Declan Kennedy

Looking at the eco-village in a holistic context, it is possible to trace development curves which have defined urban eco-villages since the new emergence of this movement in the early seventies.

These include:

• An optimisation of the whole
• The rise in efficiency and sufficiency
• Overcoming the gap between nature and technology
• Higher quality at a lower cost
• Renewal instead of new construction

1 An optimisation of the whole
In practice, the concept of eco-village is a multi-facetted one, encompassing the qualitative improvement of new social relationships and forms of organization, strategies of energy and water efficiency, the recyclability of building materials, aesthetic qualities and new cost/benefit analyses, just to mention a few. What unites all of these aspects, however, is that they strive for, and to varying degrees attain, an optimisation of the whole, rather than a maximization of individual parts, and thus a new quality of housing, and indeed of life itself.

The projects examined in this paper differ considerably in their objectives, approaches and the individual circumstances in which they came about. But together they show that:

• new social strategies are particularly feasible in the planning of small-scale settlements that go far beyond the scope of measures that are feasible for a single-family dwelling,
• new urban renewal eco-village projects do not have to make building more expensive; quite the contrary, that they are often the most cost-efficient solutions, both financially and in terms of the wider economy,
• nonetheless, planning processes from start to finish still require considerably more time and energy by the inhabitants and this is generally not appropriately remunerated,
• the support - both moral, financial (within normal restrictions) and practical (in changing guidelines and procedures) of administrative decision-makers plays a crucial role where new eco-village projects are concerned
• holistic approaches are generally more successful than projects focusing on a one-sided optimisation of individual social aims,
• the commitment, courage and persistence of everyone involved are often more important than a carefully worked-out, clear strategy,
• successful implementation is a social skill,
• user participation and co-design is inevitable within a clearly defined framework, especially in urban renewal projects,
• an international exchange of experience can be a big help in successfully overcoming difficulties in the implementation phase.

It is quite clear that - while almost no other field of change is changing as quickly as “social change” - certain trends for future development do emerge from the brief history of “conscious” eco-village movement which roughly spans the past thirty years.

 

2 The rise in efficiency and sufficiency
Our forefathers constructed villages mainly because they had no other choice. Their buildings reflect the building materials available to them from the nearby area, which could be integrated back into nature without difficulty after use. Supply and disposal structures were on a human scale and organized in a way that individuals could comprehend. These are two reasons why traditions of regional architecture can hold some important lessons for contemporary eco-village design.

Hand in hand with urban expansion and the growth of the transport system came the development of large-scale linear and centralized supply and disposal systems which created a widening gap between producer and consumer, between cause and effect. The expansion of the drinking-water system, for instance, and above all the sewage system, brought with it not only a decrease in the danger of epidemics and the elimination of a source of highly offensive olfactory pollution, but also a diminished awareness of water as a life element and of the impact of the individual’s way of dealing with it. The same is true of the energy and food supply, and of refuse and wastewater disposal.

Over a relatively short period of a few decades in the nineteenth century, the vital processes of life in the city became completely invisible and were removed from the control and day-to-day responsibility of the individual. Public authorities and supply companies determine, procure and control who gets how much at what price. The responsibility for, and with it the relationship to, basic support elements has become increasingly dispersed into specialized fields. Even experts have a hard time keeping abreast with the latest developments. Consequently, this has lead to a narrowing of viewpoints and a loss of understanding of how things should fit together for lay people. These are just some of the symptoms of an underlying crisis of material cycles at the core of industrialized society, which we seem prepared to accept, almost as a matter of course, as the downside of our prosperity.

One of the things industrial progress initially had to offer was a breathtaking rise in the standard of comfort. Thus, for instance, the average citizen of the world’s highly-industrialized countries now enjoys a greater level of comfort than a king or emperor did just a few centuries ago, based on a comparison of the technical furnishings in their dwellings, or the range of food available to them, or their mobility and choice to travel wherever they want on this planet and no end to this development is in sight. The key question, though, is whether we can maintain this standard of living while solving the problems it presently causes, like resource consumption and the destruction of nature, or whether we have to accept that these problems can only be solved at the price of a significant drop in our high standard of living.

