Nick Clegg calls for new garden cities and suburbs

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

The British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has made a call for a new generation of garden cities that has been cheered by the Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA) and the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA).

Clegg also said that the UK has the smallest new homes in Western Europe and that in the future housebuilders should create light and spacious, flexible homes with lots of private and open spaces.

However, and one can but agree with them, the CPRE say what about building on brownfield land and improving the existing towns and cities.

We do not need Eco-Towns, as were proposed by the previous Labor government, nor do we need these so-called garden cities and suburbs. There are existing towns and cities and homes within them that need improving and greening and there is enough brownfield land in towns and cities that could become parks and gardens.

But, as we can see, it is a case of jobs for the boys, in this case the architects and building companies, such as Wimpy and Barrats, and the like.

The same people who lost out when the Eco-Towns fell by the wayside are now to be getting a little boost, it would appear.

There is no need for any of this building and there is not even any need to build new homes as there are enough empty homes in Britain to house the homeless population of this country several times over, including social housing stock that has been removed even from the empty housing register, such as the Ocean Estate in Stepney.

The destruction of the Robin Hood Estate in Poplar also is not necessary as the people would really love to remain living there, though they might like having the places done up a little.

However, seeing where those housing estates are the land is far too valuable for housing the poorer in society. There is lots of money to be made from the land if can but be sold to developers, which is exactly the fate earmarked for the Robin Hood Estate.

The British government establishment has no interest in the people, and it does not matter which party is “in charge” but only in money that they can get, by way of backhanders, from the people they favor.

RIBA and other groups only think of profit also and talk about of getting the country building again. Refurbishing is also part of building but we toss away homes in the same way that we toss away a supposedly obsolete cell phone or PC.

The throwaway society has even arrived in the housing sector, it would appear, and I have seen several examples of such stupidity over the years now. Such as when in Hackney, some decades past, a large estate of pre-World War Two homes, several thousand of them, and in place of which was built a housing area with just under five hundred homes. No wonder we have a homelessness crisis.

We need no new garden cities and suburbs, we need to green our existing towns and cities.

© 2012

Do Eco-Towns have a future (in the UK and elsewhere)?

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

“Although currently out-of-favour with the UK government, eco-towns may still offer the best hope for creating sustainable communities”, stated the Economist recently in an article but eco-towns are not the answer. They are not the answer to the UK housing crisis nor the answer to tackling climate change.

When it comes to the lack of (affordable) homes in the UK we best look first at the millions of empty homes (and other properties that could be converted into homes and squatters can show us the way there) rather than building new.

And when it comes to tackling climate change by have eco-friendly homes then retrofitting existing homes, and greening our cities, towns and villages, as far as homes and buildings are concerned must come before building new eco-towns, as they were planned by the Blair/Brown administration in the UK.

The UK has enough empty homes, let alone other properties that can be converted, capable of housing all of Britain's homeless and those of the Republic of Ireland. We just must bring them back into use.

The proposal of the Blair/Brown clique never had anything to do with new homes and homes that were environmentally friendly but all to do with giving jobs to the boys. The boys in this case the builders that were going to be awarded the contracts such as Barratts and Laing. That is why self-build was taken out of the equation from the very start.

Environmentally conscious people had been asked to be included in the eco-town process but as self-build projects and, to my knowledge, were rejected as the towns were also to be in areas chosen by the government (and the builders).

While eco-towns are a nice concept and the BedZED development in Beddington, Surrey often being citied as an eco-town, and also a certain part of Freiburg in Germany, they are NOT towns but small parts of towns or just, as in the case of BedZED, a “green” building development.

We can only green our towns as they are and, as already said, there are enough buildings available that are empty, including millions of homes, that just need to be refurbished and rejuvenated.

The infrastructure in Britain is indeed in dire straights but that too only needs the right kind of will and, ideally, the enthusiasm of the right kind of people doing things for themselves, and that especially as to “homes" and communities, rather than being done by government appointed builders and contractors. Most people only need to funds to get things done, or the material and tools and things soon would change. But that is not even on the radar of the government. No one can get backhanders from such a scheme now.

