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Town-making is a complicated business," James Hulme, director of public affairs for the Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment, tells me. "I know a lot about the inner workings of the eco-town operation, and I can tell you with reasonable candor that the people orchestrating the effort, laudable though it is in principle, are no closer to the formula for town-making than the run-of-the-mill development sector. The government would have been much better off taking a stronger hand in promoting one or two new places that were much larger." (Larger developments, he explains, would make transport systems as well as local shops and businesses more economically viable.) "In fact," Hulme says, "if they build more than two, I'd be surprised."
Britain's Prince Charles established the foundation in 1999 to rethink the future of residential planning and design by reevaluating traditional architectural forms. Its theories have, most famously, guided the
development of Poundbury, a clustered village built on land owned by the prince on the edge of Dorchester in southwest England.
The eco-town protesters, Hulme says, had legitimate concerns. The plans as they stood would have created "mono-use estates"; "dormitories" for commuters; towns that failed to integrate living, shopping, and workplaces and thereby continued to give driving precedence over walking. For developers, on the other hand, the eco-town initiative was, he says, "a welcome relaxation of planning rules in hot property areas."
"I think where it went wrong," says George Ferguson, a past president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, "is the thought that it is possible to produce an eco-town that is not entirely integrated. It's not an eco-town to make a load of carbon-neutral eco-houses. That's just scratching the surface. Unless you get all the other things right, it's meaningless."
Last fall, feeling that the government was not getting it right, several private urban planning and architecture firms in Britain, all with experience building urban eco-developments in the U.K. and Europe, put together studies to show that the design of a town could actually affect the habits, health, and even consciences of its residents. They were drawing on the tenets of "new urbanism" or "smart growth," mixing in green technologies along with incentives for sustainable consumption.
New urbanism arose in the 1980s in reaction to the planning and design practices of the preceding decades. Its theorists, among them Andrés Duany and the brothers Rob and Léon Krier, found nothing human in the anonymity of the new suburbs or in the monumentality ("the priapism," as Léon Krier calls it) of skyscrapers and Le Corbusier-
inspired high-rise housing blocks. For inspiration they looked back to traditional urban design, especially the close-knit European towns that had thrived for centuries. "The good and beautiful city," writes Léon Krier, "results from the feliticious [sic] relationships of its buildings, town form, street plan, skyline, and geographic position."
The new urbanists sought to integrate all of a town's functions, blending components to create mixed-use and mixed-income developments, compact and densely populated, where the pedestrian and bicyclist would have priority over the driver. The result, according to the charter of the 1996 Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), would give residents "a sense of location" and celebrate "local history, climate, ecology, and building practice."
In September, I was invited to a meeting in Oslo on climate change and urban design organized by the Council for European Urbanism. One delegate after another -- planners, architects, and theorists representing private firms, think tanks, government agencies, and NGOs including the Prince's Foundation and the Natural Resources Defense Council -- argued that compact development would enable greater efficiencies and encourage the introduction of new technologies in housing construction and maintenance, road building and paving, waste removal and disposal, and public transportation.
Inner cities once produced the greatest amounts of CO2; now it's the expanding urban fringe. In the U.K. over the past 20 years, transportation and domestic use have each surpassed and now far exceed the energy consumption of industry. Personal car use consumes the most. The greater the urban density, the lower the emissions. As one planner put it: "If all housing has to be within 800 meters of a primary school, that means you're going to have to build to a certain density. It means it will be easier to walk than to be stuck in traffic getting your kids to school. You're going to persuade people there's an easier way to do things than jumping in the car."
According to a report to the British government by the BioRegional Development Group, a nonprofit group in Surrey, a well-planned eco-town could reduce its residents' share of total greenhouse emissions by
76 percent. These reductions would begin with an evaluation of the energy consumption and CO2 emissions involved in manufacturing building materials as well as in construction. Eco-towns would have to operate on 100 percent renewable energy, at least half of which would be generated on-site. The average time for walking between homes, schools, services, and shops would be no more than 15 minutes. Bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly street plans would reduce overall car use by 75 percent. This, however, would be only a beginning.
"You don't just make up an ingredient list," says Stephen Platt, a planner with Cambridge Architectural Research who has studied the evolution of new towns. "Building an eco-agenda takes real long-term foresight."
What is cutting-edge environmental design and technology today is likely to change. The same is true of the way people live. A true eco-town, like any good community, Platt says, should "allow adaptation through time." As an example, he points to the low, stone row homes of Cambridge. He conducts his business in one. He lives in another nearby. While their facades have remained unchanged for centuries, the buildings themselves -- basic boxes with pitched roofs -- have proved exceptionally adaptable.
"Everyone is seduced by the 'green bling,' " Platt says, "when the key problem is making a long-term, socially acceptable place where people will want to live and prosper. That's much more difficult than getting the technical side right."
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