Creating Sustainable Futures for Southwestern Cities: The ProtoCity Approach in the Ciudad Juarez, Mexico/El Paso, Texas Metroplex - Design with the Desert: Conservation and Sustainable Development - page 534

using the wastes as feedstock for eco-industrial parks. In hindsight, this type of approach
may have helped prevent some of the ecological disasters caused by hurricanes Katrina
and Rita, the massive release of oil from the Deep Water Horizon oil drilling rig explosion
in 2010, and the 5800 mile 2 Gulf dead zone that now characterizes this formerly abundant,
vital ecosystem.
Today, we call this approach ecoBalance ™ , a process in which decisions related to the built
environment are informed by the full lifecycle of resources and in which by-products—
intentional or unintentional, benign or toxic—are viewed as resources. 2 Through the work
with McHarg, I learned lessons that would guide the rest of my career: the city, including
the public, private, and non-profit sectors, requires considerable coordination to support
measurable and sustained regeneration.
31.2 Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems
In the 40 years subsequent to this McHarg-inspired initiative, the Center for Maximum
Potential Building Systems (CMPBS) has worked with communities along the U.S.-Mexico
border, indigenous populations along Nicaragua's Atlantic Coast, ecovillages, American
Indian Nations, university campuses, prominent federal building greening initiatives, a
rural Chinese village and farm, and the preliminary design and plan for a 50,000 person
EcoCity in Morocco. The experience of implementing a spectrum of tailored solutions in
a kaleidoscope of cultures and ecologies helped prepare us for undertaking a project in a
region as economically, ecologically, and socially complex as the border cities of El Paso
and Juarez.
Key to understanding and regenerating the ecology of a place is establishing a frame-
work to understand the conditions that influence how decisions are made and how an
altered ecology of the city region is evolving. Cities are also producing unique ecosys-
tems evolved from their surroundings. Cities are undergoing rapid transformation, as
evidenced by the concepts presented elsewhere in this topic.
This realization grew out of our National Input-Output/Life Cycle Assessment/
Geographic Information Systems model development in the mid-1990s, supported by
a Cooperative Agreement from the U.S. EPA. This approach spatially overlaid the 12.5
million businesses tracked by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis with environmen-
tal impact data from the U.S. EPA, including greenhouse gases, criteria air pollutants,
and toxic releases. An algorithmic correlation of dollar equivalency and human impact
revealed a cell-by-cell accounting with the greatest NAICS (North American Industry
Classification System) impact located along the urban edges. The pattern was consistent:
Urban areas of higher population tended to mediate impacts while rural areas took on the
brunt of the pollution (Figure 31.1). If we are to “save our planet,” a very different planning
paradigm is needed: one that uses the city, combined with its rural partners, to trigger
systemic planetary health and well-being.
By the early 1990s CMPBS was well-established in Austin, Texas, and collaborated
with City of Austin staff to establish the first municipal green building program in the
world: the Austin Green Building Program. 3 The green building movement quickly
spread from city to state and now, just 22 years later, the United States has metrics
for green at almost every scale including home, commercial, school, neighborhood,