What’s Next: Jolly Old Eco-land
Come 2016, the ideal English country home may no longer be the thatch-roofed cottage or grand manor house so many of us have come to know. Instead, it may be the brand-new home a few hills over, in one of 10 government-mandated “ecotowns”—developments of 5,000 to 20,000 carbon-neutral houses that Prime Minister Gordon Brown hopes will ease England’s acute housing shortage.
According to the government’s latest vision for the towns, residents of all ethnicities, ages, and incomes will walk or cycle to newly created jobs, schools, and shops. If they must commute by train or bus, new stations will be waiting across open green spaces. The homes will be rated at least a four (out of six) on England’s Code for Sustainable Homes—in part to counter the environmental damage that so much building would inevitably create. They will be affordable—especially the 30 percent to 40 percent priced for low-income families, and their design will be overseen by various professional bodies, including one created by Prince Charles, long a critic of England’s modern architecture.
A recent YouGov poll found that Brits supported eco-towns 5-to-1, even though many might well have grown up in the homogeneous developments the government stopped building in the 1960s. Observers explain that several small, charming “eco-villages”—such as Living Villages’ Wintles near Bishop’s Castle in Shropshire—as well as larger green communities in Sweden, Germany, and the Netherlands, have paved the way. Plus England’s National Housing and Planning Advice Unit recently estimated that the next generation of homebuyers could face house prices 10 times their annual earnings if new homes aren’t built.
But eco-towns certainly have their opponents. The Bard Campaign, for one, fears that the government will impose an ecotown near Stratford-upon-Avon with or without local support—even though the government has insisted that eco-towns will go through the proper process. The result, Bard campaigners say, will be a slapped-up, expensive, and ugly blight on pristine countryside, and its poor transport links will force residents to drive to work. In September, the campaign succeeded in securing a judicial review of the government’s eco-town policy, so that the government must now justify its eco-town program before the High Court. “If Gordon Brown’s government won’t listen to local people, perhaps they will to the judiciary,” David Bliss, the campaign’s chairman, said at the time.
Other critics, such as Living Villages founder Bob Tomlinson, believe eco-towns’ quality will suffer. “The eco-town opportunity has been hijacked by the bigger developers who generally have one objective in mind—profit—and their view of how to make that profit is to build as cheaply as possible,” Tomlinson says. He also believes that so many homes in one development make community-building impossible. “But when you have people relating to each other as a community, they become much more self-sufficient and less dependent on the state—just like in the old days, when villages had to look after themselves.”
At his Wintles, for instance, homes face each other in circles of 12 and share garden plots, encouraging residents to chat. To lessen the desire residents might have to move up and out, Tomlinson strove to make the homes aesthetically pleasing—integrating architectural aspects of the local medieval village, including plenty of wood.
But the government’s ecotowns might well create community too, says Gideon Amos, chief executive of the Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA), an environmental nonprofit with whom the government has consulted about its eco-towns.
“The real thing to fear here is that instead of bold, exemplar settlements pushing the boundaries of future urban design, ecotowns are dismissed, and the option of creating new towns is ruled out for another 40 years,” Amos says. “The TCPA has been critical of the process the government has used, but the alternative, existing planning process has its drawbacks too: It would take about seven years for regional and local planners to bring forward new sites, and even then they might not.”
The next news about ecotowns’ future will come when the government announces its final short list of eco-town sites in January.
Read more stories by Jennifer Roberts.