The new urbanists: tackling Europe’s sprawl

With its entry into the EU in 2007, Romania’s economy grew 5.7 per cent, and the year after, 7.5 per cent. This economic development drove residential construction up 29.3 per cent in 2007, and along with it, the number of cars - up 27 per cent. This growth has become a great cause for concern among environmentalists, as Romania’s extensive forests are some of the least disturbed habitats in Europe.

The losses to Europe’s natural and scenic reserves may be the most irreversible effects of its sprawl. Natura 2000, the EU’s network of natural reserves, is increasingly finding urban sprawl encroaching on its sites and new transit corridors running through them. Via Baltica, a planned road network connecting the Baltic States and Finland to the rest of the EU will cross through valuable forest and marsh lands, including the Augustow and Knyszn Primeval Forests and the marshes of Biebrza in Poland, one of the few natural wetlands remaining in all of Europe.

Reenter, the new urbanists.

European governments - as well as some in India and Asia - have begun turning to them in an effort to forestall further unsustainable growth, reclaim the lost primacy of their cities (along with their sustainable density and scale), and deliver a built environment with a much diminished carbon footprint.

The sense of vindication at the Oslo conference was tempered by the realisation that they now had a responsibility to find the money and put it on the line. It’s one thing to talk about “walkable and bikeable” places, but what are the practical essentials of a carbon-neutral urbanist town and how does one go about developing one?

One thing everyone agreed on was that the end result was only going to be as good as the planning process that preceded it. Before ground was broken on the first foundation, long-term financing of the project had to be in place, public transportation should be ready, connections to established communities had to be assured. Where were the residents going to shop, work, go to school, church, the movies?

“Townmaking,” one planner assured me, “is a complicated business. Without a guiding authority you’re not going to get the necessary level of sophistication. It’s necessary to have a long-term master plan that over time continues to add value to the development.”

For the new urbanists, building an eco-town is not a matter of building “green” buildings. For some, in fact, green buildings are non-starters, taking 25 to 65 years to recoup the energy used to build them; and once built, they can become quickly obsolete, saddled with already out-of-date technology.

“Everyone gets seduced by the ‘green bling,’” Stephen Platt of Cambridge Architectural Research told me. “Making the houses energy-efficient is the easy bit. The key problem is making this a long-term socially acceptable place where people will want to live and prosper.” More important is creating places that, like Vauban, encourage people to change their unsustainable behaviours and then enable them to do it.

It was a lack of clear planning - as well as politics - that has mired the UK’s proposed eco-towns. The number of proposed developments there has been gradually whittled down to a handful. The French efforts to create “villes durable” have yet to get underway, but they have begun by requesting proposals for projects - “not ‘cities in the country,’ but places that will interlock with the existing heritage.” Five to seven will be chosen that together will have to provide housing for some 50,000 people.

From the EU’s standpoint, the hope is that national and local governments initiate planning processes that will rein in sprawl. The urbanists’ hope is that concerns for global warming, as well as the global recession, have people looking for ways to change their economically profligate and carbon-costly habits.