Eco-Village and Sustainable communities-
Design for human settlement
Highlights from Peters notes of Robyn Francis' workshop Jan 1999
- The bit that shows is the tip of the iceberg
- The project depends on the groundwork
- Its good to remember this when immersed in the pedths of the workload
- While developing Projects we must work within the legal and planning processes that exist
- We must find the 'pathways', the existing available avenues or loopholes, and act there. These can sometimes be very subtle eg for patented seeds-a seed library cf seedbank (the former is legal the second not)
- We must also lobby for new processes, to make the way easier for others. This takes time but pays off. The NSW Community Titles Act took 8 years to get through.
- A good vision is important:-Quality of life, love, safe, connection, happiness, community, health, opportunities, future, joy, global, feeling, awareness, individuality, security, caring, abundance, acceptance, tolerance, diversity etc
- Characterisics of Eco-Villages:-
1. Human Scale
2. Full Featured
3. Ecologically sensitive
4. Healthy human development
- A hamlet (tens of houses) is not a village. A village is hundreds of houses.
- We should be careful with our language.
- In a village people are able to be known, can recognise faces, and can have a say.
- People are not lost in anonanymity and thus open to antisocial behavior.
- Think governance not government
- Think access, not ownership eg: lease land not purchase
- Watch out for blindspots eg: the needs of teens or elderly eg: cemetary eg: pierced etc teenagers is symbolic of them wanting acceptance
- The need to be able to agree to disagree
- Beware monoculturing ourselves, stretch beyond the comfort zones
- Avoid self sufficiency-look at what there is already locally, and work with that. Think about integrating with and revitalising existing villages
- Concept of 'leaky margins', edges, interconnection, outreach
- When planning for long visions, be like water-if hit an obstacle don't just stop, find a new way
- Beware big plans, as big plans often fail to look at small things
- Find allies esp high profile ones. Use levers such as ego eg appeal to councils be able to say we were first etc
- Allow for long move ins and village development, Rome was not built in a day.
- A few houses does not a village make.
- Also you don't need to provide everything, use whats nearby as well.
- Look carefully at the social or human needs-and build these into the visible and invisible structures.
New ideas take a while to integrate into the system, and follow this general path:
- Strategies for change must work with this process
- Sometimes the people involved down in the experimentation, years later end up at the top of the chain and assist about top down change also
- The infrastructure stage is very important. Books, networks, websites, lobbying etc
NSW Community Tiltes Act 1989
- Very hefty but very flexible document allowing for freehold land ownership with a share of common land.
- Allows for three tiered 'Community Association' management structure
- Separate 'precincts' fall under the 'Community Association' and are able to have different 'zones' under council planning schemes. Thus you can have mixed uses eg residential, commercial, shopping, rural within the one development.
- Precincts can have a number of 'neighbourhoods'. These can have their own management regimes and rules
- Allows for a 'non-buildings based' group titling ie: you can have the title without needing to yet have built a house on it.
- Allows for staged development.
- There are three layers of rules:
- Part A: Aims and objectives, requires 100% vote to change
- Part B: Management of land, requires 70% to change
- Part C: Manadtory matters
- Able after a specified process is followed to be able to force someone who is failing to comply with the rules to sell their unit
- 43 lots
- Levies are same for each household: Annual levies $500 per year +$500 rates
- One vote per household
- Commons management System:
- Committees have a small membership 3 people, and deal with a narrow task
- Eg:Reafforrestaion, woodlot, ag lot, water, community cantre, roads +corridoors.
- These are resided over by an executive committee of 5 people
- Lesson, when doing owner build build at least the shell of a common house initailly- toliets shower laundry kithcen. This way people can use these while building. It can be added onot later
- Think expanded housing as a pathway, group houses under one roof, but with better privacy and own entrances.
Bylaws and community managment
- Don't assume anything about the future residents, esp that they will be green
- Enshrine you goals in stone up front
- Topics: eg energy and resource use
- Water collection and waste handling
- Style and character, sympathetic to the environment
- Landscape and building guidelines
- Require lot owners to do PC course
- Provide a owner handbook
- Levies for bottom line maintenances costs-facilitated annual workshop to decide on priorit projects. This can be held 2 weeks prior to AGM.
- Co-opoly-Make paper money to tune of community budget and have individuls place some in each of the poss project boxes.
