The Blue Zones of the Eco City

blue zones of the eco city

The Blue Zones of the EcoCity

While environmentalists concern themselves with making the world Green, Dan Buettner focuses on Blue. His Blue Zones series of books take a scientific approach to measuring and optimizing human health and happiness.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that these blue zones are also central to the Eco-City framework.

At the intersection of the park, main street, and transportation grids, the Blue Zone is dedicated to health, education, and community welfare. Easily accessed by short walks, bike, transit, and auto, the Blue Zone bridges the Green Zone of parks, urban agriculture, and water, as well as the Pink Zone of work, shopping, and hospitality.

Together these uses create a cellular form, blue at the nucleus, with green surrounding, which draws people toward a balance of family, education, recreation, food, play, socializing, choice, wealth, activity, health, meditation, volunteering, outdoors, co-ops, performances, arts, positivity, purpose, engagement, serendipity, choice, and care.

In the following series, we will be focusing on these Blue metrics with an eye toward measuring how our built environment can help create and foster the “happy” society in tandem with Economic and Ecological Prosperity. Can Green at No Cost also be Blue at No Cost? Let’s measure it and find out!

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Richard Vermeulen - Construction Economist for Green Building

Richard Vermeulen is the construction economist creating profitable sustainability in the built environment. He’s the founder of GreenLight™, author of Green at No Cost, and developer of the Total Benefit Analysis and The Value Process as well as co-CEO, lead economist, and chief estimator for Vermeulens. Richard has developed industry-leading standards for estimating and data-basing complex construction projects throughout North America. In addition to consulting for thousands of major projects over 30 years, Richard has designed and built residential and commercial projects, from hammering nails to hound-dogging bureaucracies. He has traveled extensively, always with an awareness of how cities do and don’t work.

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