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Click for full-size image Where the Past Meets the Carbon-Neutral Future
Once the train gets beyond the outskirts of London, the English countryside comes into view, a panorama of low rolling meadows, slow-winding streams, and tidy hedgerowed fields spreading beneath dark barreling rain clouds. Cows and sheep graze sodden pastures. Summer wheat lies baled and stacked. Church spires on the horizon identify distant villages. The soils of this wheat belt produced crops that fed not only generations of British royalty but also the soldiers of the Roman Empire. Like any ancient monument, this land commands respect and zealous protection.
In the late 1940s, worried that the postwar building boom might spread out from London and other major cities and fragment the countryside, the government allowed towns to legally limit growth by restricting building beyond established borders. Towns take their "greenbelts" seriously, their inviolability evident in the absence between towns of strip development, fast-food alleys, supermalls, and extravagant corporate campuses -- what one British architect has referred to as the "barking-mad development" of American suburban sprawl. Towns have distinct borders. They don't dither off into detached subdivisions. Where a town ends, countryside begins.
So public reaction was cool in 2007 when Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced an initiative to develop 10 new communities in the countryside, each of 5,000 to 15,000 homes. It wasn't that such government housing initiatives were unprecedented. In the course of the twentieth century the country had seen through grand visions of "garden cities" and "new towns." What was new was that these were to be what Brown called "eco-towns," carbon-neutral communities designed to meet "the challenges of climate change, the need for more sustainable living, and the need to increase housing supply."
It seemed like an unimpeachable idea: the United Kingdom, like much of the rest of the world, was dealing with an increasing population making increasing demands on the planet's renewable resources, and with an unabating increase in CO2 emissions. Since the greatest share of greenhouse gas emissions comes from buildings and cars, national and local governments have initiated efforts to reduce the carbon footprint of the built environment -- "sustainable cities" in the United States, eco-cities in China, villes durables in France, eco-towns in India.
In the U.K. the need was particularly urgent. The growing number of smaller households and increased immigration had left the country short some 3 million housing units. Rising fuel prices were inflating the costs of driving, heating, and producing energy. The government hoped that along with new public transportation initiatives and regulations on industry and coal power, its eco-towns would help the U.K. meet its commitment to bringing greenhouse gas emissions to
80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.
And yet, within a few months, the eco-town initiative was under attack. Citizen committees formed, irked that the government had first asked developers, not regional and local planning authorities, where or whether they wanted these towns built. They saw the new towns creeping into greenbelts despite government assurances to the contrary. And they predicted more cars on already crowded roads. Protesters rallied in churches and town halls and submitted petitions signed by thousands of residents. High-profile names -- the actress Dame Judi Dench and the attorney Anthony Henman, father of the British tennis star Tim Henman -- were enlisted in the cause.
Architects and planners were skeptical that the government had the design and technical wherewithal to know what would make a community truly carbon neutral or to judge whether developers' plans would measure up. The venerable Wildlife Trusts and the Campaign to Protect Rural England found that some sites set for development encroached on rare natural habitats. Political opponents accused the prime minister and his housing minister at the time, Caroline Flint, of grandstanding for political gain. The press suggested they were greenwashing suburban development as usual.
During the first six months, developers vying for an eco-town designation submitted 57 proposals. By September the government had whittled the number down to 15. The next month, acting on a lawsuit filed by a Stratford-upon-Avon citizens group called BARD (Better Accessible Responsible Development), a court called for a judicial review of the process by which the eco-town sites had been chosen. Grant Shapps, the opposition Conservative Party's "shadow" housing minister, said that the government had "taken a reasonably good idea and completely screwed it up." Brown removed his beleaguered housing minister and named her minister for Europe. The Department of Communities and Local Government, the lead agency in the eco-town effort, announced that it would put off its final site selection until the beginning of 2009. Rumors circulated that fewer sites would eventually be approved than the 10 originally planned. By November, the credit crisis and looming recession dimmed the hopes for carbon-neutral development even more. Within a year, what had seemed so right had gone terribly wrong.
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