- Paid or LETS staff Ok for some positions
- Where at all possible use use pays for common resources, eg water, land
- Ag lots first year free, so as tennant puts in infrastructure, after that 15% of gross income.
- Use the I Ching as a group
- Very successful developer driven model 240 houses.
- It was so successful that there is virtual no turn over. It takes around 5 years to get a home there
- The real estate bodies lobied to outlow this kind of development, and were successful. This is the reason why it has not been repeated.! Groan-this is the power of lobbying (in reverse)
- In Village Homes the roads take people out of the village, and paths take them within. It is difficult to drive around inside.
- Has an excelent bookshop-take some money!
- Edible landscaping of road coridoors, produce money for body corporate.
- Private yards are on the road side, fenced. The front of the house is the back of community path side. Privacy is about design not proximity.
- Use shady trees over hard surfaces
- VH is growing more food now than it was under primary agriculture-we needn't woory about displacing ag land.
- VH pays a full time horiculturilist to manage commons
- Peoples gardens are an indicator of their wellbeing-if neighbours notice a garden s unkept, chances are the owner is unwell or something. They offer to help out, or tend the garden.
- Look into Unit Trusts as an investment tool- finance on such is not easy but just sell more units
- The securies commission bizzo is most at concern if you actually advertise, the pathway is thus there.
- UT's can be linked to a place in the village
- UT money not used, but held in trust as collateral to borrow against.
- Do a village money audit-where are the leaks? Could the amount you all spend at the supermarket pay a gardner?
- Organise seminars for legal and finance side of it-to help build structures. Find speakers
- Set up a development coalition, between various projects to avoid reinventing wheels
- Make sure you get a full list of planning/council needs up front else you may get them dripfed serially.
- Used a company to develop the site.
- Done as staged devlopment, doing individual titles in batchs as they are built
- Used a company share scheme. Company owns the land and issues shares to unit owners.
- Difficult to get or out, finance, and revaluations.
- Land holding trust, issuing LTOs. With a 30 year lease.
- Site worth $1M or so, vendor financing for 3 years.
Group design and Development-touches on community consultation abit
- Don't ask people 'what do they want'- cause you will get a fantasy wishlist
- Use more probing questions that build a picture of needs, eg
1. What does... mean to you?
2. What do you value most about ...?
3. What are three key problems or areas youd like to see changed?
4. What are three wishes or themes to tick?
- Try to reach people that are normlly skipped over in conslation processes
- Run workshops at different times of day to accomadate differnet kinds of folk
- Ditto in different venues-people are most comfortable in certain plaves eg. Bowling club v environment centre
- Do Culteral mapping:-
1. Get group to draw a map and see what shows up
2. Then each person draws on there dailiy routes and modes of travel.
3. Do for all ages etc. Work with the results eg. Put a ped crossing where most people cross roads
- Make models to reality test outcomes of design resulting from mapping
- Use cut out photos for building facades, cheap and quick
- Public meetings:
1. pin up the agenda and groundrules, let people know that the tradional interjections are not allowed.
2. Get a good facilitaor
3. Prior to the meeting set up a forum o decide agenda, process etc
4. Make sure people know that there is a time set aside for questions and discussion
5. Define consensus as a decsion everyone can live with
- PMI-pluses, minuses, inetersting -get 3-4 people teams to brainstorm these
- If people are getting polarsed go around the circle alternating plus minus, and different each time round.
- McHarg Overlay Method
1. Say looking at land tuned for possible housing development
2. Look especially at watershed/ catchments.
3. Mark in different colored overlays, swamps, steep areas, bad aspect, natives, sacred spots, best soils etc etc
4. Late a secondary set of overlays looks at access, services, gravity feedable, windpawer sites etc.
5. Whats left is ripe for housing. Make sure you have space for main central clusters cf isolated small lots
"Sustainabilty is about accepting the emergant quality of evolution, the law of chaos, the uncertainty principle and getting in touch with what needs to be done and doing it with the opportunities that presnt themselves"
- The Tao of Leadership
- Reinhabiting the Earth, Kirk Patrick Sale
- The Global Brain, Peter Russell
- NSW Community Titles Act 1989 (Robyn is going to send us a copy)
- NSWcRural Residential Development Report (Doug has?)
- A study of Community title and what changes we might favourably make to Unit Title?
- Consultation and decsionmaking processes summary?
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