Ecocities of Tomorrow: UK's First Planned Ecovillage Gets Go-Ahead
by Jesse Fox, Tel Aviv, Israel on 03.29.08
After having their plans rejected once by British planning institutions, a small group of families has been granted permission to build a small ecovillage in the Welsh countryside. The tiny village, to be called Lammas, is planned to cover a 74 acre site of pasture and woodland.
Planned to be completely independent of national infrastructures, water would be drawn from springs and rooftop rainwater collection. Electricity would come from local, renewable sources such as small-scale ethanol production and an existing water turbine. All houses would be built out of straw bale, earth and timber, with rammed earth floors and hemp fiber insulation, and would include compost bins and composting toilets.
The Lammas website features incredibly detailed plans regarding every aspect of the community's existence, including site layout, architectural and transport plans, an ecological footprint assessment and detailed business plans. Closely following Permaculture planning concepts, the "low impact" village concentrates residences and compact, intensive functions in a denser core, with less intensive functions spread out along its edges. A significant portion of the community's land will be set aside for natural woodlands, containing native plants.
Planning permission for the community became possible when the Pembrokeshire County Council implemented a "low impact development" policy, requiring a high level of self-sufficiency in local households' use of resources. Pembrokeshire is one of two local authorities in the UK with such a policy regarding local sustainability.
Below is a short film about the Lammas initiative, courtesy of www.undercurrents.org.
For more detailed information, check out Lammas' website at www.lammas.org.uk.
This post is part of an ongoing series examining current and future trends in ecological city building ahead of the 2008 Ecocity World Summit during Earth Day Week in San Francisco this April.
Via:: ecoworldly, newbuilder.co.uk, icWales.co.uk
This may sound like a major breakthrough but communities like these already exist in places like Costa Rica or Panama, which are often regarded as third-world countries.
europe is always ahead of the game in 'liberal' matters no suprise there and that is why id love to live in a different country someday!
Yay! Thank goodness for this, I thought they weren't going to get it after the first attempt to get planning permission failed. The pioneers at Lammas are the nicest bunch of people you'll ever meet and if anybody deserves to succeed, they do.
Tim.
If only, sadly this is not quite true. We have just resubmitted our planning application and will have to wait til june for the local council to come to a new decision. Hopefully this will be a yes as we have answered every single point they raised the first time and we now have significant support at the national level. If they do give a local refusal again we will appeal to the welsh planning inspectorate at which level we are very confident.
In response to the above comments, this is what is significant about this project: It will be the first such project in britain under a completely new set of rules which allow ecological living in combination with working on agricultural land. Agricultural land here is available from about £5000 a hectare as opposed to any residential plots which start at £100,000-£200,000. So once the precedent is set, the option will be open to live on and work a piece of land for less than 10% of the cost of any other home. If you think about it, that could really make a serious difference.
Please do have a look at www.lammas.org.uk and maybe support this and future projects by writing a letter of support or buying a share. Thank you
(& thank you tim)
Wasn't this tried before, with the Centre for Alternative Technology at Machynlleth in Wales started in 1974? I was the first resident manager on site in that year (I didn't last very long). Whatever happened to it, is it still operating?
Tony Williams
Is CAT still operating... You should look them up. They are pretty much considered the definitive experts for all things green, talking to the mainstream, providing research and advice etc to individuals, commerce and govt. I don't know how many thousands of visitors a year they have but it's quite a few.
What they are now doing is quite a long way from what we are hoping to do which is proving sustainable livelihoods and land based living on a small scale.
Oh and of course if we're going to change the world it means a lot more than one or two projects doing these things. Once this project gets permission it will represent not only an example but a new route open to anybody