the cities from this continent, what remains is not much. In fact, even though we Americans tend to be very sceptical about the presence of the city, we must recognize that the City is still the place where things are happening in scale and in quality which is very real otherwise.” Paolo Soleri. This paper is an introduction to a new philosophy and outlook for eco-city design. Its analyses how to make existing cities more eco-sensitive with the help of a ‘live’ case study, an eco-city representing human unity in India called the \“Auroville International Township”, and uses this to discuss the starting point for the design of new urban sustainable settlements. Keywords: ecopsychology, environmentally sustainable design, Auroville, green architecture, urban design of new cities. 1 Introduction \“Nature is good at conservation - of energy, water and matter. It is an exemplar of passive design and it looks after its own economy not just locally but globally.”Lovelock’s [1] Gaia principle. Ecourbanism, a term coined by Miguel Ruano [2], \“defines the development of multi-dimensional sustainable human communities within harmonious and balanced built environments”. Ecourbanism is also a term now commonly associated with design of green communities and making existing cities more environmentally sensitive. Currently, over half the population of the world is

Keywords

ecopsychology, environmentally sustainable design, Auroville, green architecture, urban design of new cities.