Industrial regeneration projects abroad that could provide lessons for Athens is just one of the issues being debated at the EcoWeek 2008 conference that began at Zappeion Hall and continue through Monday.

 Sustainable living in an urban environment > Distinguished architects and town planners debate ways of minimizing our ecological footprint on the planet at Athens conference.

In a project in Texas where large areas of concrete had to be broken up, the rule was that no rubble was to leave the site, but pieces of concrete were used effectively as paving around the new structure. Julie Bargmann, a landscape designer who worked on this project, will be talking about this and other industrial and urban ecology projects during the conference. Other speakers include Ben Gill of BioRegional, Ken Yeang, Greek architects Alexandros Tombazis and Costas Tsipiras.

Prominent architects who are promoting sustainable solutions for buildings and towns around the world are meeting in Athens until Monday to exchange views on how to make a zero impact on the environment. As next year’s deadline approaches for Greece to comply with European Union Directive 2002/91 on the energy efficiency of buildings, an increasing number of local professionals in the field are focusing on sustainable living in the urban environment.

“It’s about choices”, one of the speakers, landscape architect Julie Bargmann, told a press conference, “and we have to look at who is affected by these choices, who benefits and who suffers. As designers we have to present these choices to our clients, to tell them of the consequences of their choices and that means educating them”. These clients are all too frequently major corporations and state authorities as well as homeowners, and where there is little realization or concern for repercussions on the environment, the process requires what Bargmann called the “hard hat” approach.

“It’s useful to define ecology in contemporary terms. I would argue that ecology does not necessarily equal nature only. Ecologists used to exclusively work on ecosystems that were purely natural, now a lot of them are realizing that they need to talk about urban ecology and I also use the term industrial ecology because that’s what we are dealing with in this world today”. Bargmann worked on the Ford Rouge project in the US. “It was a large industrial site where coke ovens were slated to be dumped but instead we worked with scientists to make a plan for regenerative gardens in juxtaposition with coke ovens that were visible to the public”.

In another project, in Texas, where large areas of concrete had to be broken up, no rubble left the site, but pieces of concrete were used effectively as paving around the new structure. Instead of carting soil off to a landfill, Bargmann used what she calls the “dirt dance”, the choreography of all the different types of soil that could enable healthy soil to be used again on the site.

Architect Elias Messinas, Director of Ecoweek 2008 which is organizing the conference, pointed out that this type of approach would be extremely relevant to the old Athens airport at Hellenikon, a very polluted site destined to become a metropolitan park but which first has to be regenerated. “What do you do with the construction debris, even just from the old runways, for example? This is a very good thing to think about when decisions are being made” said Messinas. “The airport site is being chopped up between different interest groups, with four or five different Municipalities involved. A lot of groups are involved in the decision-making process and we don’t really have a serious Ministry of the Environment”.