conforming to a vision retrieved from the past. Yet all credit to
the Duany, Plater-Zyberk, Speck revival of the Traditional
Neighbourhood Development model, exemplified in the open-
access settlement of Seaside, Florida (Suburban Nation, 2000).^43
Historically benchmarked, the eco-village ideal conforms also
to the Geddesian ideal of a rapprochement between ‘work
place folk’ for a countryside setting, described by Geddes in
his prototype as ‘the valley section’.
Eco-villages are predicated on the virtues of dependable and
frequent public transportation, a within-settlement energy effi-
ciency, pedestrian accessibility, waste reduction reuse and recy-
cling, food and fresh water quality and semi-sufficiency, all
laced through with greenways and backgrounded by a
farming-woodland landscape. In this context the eco-village
construct reaches back into history by replicating the decen-
tralized, away from the city yet locally concentrated, global-
wide rural village pattern. It also attaches to the neomodern
principles of Agenda 21 – taking care of the community and the
habitat (Duerksen and others, Habitat Protection Planning,1997).
Villages of the green-setting kind, peripheral to European cities
and a few of the older cities of the New World, are locally dense
habitations mostly established prior to the steam train, and cer-
tainly prior to the widespread use of automobiles. They are cari-
catured as being the distance apart, approximately, that a villager
could return-traverse to market in the next town, on foot during
one day. Their growth has been slowly incremental, often lineal.
As they grew, they incorporated mixed uses (houses, small shops,
light and service industry) and provided specialist services (of
the blacksmith and bakery kind) which, previous to their consol-
idation as a village, may have been part of a farming hamlet.
Those villages within an hour’s drive of a large town or city have
now become residential dormitories which offer aesthetically
attractive, fairly private options for a mobile urban elite – at con-
siderable social cost to the already established agriculture-serving
population. In Britain various technical planning devices (the
Green Belt, Rural White Land designations, Regional Growth
Management practices; the delineation of Exception Areas, Areas
Of Outstanding Natural Beauty and Sites of Special Scientific
Interest) are used to limit the urban impact and prevent a subur-
banization of the between-village space. One clear British objective is to retain
good agricultural land, worked as living-producing household-farm entities. An
accessory aesthetic objective is to leave these good-soil agricultural localities as
agricultural and silvicultural tracts, avoiding the insensitive infilling of between-
settlement landscapes.
What now mostly takes place throughout the quasi-urban freehold penumbra
of settler society cities and larger towns is a patchy, individualized quasi-rural224 PracticeNEW URBANISM
(A United States
selection of projects
which incline toward
the eco-village ideal)
Seaside FL
Kentlands MD
Laguna West CA
Windsor FL
Fairview OR
Southern Village NC
Northwest Landing
WA
Sunnyside OR
Celebration FL
Addison Circle TX
Belmont Forest VA
‘The “new” in New
Urbanism...attempts to
apply the age old
principles of urbanism –
diversity, streetlife, human
scale – to the suburbs in
the 21st Century.’
Calthorpe and Fulton,
The Regional City
(2001: 279).
Imported into urban
localities:hydro-generated,
wind-powered, fossil and
nuclear energy; potable
water; fresh air; food and
fibres; consumer
‘durables’.
Exported from urban
localities:waste heat,
waste toxins, waste
water, polluted air,
sewage, garbage.