Taking a leaf out of the book of Christiania in Copenhagen may be a good idea here too. Those folks, who often were and still are referred to as Hippies and Pot Heads, were and are great visionaries. They took over an abandoned military barracks and turned it into a viable community. And the UK surely has a fair number of empty military bases and military housing complexes. Ah, but they need to be sold, don't they, to make money for the treasury. Prime development land many of those bases are and thus they could not possibly be converted.

There are too many brown envelopes and other favors flying about of which our planners and politicians, local and central, happen to be the recipients for this to be utopian. But it is only utopian if we permit the crony culture to continue.

Christiania is now in existence, though never officially recognized by the Danish state, since the late 1970s or thereabouts and, while the authorities at times have been considering evicting the residents of that area, they have let it be.

More than likely this is also do to the fact that it would cause some international condemnation and, in addition to that, the state would then be responsible to give homes to those they evict. Thus the status quo is much more preferable.

No one, bar those of us in the movement, it would seem, can see that Christiania (and others) could be a great example as to how sustainable intentional communities could be created from old, rather than having to build new complexes.

Yes, brownfield sites and especially former barracks and bases might have some contamination present but that should not create an obstacle and we should make use of existing places before building new, especially in the open countryside.

Making sustainability ‘part of what we do’ is something the Campaign to Protect Rural England was adamant about back in 2008 when the original eco-towns were being considered.

‘Urgent consideration should be given to improving the environmental performance of all development, new and existing,’ they said in a news release back in 2008 and the CPRE is still committed to this notion. It is a notion that we all should support.

Green communities, villages and buildings should have a place in the future but they must come out of the existing cities, towns, and villages, and not be, necessarily, newly created on greenbelt land and in the countryside.

We must bring community back to the places where we live and where we work and we must work again where we live and not live miles, often tens to hundreds of miles, away from where we work.

Community is more important, much more important, than green housing though the latter is also of importance. However, when we can reduce the distance between home and work, between home and school, between home and shops, and make areas walkable and cycleable we will have already won by miles as far as reduction of CO2 emissions and other pollutants are concerned.

At the core of the original eco-town concept was community, and this requires more than a mind for ‘green’ housing and one of the big opportunities with eco-towns is actually around sustainable lifestyle and the idea of creating healthy homes for ordinary working people.

Though much of the focus has been on eco-technology aspects of such developments simple things like being able to grow your own food, walk your children to school and afford heating are what such communities are about.

But this is much better achieved by making the places where we currently live sustainable rather than building new and there are enough homes to go around if we but have the political will to bring them back on stream.

Why is the Ocean Estate in Stepney, in the East End of London, or the Robing Hood Garden one in Polar, also in East London, are going to be demolished? In the case of the Ocean Estate the story is for “redevelopment” but in the end of 2012 nothing had happened as yet. But the people have had all been evicted bar one or two that defied the order and squatters that had moved into the empty flats.

The Ocean Estate was a real community, a vibrant community, and most residents had no intention of leaving. However, the governments decided to break up this community and to claim the place is to be redeveloped.

As for the Robin Hood Estate the people also do not wish to leave but the site is to be sold to be developed for expensive home and offices for the London Docklands. That's what it is all about. Not because of a bit of asbestos in the walls and such.

Both those housing estates would be a great opportunity to convert an area, without moving people from their homes, into a sustainable “green” community. But no, it is far too valuable as development land.

Rather build new eco-towns somewhere in the middle of almost nowhere and hope that people will move there.

Time to bury the eco-town idea and green our existing communities. Period.

© 2012

Turn our cities into eco-towns, not build new ones

by Michael Smith

A leading environmental institute has hit out a Government plans to build new eco-towns from scratch, arguing that it would be more sustainable to address the impact of our existing urban centers. And this was about time too.

In a response to the Government's Draft Planning Policy Statement on Eco-towns the Chartered Institute of Water & Environmental Management (CIWEM) has questioned whether the planned settlements will really forward the sustainability agenda – and rightly so.

