A Green town for 12,000

Guy Dauncey

From a letter to the Institute from one of its directors, Guy Dauncey, who lives in British Columbia, Canada.

The main thing I'm up to is SO BIG that I hardly know where to begin!

'I'm involved in a project out here to build a whole new town, from scratch, for 12,000 people, as a model of community participation and ecological sustainability'

I'm involved in a project out here to build a whole new town, from scratch, for 12,000 people, as a model of community participation, community architecture and neighbourhood design, ecological sustainability and economic self-reliance.

The $15m investment cash comes from four trade union pension funds; and we are hopefully just months away from obtaining zoning (planning permission).

It won't be a car-free town; the investors are not convinced that 12,000 people will willingly sacrifice their cars, especially in a part of the world where public transport is still fairly rudimentary. We will be incorporating a car-free area within an early neighbourhood, as a way of testing the market's response. The investors feel that they are putting up $15m of their union members' money, and they want to be sure that the investment is safe.

The site of the town is quite remarkable: it's not only the site of a huge abandoned old cement works, but it's also an astonishing, steep, east-facing hillside, with three miles of waterfront, and stunning views.

Additional information from material sent by Dauncey:

- The co-operative for this new town of Bamberton plans to build between 200 and 500 housing units a year for 20 years on the 1,560 acre site 32 kilometres north of Victoria.
- With the new town springing up on the wooded hillsides, 'it should be a way to absorb the pressures of growth in the nearby communities, so they won't feel their rural lifestyle is being threatened.'
- The lower quarry will probably be flooded to become a lake. The higher quarry may become a natural park or something similar. The town centre on the waterfront will provide shops, restaurants, homes, a resort hotel and a marina, designed to be a vibrant, colourful centre for the town as a whole.

'The town is planned as a series of small, friendly neighbourhoods, focused around village greens'

- The town is planned as a series of small, friendly neighbourhoods, focused around village greens. In fact the whole of Bamberton is based on Christopher Alexander's book 'The Pattern Language' (OUP, New York) - this is the main architectural framework being used, plus a town planning context called 'Traditional Neighbourhood Development', which is basically the 'Pattern Language' applied to town development as a whole.
- There will be space for CoHousing, which involves a cluster of homes with shared ownership of a common house.
- Purchasers will have to live with land-use covenants imposing tight restrictions on topsoil removal, tree-cutting and use of chemicals and herbicides.
- The town will be wired with fibre-optics for advanced telecommunications.
- The emphasis will be on the use of community minibuses for local transport and car-pooling and community transit for longer journeys.
- A tertiary sewage treatment plant similar to that in Penticton, British Columbia, will be installed, producing compost, water for irrigation in summer and fish-quality water outflow in the winter months.

What I'd really like to do is to find a way to tap the creativity of the wider public, given that the chance to design a new town from scratch doesn't come up that often.

Guy Dauncey, 2069 Kings Road, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada V8R 2P6 (tel 604 592 4472 h; 592 4473 w, tel and fax).

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