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Posts Tagged ‘UK’
Thursday, March 11th, 2010
"We're all in this together" is the headline of a recent article in the Real Estate section of the TimesOnline that looks favorably on the rise in sustainable communities in the UK.
What do you share with your neighbours? A cup of sugar? A dividing wall? Despair over the way that your recycling boxes always seem to be thrown back over the hedge?
For a growing number of communities across Britain, the answer is much, much more. New communes, ranging from listed urban properties converted into self-contained flats with communal space to new-build eco-villages on rural smallholdings, are springing up, offering communal living with a contemporary twist.
Read the full article here.
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Related Posts Tags: cohousing, intentional communities, London Times, sustainability, UK
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Written by:
molly
Friday, October 30th, 2009
Communal Living: Love thy Neighborhood, an article in the Guardian this week, describes the many advantages of co-housing/communal living and shares resources with individuals seeking community in the UK. Reporter Miles Brignall profiles the recently formed Lancaster Co-housing project.
Share your car, share childcare costs, share energy bills, but still enjoy the privacy of your own home. Welcome to the new age of communal living.
Read the full article here.
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Related Posts Tags: cohousing, communes, intentional communities, Lancaster Co-housing, UK
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Written by:
molly
Monday, August 25th, 2008
CNN has had two articles on community in the past few weeks, one on simple living and one on eco-communities in the UK.
The simple living article profiles a woman at the Keystone Ecological Urban Center in Chicago.
Keri Rainsberger isn't rich. She works in the nonprofit world for a relatively low-profit salary. Yet, as many Americans are scrimping for every penny, she hardly feels the pinch.
How is this possible?
For starters, she has no car and commutes by bicycle each workday. She also has no mortgage payment and chooses to live in an "intentional community," a partly shared space where $775 a month covers everything from utilities to meals.
Her private quarters -- larger and a bit more expensive than some -- are about 400 square feet, divided into a sitting room, a craft room and a small bedroom. She shares bathrooms, showers, a kitchen and a large dining room with 28 other residents whose ranks include young professionals, professors and retirees.
"It's like a college dormitory, but with better conversation," she often jokes.
The article claims that the poor economy is pushing more people to explore simple and cooperative living:
"The economy starts to tank. People get tired of it," says Daniel Howard, an expert in consumer research and behavior at the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University. "It's people saying, 'Let's get together and help one another.' And it works."
But those who advocate a simpler, less consumer-driven life say there are lessons in the strategies she and other intentional communities use.
By buying their food in bulk, for instance, Rainsberger and her neighbors spend $100 to $150 per person each month for meals. (Consider that the U.S. Department of Agriculture "thrifty plan" for a single person is $200 a month.)
The article comes around to point out someof the non-tangible benefits of community:
Rainsberger, whose closest family is in Ohio, savors the camaraderie.
"For me, to be able to walk out my door and have everybody in the hall know me, that's a really great experience," she says. "And if anything happens to me, I know there's somebody next door who'll take care of me."
The article on Eco-Communities stresses the sustainability focus of many intentional communities:
Communities that put an emphasis on green values range from isolated eco villages to sophisticated co-housing projects.
But where co-housing projects were once primarily intended as a return to a more collective, less isolated way of living, new projects often place an emphasis on sustainable living.
They mention Nubanusit Neighborhood and Farm in New Hampshire and the UK community Living Villages. They go on to look at how widespread eco-communities might become:
Inherent to eco communities is their small scale. Not only does it provide the social glue that holds them together, it allows communal facilities and equipment, such as lawnmowers, to be shared, reducing the community's carbon footprint. But in a crowded world that size restriction limits how widespread these developments can become.
While these communities will never be for everyone, Berger maintains co-housing is a model for the future. "A lot of the basic concepts behind co-housing are applicable to larger housing developments," she says.
"Some of the principles could be woven in to conventional developments -- things like having the residential area car free, having a common house where you can eat communally from time to time, hold events, and have a children's room and games room for teenagers.