I have been questioning the policy of new settlements as Eco-Towns for a considerable time now – in fact from the beginning that it was suggested.

It is totally bonkers, to use a good old English phrase, to think about building new settlements as Eco-Towns where we have perfectly good examples that could be turned into eco-towns already in existence, namely our existing towns and cities.

The eco-towns program of the government aims to address the twin concerns of climate change and the growing demand for housing. The solution, therefore, that government puts forward is, in essence, to build new settlements that have environmental measures built in from the outset.

The CIWEM is among the growing number of organizations that have begun to question the wisdom of this strategy, however, arguing that while building new low-impact towns might seem an easy win, the impact from the built environmental could be more effectively tackled by making better use of what we already have in place.

"From the outset, eco-towns will involve the construction of new homes, transport infrastructure and other basic services," said a statement published by the institute.

"But the UK already has potential eco-towns, including London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds, which have the fundamentals of settled and sustainable communities such as schools, hospitals and transport.

"CIWEM recognizes that re-developing existing urban centers in a more sustainable form raises major challenges but, if challenging targets on carbon emissions reduction are to be met, the Government must focus on this front.

"CIWEM believes that a commitment of funding and retro-fitting would make these cities carbon-neutral.

"In the context of the UK, new housing provision as discussed by the Barker Report is simply unsustainable and wider policies relating to population growth, consumption and lifestyle must be discussed by Government as a matter of urgency.

"What is faced in modern times is not a housing crisis per se, but an unsustainably large population living on a small island, using resources at a far greater rate than can be replenished."

In addition it has to be said that there is a lot of empty housing stock about that simply is allowed to fall into disrepair and is left standing without anyone occupying it. Let's give people the ability to rent those properties at a low rent with also giving them the possibilities of doing up those properties.

Landlords that speculate with empty housing stock which is falling apart, more or less, must have this housing stock taken away from them and put to use by the local authorities and we must get back to rented housing that, in fact, is owned by the municipalities.

If we want to have enough housing for everyone in the British Isles then we must revert the policies of the Thatcher years. But, it would appear, that no one is willing to do so.

Eco-towns, as envisaged by the current regime in Britain is not going to solve anything. It is neither going to have any impact on the housing crisis nor is it going to benefit the environment. In fact all that building is going to be impacting negatively on the environment and the climate.

Any blind person with a white cane can see the impact the building, from scratch, of such new eco-towns is going to have.

Even regardless of whether or not new eco-towns be built, the existing buildings, residential and non-residential, in our villages, towns and cities must be “greened” in the same way. Otherwise all the eco-town stuff will do nothing and be nothing but window dressing.

© M Smith (Veshengro), 2009
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Govt over-states eco-town's green credentials

by Michael Smith

The Department for Communities and Local Government has been rapped over the knuckles by the advertising watchdog for misleading claims that a proposed eco-town in Staffordshire would be built on brownfield land.

Now who would have thought that about our government agencies doing that with regards to eco-towns? How much else then is a lie about those eco-towns?

An advert put out by the DCLG inviting the public to share their views on the proposal suggested that the entire development would be built on a brownfield site, while the truth is that the greatest part of the site would be built on greenfield land adjacent to the formerly-developed site, an old airfield.

The Advertising Standards Authority upheld a complaint about the advert made by Lichfield District Council and a local pressure group, which is opposed to the eco-town.

The advert read "An eco-town near you? Curborough, Staffordshire where a bid has been made for 5,000 homes on the brownfield site of the former Fradley airfield."

DCLG accepted that the advert was inaccurate and said that the error had been made because it was based on information from a former consultation document, itself also inaccurate, which suggested the entire development would be built on existing hard standing at the airfield.

It said there had been no deliberate attempt to mislead and agreed not to publish the claims again.

What a lame excuse by the government department in question. No no deliberate attempt to mislead had been made and someone else is obviously at fault. I am afraid that my bullshit meter here is going well off the scale.

