On April 14th, 2010, I gave the closing keynote at the Municipal Green Building Conference and Expo, help by the US Green Building Council’s LA Chapter, and SoCal Gas Company. You can watch the full hour-long video here.

Here I am presenting my 2010 talk, “Detroit, Dallas & Despotism: A 3D View of Sustainability” to an audience of about 1000 people in Los Angeles.

After all of this talk in the past decade about the need for green buildings, the question is no longer WHY we need to go green, the question is HOW. American cities are confronting serious issues and are they are in dire need of tangible, deployable & affordable solutions.

This talk explores the lost city of Detroit by analyzing its decline from the once great “American Dream City” and mapping out a plan for transforming it into an urban oasis of sustainability. The lessons learned here could be applied to every rust belt and industrial city in the country.

In stark contrast, we investigate the city of Dallas, a place born from the oil industry but now developing one of the most sustainable city blocks in the US through my work with Urban Re:Vision. The third “D” of the talk delves into the growing trend of despotism and the strange forces working against the greening of the economy.

This is the talk I am giving around the country until October. My new talk will debut at the West Coast Green Conference on October 1st, 2010, which will be what I present through 2011.

Green architect Eric Corey Freed lectures on “Detroit, Dallas & Despotism” from Eric Corey Freed on Vimeo.