Read the Simple Living Article on CNN
Read the Eco Communities article on CNN
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Related Posts Tags: Chicago, CNN, cohousing, ecovillages, Keystone Ecological Urban Center, Living Villages, Nubanusit Neighborhood and Farm, Simple Living, UK
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Written by:
Tony Sirna
Thursday, July 31st, 2008
The Times Online and the Sunday Times (of London) carried an article on both the utopian and the practical aspects of community living. The article features an existing co-housing developments in the UK, Community Project of South Downs. Benefits such as shared child rearing, help in times of health crisis, and shared resources are mentioned. Some drawbacks of life in a co-housing development are also mentioned, such as additional planning required for new development. The Times writes:
Visiting the Community Project on a sunny summer's day, it is easy to appreciate the appeal. The setting is idyllic - the buildings look out over a green valley, narrow paths wind between rambling undergrowth and abundant vegetation, while three horses in a paddock swish their tails lazily against the flies. Come teatime, the place is swarming with children conducting water-gun fights and larking about.
"It's awesome for kids," says Jed Novick, 49, a lecturer in journalism who moved here two years ago with his wife, Gilly Smith, 45, and their two daughters, Ellie, 12, and Loulou, 9. "They have such freedom and independence here, within safe walls."
Such a lifestyle appeals to many people, and the article also mentions the potential for the development of more co-housing projects in the future. A training center for would be co-housing founders, Threshold Centre at Cole Street Farm. The Times writes:
Fancy the idea of living communally? You could always found your own cohousing community. Alan Heeks, an ex-businessman with an MBA from Harvard, set up the Threshold Centre at Cole Street Farm, near Gillingham, Dorset, with a group of six like-minded friends in 2004, and runs regular workshops for those interested in cohousing. The basic principles are the same, although there are differences: the eight members share everything from home-grown vegetables to the washing machine, and are required to give 5% of the value of their property to the project when they sell.
Given the balanced article, I am suprised at its name, "Cohousing is the new name for commune living". Perhaps "commune" isn't such a charged word in the UK as it is in the US?
Read the full article here.
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Written by:
erika
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008
With oil prices on the rise, conserving energy is once again a hot topic in the news. Several articles have appeared recently on "green" living at intentional communities.
Boston.com, WFAA-8 (the ABC affiliate in Dallas/Fort Worth), and the Baltimore Sun are among the news outlets running an Associated Press article highlighting market trends toward "green" building. Nubanusit Neighborhood and Farm, a co-housing development that just began construction in New Hampshire, is used as an example of what to expect in the future. They report:
Recent market research by McGraw-Hill Construction projects that the green building market could account for $20 billion in sales, or 10 percent of the overall homebuilding market, this year. Those figures are expected to double within five years.
Starting next year, the U.S. Green Building Council will begin applying a version of its Leadership in Energy Environmental Design rating system to entire neighborhoods rather than single buildings. A pilot program launched early last year attracted so much interest that officials accepted more than 200 proposals, twice the number they sought.
Nubanusit Neighborhood and Farm is not part of the pilot program, but its 29 homes are being built to the council's highest certification standards.
Read more here [boston.com], here [WFAA-8], or here [Baltimore Sun].
Another green community is generating attention in Israel. The Jerusalem Post featured an article on Kibbutz Lotan's green environmental strategies, and communal social ethic. The eco-friendly policies are highlighted as a central feature of this kibbutz:
Everyone seems to share a commitment to the creative ecology that's become Lotan's hallmark. Its famous Center for Creative Ecology, with its recycled water-wetlands, the bird reserve, straw-bale building construction technology and a host of other recycling projects have attracted favorable attention the world over. Even the UN recognized Lotan's Ecovillage Design Education curriculum, a part of its Green Apprenticeship Program that attracts students for 10-week stints, housing them in straw-bale geodesic domes.
The article delves into some of the specific eco-friendly techniques implemented at Kibbutz Lotan.
In 1986, Lotan made the critical decision to go green. "I was a big recycler from the beginning," Alex says. "The kibbutz itself didn't start until later. Our first effort was to separate out organic waste for composting - and we immediately got into trouble. The regional authority came to empty our garbage cans, and they were empty. 'We're not coming in!' they warned us. They learned to love us - we reduced our waste by 70 percent. After that, we started getting more creative, recycling all kinds of things."
Water is among the things they recycle, not just once, but over and over. "For drinking water, recycled filters from the Eilat desalination plant are used in a reverse osmosis desalination plant that Mekorot - the national water company - maintains. Every house has two faucets: one for RO drinking water; the other for salty water, pumped from the aquifer. Everything that grows is watered with salty or recycled water. When water is short, you have to be creative."