The way things appear more and more, to me at least, is that there are lots of lies being circulated from this government – and no, I do not think that a Tory or Lid-Dem government would be any more transparent and honest – as to this and that with regards to the environmental projects, such as those eco-towns that no one, but the government, wants and that are not the answer at all.

We need to green existing villages, towns and cities and NOT build eco-towns in the middle of the countryside. If we want to build anything like that and use old airfields then, please, use just that land only and nothing else. Maybe 2,500 homes instead of 5,000. That still would make an eco-village, and why not?

But this government knows it needs to build more homes and the eco-towns, initially claimed they were going to be counted in that number, are now going to be included in it and hence they need to be pushed forward regardless. This is total and utter stupidity. Not that we have come to expect much else form our governments.

I will say it again, just in case it might thus sink into the heads of those who make decisions: what we need is not new eco-towns but to make our existing villages, towns and cities “greener” and sustainable. It can be done. In fact it is being done in other countries. Here we are, as per usual, harnessing the horse the wrong way onto the cart. Surprise? Not really. When it takes a government extremely expensive studies to discover that wood can be burned and that inland water ways and canals can be used to carry freight, in the latter case they were initially built for that very purpose, then what can one expect.

© M Smith (Veshengro), September 2008
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Eco-Towns – do we need them?

The simple answer, sweet and simple, would be a firm NO

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

We do not need those ever so highly touted Eco-towns and we also cannot afford them either.

Our aim, first and foremost, must not be Eco-Towns but to green our existing towns and villages instead, instead of talking of building and considering to build x-number of new Eco-Towns, the latter which are now supposed to also be part of the “need” new housing stock. This is totally and utterly crazy.

We do not need to build those new Eco-Towns. Instead, as said, we must do something about our existing towns and villages.

One can but wonder what really behind the stupid idea of the British government to keep pushing this agenda. It is an agenda that must be stopped! Those towns are a waste of time and effort and money and will do nothing to stop – as if we could anyway – climate change. The fact that most of them are in the countryside, often relatively far away from public transport access to the wider world will make the car something that cannot be given up at all. This despite the fact that the residents, at least half of them, will not permitted to have a car in those Eco-Towns. So, can someone please explain to me how they are going to get to the nearest rail station or such and – the cost of the tickets of the trains in the UK are making train travel very expensive and inaccessible to the lower range of the population which therefore (1) cannot live in such Eco-Towns – despite the fact that the government says many of the homes are supposed to be for those on lower incomes – because they would not able to be without a car and (2) all the travel to and from such towns, which probably will be nothing more than dormitory towns anyway, will add to the carbon emissions and all that.

Instead, if we would, like other countries are doing, green our existing cities, towns and villages, the savings, in many ways, could be immense, including the carbon savings.

Some of this greening of our villages, towns and cities could, certainly, be done, or more precisely, they should be done, by the residents, such as residents of a city block. Those eco-block and real eco-villages, from existing stock, could even become somewhat communities like Christiania in Denmark, the former military barracks that was taken over by then Hippies in sometime in the 1970s or thereabouts and that to this very day is a community/commune that has its own infrastructure. All is possible if but the will, the political will especially, would be there.

Eco-Towns, and so many experts have said already as well, will do more harm than good and will not, in any way, help the UK towards its sustainability goals.

So, let's abandon this silly and expensive notion and do something (more) positive with out existing centers of living, whether villages, towns or cities. This does make much more sense and would be money well spent.

I do, however, assume that the British government will press ahead with those silly ideas regardless for somewhere along the line someone's career is on the line should he or she not aid the developers in getting those Eco-Towns come along nicely.

Let us not be stupid. Let us go and build new homes where there is the infrastructure already in place and then improve upon the infrastructure, whether transport or other.

To start from scratch, much like the “New Towns” of some decades ago, such as Lego Town, erm, sorry, Milton Keynes and such like, is a silly idea, especially as many experts say that it is not going to do any good and may rather do harm.