According to latest German calculation, we could reduce our current rate of consumption to one quarter of its present level (Wupperthal Institute – Factor Four), if we were to use the resources at our disposal more economically and efficiently, and were prepared to change our production processes and consumer habits.

Many eco-village members are consciously, or subconsciously, of the opinion that the flow of materials in the rich countries could be cut back far more, to one-tenth of its present level (Schmidt-Bleek et al.: - Factor Ten). He proposes that this be done not “only” by producing goods more efficiently, but above all by defining the servicesthat they are intended to provide and then comparing the various options, including all of the material flows they involve, as well as their “environmental rucksacks”. This requires a new way of thinking. Resource efficiency can be increased to seven times its present level - for example - a refrigerator which once it has been installed in a kitchen, lasts for one hundred years instead of needing to be replaced every ten.

Thinking in terms of services can help to “dematerialise” even more. Maybe, we can even do without some buildings. If, for example, we were to establish outpatient care services - instead of building new and even larger hospitals - resource efficiency and preventative medicine could be increased to a hundred or a thousand times its current level. At the same time, we would be making a number of contributions to social well-being; i.e. by creating new healthy communities, keeping patients in their home environment, reducing traffic and cutting costs to patients.

The building sector, which currently consumes material at a rate of 20 tons per person per year in Germany alone (this includes “environmental rucksacks”, such as materials necessary for the production of steel, glass, concrete, etc.) , would naturally be a prime candidate for the new processes, technologies and altered consumption behaviour of the kind described above.

3 Overcoming the gap between nature and technology
In the wake of the Club of Rome’s publication on “The Limits of Growth” in 1972, and the first oil shock in 1973, many groups began rethinking their building priorities. It would be fair to describe the decade from 1975 to 1985 as the “pioneering phase of intentional communities and eco-villages”, and the decade from 1985 to 1995 as the “testing phase”. Since 1995, Europe has been in the early stages of the “application phase”. All three phases have existed parallel to one another to varying degrees and embody problems and opportunities of their own.

The pioneering phase contrasted drasticallyto the approach that characterized the era of industrial expansion which followed on the heels of the second World War, epitomized in the concrete housing jungles of the 60s, 70s and 80s in their remoteness from nature and their wasteful consumption of resources. The pioneering phase was hostile to technology in many ways. The motto of eco-village seekers of the time was “back to nature”, to small-scale, interlinked, self-sufficient and decentralized systems.

David Holmgren and Bill Mollison published their book “Permaculture One” in Australia in 1978, which became a bestseller overnight. Based on an understanding of the Aboriginals’ sustainable way of life that has lasted for a millennia, it enriched the green movement in different countries at a different rate of influence but by 1998 it wasall over the world.

In Germany, the Energie und Umwelt-Zentrum (Energy and Environment Centre) in Springe near Hanover worked on models for a less destructive way of life and of work, as did the “Langenbruck Eco-Centre” in Switzerland in the early eighties.

This initial phase was characterized, on the one hand, by endlessly difficult in the planning, permission and building processes, and, on the other, by an irrepressible enthusiasm and a sense of breaking new ground shared by advocates of alternative lifestyles. It also encountered a deeply-rooted distrust by the political and economic establishment and the established sciences – even in the often cited “innovative” planning and architectural departments of most universities.

The pioneers who built the first ecological buildings and small eco-villages had to weigh up every aspect from the standpoint of whether conventional supply and disposal system solutions were optimal in terms of resource consumption and had to prove time and time again that there were less wasteful alternatives. But they were also faced with the challenge of fulfilling increasing demands on the planning process and of developing new technologies. As was to be expected, they only succeeded in negotiating these difficulties in some cases, and produced a number of plans which failed, providing the opponents of change with abundant ammunition for criticism and condemnation.

If in the pioneering phase people had still thought in terms of irreconcilable opposites, it became clear during the “testing phase of eco-villages”, which occurred roughly between 1985 and 1995, that considerably more differentiated planning approaches were involved.

As it is still impossible to replace existing large-scale centralized systems with decentralized systems in the time available to us, the aim now was co-existence or supplementing functions, as well as combining options and composite systems. Thus, in contrast to the pioneering phase, the testing phase from 1985-1995 was characterized by a step-by-step convergence of centralized and decentralized systems, and the integration of low-tech and high-tech, of nature and technology. Thus, the pioneering and testing phases continue on, parallel to the application phase.

