Category Archives: Buildings

Housing

Vauban community self build

Vauban community self build

In the UK debates have raged for decades about whether various services or industries should be privatized or nationalized. Such debate tends to pit people into opposing ideological camps. Such static and polarized positions overlook the possibility of other models of doing things. In September 2015 I wrote a blog about this in relation to the energy sector and the emerging civic or municipal sector in Germany and elsewhere. This municipal, civic, pluralistic, flexible and networked model has many advantages over either simple nationalized or privatized systems. In that earlier blog I looked at energy. Today I want to look at the UK’s housing crisis. In subsequent blogs I may look at other industries or services through this prism of organization and ownership.

It is generally acknowledged that the UK has a housing crisis. Home ownership is falling and a growing percentage of the population live in private rented accommodation, which is often overpriced and substandard. Many people would like to buy a home of their own but can’t afford to. The UK property market treats houses as assets to profit from rather than homes to which people have a right to. Many years ago I worked for the old GLC housing department. The council estates we owned and managed had many problems and I wondered then about how things might better be organized. Margret Thatcher’s ‘Right to Buy’ legislation helped many people onto the property ladder, but at the cost of future generations, as it massively depleted the supply of affordable housing. Council housing did offer affordability, but often at the expense of disempowering people. Families were often stuck in sink estates with little or no hope of moving to somewhere better. The right to make improvements and alterations were all taken away from people and vested with the local council, which de-motivated and disempowered many people.

Self build offers tremendous scope in all manner of ways. It can get people onto the housing ladder and into the homes of their dreams. It can be tremendously empowering. In the UK both individual and group self build has traditionally been a very small part of the housing sector. It is growing, but is still tiny, especially in comparison with many other countries in Europe, the Americas and elsewhere. House building in the UK is dominated by half a dozen or so private companies who have long had too close relationships with local councils and national government. In many countries local and national governments, and importantly also banks, work very much more closely with self build groups. At an event I mentioned in my last blog Ted Stevens showed dozens of examples. Most were from Holland and Germany. A growing, but still tiny, number are from the UK. The National Custom and Self Build Association have a fascinating selection of examples on their website. One is Vauban, near Freiburg, a place I have often cited in talks for its cutting edge sustainability. Community self build is at the core of Vauban’s success. Do read about it on the Self Build Portal and imagine if something on this scale could ever happen in UK, and ask yourself what is holding us back.

Three inspirational events

Almere

Almere, pioneering community self building on land reclaimed from the sea.

Apologies, it’s now nearly a month since I last posted a blog. I usually try and write one every week or so. It’s been a busy month. One annoyance has been the General Data Protection Regulation regulations that I couldn’t fathom, which meant that I’ve cancelled the Mailchimp automated newsletter, and I’ll have to work out how to delete the sign-up form from this webpage! Sorry to those of you who enjoyed getting the blogs via the newsletter format.

Over the last week or so I’ve been to three events that each in their own way were inspiring and indicated positive trends. All could do with strong government support to really grow to their full potential.

The first event was the AGM of Ledbury Solar Coop. The coop is doing well and the directors are doing an outstanding job. This is one of the Sharenergy renewable energy coops of which I’m a member, and which I’ve frequently mentioned in previous blogs. To me they seemed to have massive potential to meet many social and environmental challenges. Unfortunately government support has been weak, confused and generally unhelpful, which has certainly slowed the spread of such coops.

The next event was Riversimple’s launch of the Rasa in Abergavenny. It is looking increasingly likely that our car club will be part of their trials for this hydrogen fuel cell car. The Riversimple car and our car club are things I’ve blogged about before. Together they indicate a way of moving beyond the era of individual ownership of wasteful and highly polluting petrol and diesel cars. We could free up a lot of urban space, cut traffic congestion and pollution by moving toward more flexible patterns of mobility.

The third event I’d like to flag up was the launch of Hereford Community Land Trust’s Building Momentum project. They had two outside speakers who I thought were excellent and showed how the UK’s housing crisis might best be addressed. Keith Cowling spoke about the achievements of Bristol Community Land Trust while Ted Stevens gave an inspiring talk setting UK community self build in context with the extraordinary projects being built in many other countries. (eg Berlin)

Together these three events show how energy, transport and housing outcomes could all be improved.

 

Australian Solar (Again)

Baldivis

Baldivis: of 5,765 houses 3951 now have solar panels

In 2012 I wrote a blog entitled ‘Re-powering Port Augusta’, advocating large scale concentrating solar thermal power stations be built to replace Northern and Playford B ageing dirty brown coal fired power stations, which were due to close. Since I wrote that blog a number of coal fired power stations have closed and many parts of Australia have experienced power cuts. For many decades Australia has had excellent pioneer academic solar thermal researchers but still has no large scale solar thermal power stations with thermal storage. India, South Africa and Chile have all overtaken Australia on that front. Now, rather belatedly, there is a flurry of interest in building various types of solar power and energy storage systems in Australia, and especially in the Port Augusta region. Port Augusta in South Australia is ideally located for such projects with good grid connections, a very sunny climate and a workforce with relevant skills.

Sundrop Farms, with Aalborg CSP, have built the excellent system that I blogged about a few months ago (here and here). This however was relatively small scale and just for the tomato farm, not for feeding electricity into the grid, but does provide an excellent example of what can be done.

Australia’s adoption of solar power has been very unusual. The vast majority of its solar power, about 80%, is domestic rooftop arrays. (Solar farms only account for about 8%) Rising gas and electricity prices, recent power cuts, government policies that favoured small scale arrays, large numbers of detached owner occupied houses and falling prices of solar panels and batteries are all factors contributing to the rise in rooftop solar systems in Australia. Thirteen months ago Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg stated that 15% of Australian households had photovoltaic solar panels on their roofs. Renate Egan of the Australian Photovoltaic Institute claims this figure is now 26% (higher than any other country, except perhaps a few tiny island nations). In Baldivis, a suburb of nearly 6,000 houses to the south of Perth, the figure is 69% and rapidly increasing. Within a year or two it is likely that some such places will have solar panels on 90% or more of households.

Rooftop solar looks set to increase. So far this is mainly by adding solar panels to existing buildings, which are often not ideally suited due to their orientation and many having hipped roofs. If new houses were designed and orientated to maximize solar generation very much more power could be produced at very competitive prices. The next steps will be to increase energy storage and for people to switch to electric transportation systems. As I’ve said before, Australia could become a 100% solar powered economy. It is happening piecemeal, but could be very beneficially aided by clearer government goal setting and forward planning.