Woah! Let's reign in those horses a wee bit. Rethink please!

© M Smith (Veshengro), July 2008

Scrap eco-town plans rural campaigners tell government

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

Eco Towns – a green oasis or a mirage?

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

Are those “Eco Towns” that are currently being proposed a knight in shining armor or are they but misguided desperation?

I must admit that I am not a house builder, a banker or an energy magnate. I am neither a property developer, a broker or an oil buyer. Nor did I benefit from the last umpteen years of house price rising, simply because I have never owned a house, and have been renting always. Nor have I, so far, inherited a house from someone (anyone out there who wants to leave me one in their will?). Also, I have never every even gone down the line of changing my energy supplier to get a better deal and a lower rate. I might get tempted if one came along that would be truly green, so to speak, but so far all I have seen is hype and lies, such as from N-Power. I also do not really have to worry, personally, as to the cost of gasoline or diesel as I do not own nor drive a motor vehicle of any kind.

Having said all that, however, I cannot, but, help noticing that there are some pretty serious goings on in the markets at this moment in time.

Share prices of the major British house builders have fallen by up to, and in some cases by more than, 80% during the last twelve months. There are banks issuing rights calls in order to bolster their threadbare balance sheets and refill their coffers left, right and center and one major bank in Britain – Northern Rock – has already gone to the wall, basically. There there are the major oil suppliers and controllers of this substance who seem to be downing the last few drinks at the bar before time is called. There is all that going on and in addition to that food prices are spiralling ever upwards for the first time in years. These are scary times indeed and many people, here in Britain, and in other developed nations, such as and especially the United States are very worried as to where this is going. It is not, it would appear, the politicians that do the worrying, but the people on the grassroots level. The rise in prices of gasoline and diesel in the United states has led farmers to return to mule power, for instance, and their fuel is about half (and that is a lot by US standards) in comparison to the costs in the United Kingdom.

As prices fluctuate in every direction imaginable and perceivable it is very hard to see any real end to it, presently. So far, to my knowledge, there has not been a single mainstream statement, figure or proposal that clearly points the way back to what was getting to be a very comfortable status quo. When one reads some of the broadsheet newspapers lately it appears to be a page by page roller coaster with one column flirting with the idea that we are heading for global collapse immediately followed by a reassuring, though often more than shaky, article proposing that an end date to the debacle is in sight.

Perhaps in these turbulent times there is a shining knight on the horizon? Is he not right now approaching on his horse? Look it is Sir "Eco Town", the savior of us all. So, at least, we are lead to believe, here in the UK.

"Eco" - what an interesting word. But who really knows what it means exactly? Is it environmentally friendly? Is it fair trade? Is it the new "green"? Is it more than "green"? Is it all of the above? I personally do not really know even despite the fact that I write on “green” issues, and neither, I am sure, do most people. And I am not even sure that the government knows either. At times “eco” seems to be a fashionable term that can be strapped to any concept or plan with the immediate effect of breathing new life and viability in to it., whether or not it can do anything really. Much like the “Eco Button”, the ever so highly praised and hyped tool to reduce your PC's “carbon footprint” (oh, how I hate that word).

How fast are Eco Towns coming to our rescue? Well, not all that fast at all. The first of them, if we are lucky, will be ready in 4-6 years, but knowing how any projects end up in this country it is more like 6-10 years, I should think. Aside from everything else, those “Eco Towns” are going to need an awful of a lot of energy to bring them into being. In addition to that we all will have to buy into the concept for it to work; we have to buy those houses in those “Eco-towns” and move in.

So, once those much-praised “Eco-towns” are built then what do we do? Re we to desert our existing towns and all move into Eco-towns? What good will they be when we have Eco-towns? How will we all cook our tea and whatever in boring old normal town? What about all the old roads, shops, internet cables, phones, sewers, drains, water pipes, electric cables, central heating systems, high streets, the rest of the infrastructure and all that – I do not think that I need to go on? What about all of that and everything else?

