by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Countryside campaigners are calling on the government to rethink existing eco-town plans.
The Campaign for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE) claims the nation has been misled and the planned eco-towns will not be as green as they seem.
CPRE's Head of Planning, Marina Pacheco, said that to begin with the Commission supported the eco-towns initiative for who would object to exemplar schemes built to high environmental standards which provide the affordable homes the nation desperately needs? However, she said further, that they now believe that they, and the country, have been led astray.
“What will this programme deliver?” she asked. “It appears increasingly to be about spin with very little substance.”
The Green (Living) Review and its editor, this writer, also initially supported the idea of those “eco-towns” but, for some time already, doubts have been cropping into my mind about this, especially as regards to the “forcing” of half of the residents in such towns to not to have a car by basically making it against the statutes for them to have one. Anything that is compulsion like that cannot be supported. It is not ethical to do such things and to compare it, as the government tries to do, with the likes of Freiburg in Germany, mentioning the fact that many people there do not own a car. While this is the case, the residents there decided on their own free will to go without a car. They were not told they could not have one. They, and Germany as a whole, have a much better transit system than does the UK.
The entire thing is nothing but spin but, then again, we have hardly come to expect much else from this so-called Labor government in the UK.
Marina Pacheco said the CPRE's key concerns included siting, with many of the proposals likely to be 'car-dependent housing estates' with no working transport links.
And this is also one of my concerns especially as regards to the people not being permitted to won a car. If those are “housing estate” kind of “eco-towns” a long way, as it would appear, from elsewhere then that idea is not going to work from the start. Or what we are going to find is, what has been talked about in other such schemes in other places, and that are dormitory estates where cars are not permitted to enter. This means that need to be parked outside a certain perimeter at night and whenever, people will cycle or walk to and from home and then use the car to get about the country and countryside. This will defeat the object.
CPRE is also concerned that most of the sites were predominantly greenfield with two actually lying in designated greenbelts.
The organisation also claims that most of the proposed eco-towns go against local plans agreed with communities and therefore have no local democratic mandate with site-selection based on arbitrary, mainly developer-led, bids rather than sound planning in the wider public interest.
It must be said that from all that we have seen over the last years the fact that they may have no local democratic mandate to do any of what they are planning will not stop this government from doing what it wants to do.
"We are urging the government to go back to the drawing board," said Ms Pacheco.
"Many of these shortlisted schemes are recycled, failed proposals. The government insists that eco-towns must be freestanding new settlements. But by refusing to look at alternatives, such as eco-quarters and redevelopment sites already coming through the planning pipeline it is missing a golden opportunity"
Instead of the stupid idea of "Eco-Towns" that will not, in the least, benefit us, we should, nay we must, concentrate instead of greening our existing towns and cities and turning them into eco-towns themselves. This is much more economic as well, and is being advocated by a large number of green architects, planners and developers. It can be done as the achievements in other countries, including the USA, have shown. It can and will work, especially if it is community-led.
Let us green our existing housing stock in our current towns, cities and even villages, build some more needed homes as and where on brownfield sites (they are there, whatever some may like to claim), but let us ditch once and for all the stupid “eco-towns” notion. This is eco-spin and nothing more and about as useful as the eco-button for your PC.
© M Smith (Veshengro), July 2008
Scrap eco-town plans rural campaigners tell government