In terms of building materials, creative doesn't begin to describe it. Here, buildings, benches and artistic flourishes of all kinds are constructed from recycled waste. Old tires packed tight with non-degradable plastic containers form the base, which is then covered with rock-hard "cement," local mud mixed with straw. It dries, and then several coats of Lotan's secret ingredient - used falafel oil - are painted on as a sealer. The result is incredibly beautiful. If it weren't for an occasional "truth window" - exposed parts showing the inside - it would be hard to believe what's underneath.
I imagine that a geodesic dome built from straw bales is a sight to behold! Read the entire article here.
On the other hand, not every community labeled as "eco-friendly" is actually such. Buzz Blog reported on the UK's plan to build carbon-neutral "ecotowns" in February. The UK government's plan is to build town centers around sources of renewable energy, so that they have less of a carbon footprint. Opposition to this plan has cropped up from rural residents, who are upset that their rolling countryside and views of farms will be ruined by these new towns, and that they will have many new neighbors. Further, they argue that towns remote from work sites will increase commuter miles driven in cars.
The Christian Science Monitor reports:
... the innovative plan is pitting urbanites' vision of green utopia against the ire of rural England, whose residents are loath to let their pristine environs be despoiled.
"This is completely the wrong site," says Pete Seaward of Weston, a village in Oxfordshire shortlisted as an ecotown. He holds up a scenic picture of a local lake. "If they're saying that it is 'eco' to build on and fill in a lake like that, they are dreaming."
Ron Field, chairman of the parish council at Ford, another site on the eco-village shortlist, adds that there is huge local concern that this is just another ruse to allow developers to make money.
"We don't want it because it's plunked in the middle of a small hamlet in between two coastal towns which they spent millions and millions of pounds trying to regenerate," he says.
"They're building it on 600 acres of green field land which is used for growing food crops to feed the people that live in our area, and it's all done as far as we can see for money."
I find it hard to believe a lake would be drained to build an ecovillage, and wonder whether these are exaggerations on the part of villagers irate about something else. I wonder whether there is any other analysis of these "eco-towns".
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Related Posts Tags: cohousing, ecotown, ecovillage, green, Israel, Kibbutz Lotan, market research, New Hampshire, Nubanusit Neighborhood and Farm, UK
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Written by:
erika
Tuesday, April 1st, 2008
 Lammas Ecovillage in Wales is seeking approval for their ecovillage under new UK government rules to allow a new form of rural mixed use development. Theirs would be the first ecovillage approved under these new rules which allow a mix a residential, agricultural, and commercial enterprises on much more affordable rural land.
Lammas has been getting a lot of press and exposure on blogs but not all of it has been accurate. EcoWorldly and TreeHugger recently posted a notice saying Lammas had been granted approval but a Lammas member commented to say that they had resubmitted their plans but is still awaiting approval. For more accurate info keep an eye on the Welsh news or on the Lammas site itself.
You can also see videos about Lammas at undercurrents.org:
Living in the Future and
Ecovillage Pioneers
 I for one am certainly envious of their amazing scale model of their proposed village. If every ecovillage could bring together such a clear and compelling plan with models and video and detailed proposals it might shock planning departments into doing something!
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Written by:
Tony Sirna
Thursday, February 14th, 2008
With grass-roots ecovillages pioneering sustainable living, the mainstream wants in on the action. The Guardian reports that the government in the United Kingdom has plans to build 10 carbon neutral ecotowns by 2020. The towns will have up to 5000-20,0000 homes, 10-100 times the size of most ecovillages, but will share a focus on ecological living.
Most important, the whole town has to be carbon neutral. This means the amount of energy taken from the national grid to run the town is less than or equal to the amount put back through renewable power.
There are also groups working on helping ecotowns be car free but its not clear who will be helping the government develop the social sustainability aspects of the "three-legged stool" they mention on their ecotown website:
It is appropriate to start with an understanding of sustainability as a "three legged stool": in addition to environmental considerations there are the less well understood but no less important aspects of social and economic sustainable development to consider.
Perhaps they will be able to learn from the rich tradition of ecovillages and intentional communities in the UK on how to create opportunities for community and create a spirit of cooperation towards their ecological goals.
If only the US government were investing in sustainability at this level...
Guardian article on carbon neutral ecotowns
Ecotown website
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Related Posts Tags: car-free, carbon neutral, ecotown, ecovillage, UK
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Written by:
Tony Sirna
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