First of how many of those “Eco-towns” are there being built? Will it be a chosen 50,000, or whatever the small number may be, who get to live in Eco-town luxury whilst the rest of us all will have to tough it out outside the walls? I suppose these Eco-towns will also be immune to the tempestuous markets? All the food, energy and shelter comfortably catered for within the confines of those gated communities?

The “Eco-Towns” are, the way I see it, nothing but another gimmick of this government. Another silly idea to make themselves look “green”.

Let us “green” our existing villages, towns and cities and through empowerment regain a sense of community and more than just a sense of... let us, in fact, go a create community, real community.

Gordon Brown found himself in the firing line again in the papers not so long ago that for daring to ask the North Sea oil producers to up production and then hinting that nuclear power is the way forward.

The opposition, on the other hand, surprisingly, were pointing out that if 1 in 3 houses were retrofitted with micro-generation and the energy market decentralized we would not need the nuclear power stations.

This does strike a chord with me as empowerment is the fastest way to enable a group – in this case a country – to achieve anything. It also strikes a chord with me as I have been advocating, ever since it made sense to me after reading “Small is Beautiful” just that, namely, small decentralized power generation plants but everyone I have ever spoken to in the field of energy production and government just benignly smiled at me as if I was an imbecile for suggesting that.

Micro-generation and decentralized energy production is, in my opinion, the only way forward. Neither oil, gas or coal, and not even nuclear – unless we can go down the fusion route – will help us. The infrastructure also if way too vulnerable. Local generated heat and power, however, does not suffer from those problems.

The building in of resilience to our communities is what we must do. We must look to build communities that will smooth the transition from an oil dependent community to an alternative form of energy, all the while seeking to drastically reduce the amount of CO2 in response to the changing climate.

And there is also more than one problem that I have with those “Eco-Towns” a-la British Labor (now there is a joke) government (and here is yet another of those joke – government, as they couldn't govern a school let alone a country), but one especially, and that is the fact that, according, so the British government would like everyone to believe, the Freiburg model, about 1/2 of the residents in such “Eco-Towns” will nor be PERMITTED to own a car. Duh? They government is going to order and compel one half of the residents – which half precisely – that they cannot and must not and will not be allowed to own a car? Welcome to 1984. A little late, I know, but arrived it has. The lie also lies in them claiming it to be according to the Freiburg model: in Freiburg it is more than 50% who have chosen – CHOSEN by their own free will – not to want to have a car. Slight difference, is it not. Freely chosen not to have a car or being told you cannot have a car and will not be allowed to have a car. Now, I do not own or drive a car and as a cyclist I would be happy to have a few cars less on the road but... to my dying day I will defend anyone's right to own a car if they so wish.

So, how are we going to mobilize and motivate our communities to vacate their current abodes for pastures greener (or rather "eco") next door without a sense of community? It is community that makes up a village, a town, a neighborhood. What if community could regain itself in situ and can, in fact, "eco" and “green” the existing towns? What is to say that we cannot build resilient sustainability in to our existing neighborhoods without involving the oil intensive construction of yet more estates, and towns, even though those may be “eco” ones?

Personally, I do not think that we need the fabled “Eco Towns”. Instead, what we need are empowered villages, towns and city neighborhoods; real communities of people of all types, ages and classes.

I think that, rather than even thinking about those gimmick towns, those so-called “Eco-towns”, for that is all that those are, gimmicks, we should, nay we must, “green” our existing villages, towns, city neighborhoods, and create real local green communities in the existing places that there are currently. There is NO NEED whatsoever for such “Eco-towns”. They are neither a “green oasis” nor a “knight in shining armor”. They are, in fact, a waste of time and money.

If we go down the road that the current British government seems to have embarked upon, namely that of constructing such “Eco-towns”, we – one – will be wasting lots of money and especially energy and resources and – two – the possibility of using such monies in regenerating our existing villages and towns, our existing neighborhood and “green” those. It can be done, and more than likely a lot easier and a lot better than building those new towns.

© M Smith (Veshengro), June 2008