If, until the mid-90s, innovative planners at the forefront of the eco-village movement were satisfied with achieving an optimal combination of outside and self-generated supply and disposal with water, energy and the necessary materials, current innovation aims higher still: zero-energy buildings zero-waste emissions are well on the way to becoming “mega-out”. What they are aiming at now are buildings that produce more energy than they consume. Water-saving technologies should make way for self-contained water cycles, or failing that, wastewater-free buildings which produce compost and “service water”, and green spaces that produce fresh food without requiring much input - thus becoming edible parks. The emphasis is not so much on self-sufficiency as on sustainable systems, aligning ones production and consumption with the carrying capacity of the land.

4 Higher quality at a lower cost
The most advanced projects that we came in the Global Eco-village Network (GEN) upon have already attained the goal of keeping outside services to an absolute minimum to the extent that cycles are self-contained, just as early pioneers´ visions foresaw. If this goal also leads to a reduction in investment and running costs, these eco-villages can be seen as new milestones in the pioneering and testing phase.

It has also become clear that the real issue is not just new technological solutions, but rather a holistic approach which reinstates the responsibility of the individual and recreates the visibility of the individual elements on which our very survival depends. In this vein, drinking-water is extracted on site and rainwater and grey-water are allowed to run off into open bodies of water, or swales, or are purified in planted soil filter-beds and water polishing ponds. Waste, or at least its organic components, are composted together with faeces. Witnessing stinking garbage turn into aromatic humus is a truly surprising experience.

Thus, designs for urban eco-villages manage to combine apparent contradictions:centralized/decentralized, hi-tech/low-tech, very high quality/very low costs.

The real obstacles are generally experts with little experience in ecology, politicians lacking courage, and administrative regulations that are too narrowly defined: not the commonly-cited occupants and costs. If energy, water, wastewater and refuse disposal rates continue to climb as they have over the past few years, every project which manages to lower running costs will become economically more attractive in the future, while “non-ecological living” will become more expensive, be it food, cars or buildings.

The full potential of the motto “using together instead of consuming individually” has only been touched upon by many eco-village projects. A real opportunity for the way ahead lies in the plummeting costs of information technology and in direct links between groups with similar goals through global communication networks, e.g. the GEN. These options will allow communities not only to exchange information more cheaply and quickly, but also help them locate the right solar car, bicycle or building at the right time, in the right place and at the right price.

5 Renewal instead of new construction
The biggest challenge for everyone involved in building (especially in Europe) is the ecological renewal of existing buildings.

Renewing ecologically means converting and renovating buildings with a view to a “sustainable” use of resources. This involves, for instance, saving non-renewable materials such as copper, aluminium or iron from dismantling operations in cities and reusing them efficiently, rather than mining them from the earth. It also means allowing wastewater to flow back into the groundwater, or into rivers and lakes, in a state that is just as clean or cleaner than when we extracted it as drinking-water; keeping the air clean, so that we can once again smell the scent of plants. Planning quietness and reducing noise; and providing a diversity of uses in a small area are unwritten objectives of many urban eco-villages - so that living, working and leisure can be combined to reduce transport distances and improve the quality of life. In almost all our cities we are still very far away from this vision. However, the examples shown here indicate that there are ways and means of getting closer to these goals. What we need now are ways of attaining these goals.

Naturally, renewing older urban areas requires a greater sensitivity, patience and openness to teamwork than developing new settlements. At first glance, they generally appear to differ very little from completely “normal” projects, and are almost a little boring from the design point of view. However, a closer look at the urban eco-village self-planning processes reveals that they are far more diverse and complicated than new development projects. The paradox is that the solutions in the urban eco-village projects are often more diverse, imaginative and better tailored to the needs of the occupants.

With both new construction and renewal, the key to success lies in winning over the support of everyone involved to the goals of environmental quality, and making the planning and building process a joint success despite, or perhaps because of, the many participants - all of whom are pursuing different interests. The quality of life and of neighbourhoods gained through the juxtaposition of old and new, past and future, is well worth the effort in the present. Nowadays, everyone is talking about sustainable development. In the eco-villages, people are already living it.