Communities Redefined

A while back in the good ol days of the Franklin District I recall attending a community meeting in Waiuku to discuss the Council Plan. I was fresh back from a visit to the States where I had spent a few days in Tucson Arizona as the guest of the University Business School. Water was pretty precious there in the desert. I was impressed that every house had two separate supplies of water. One was treated water for human consumption the other was recycled grey and waste water to be used for flushing the toilet, watering the garden, washing the car.

At the Council meeting in Waiuku I asked what our plans were for water recycling, and also why every house didn’t have a water tank. Neither of those were on the agenda.

Of course now we are flat out building dormitory suburbs in Franklin on A class growing soils. Instead of doing what we always do, the development could have been a fabulous opportunity to make a difference.

There are those who argue our modern lifestyle is utterly unsustainable. The technology already exists to change that and it is just a matter of applying science into the architecture of everyday life.

ReGen Villages is a start-up real estate development company aiming to build small, self-sustaining residential communities around the world. The first one is expected to be completed in Almere in the Netherlands in 2018. It will collect and store its own water and energy, grow its own food, and process much of its own waste. Also, no cars. Each completed village will house 100 families on about 50 acres. ReGen villages are designed to give people an environmentally friendly alternative to urban life.

ReGen stands for regenerative, where the outputs of one system are the inputs of another. The concept combines a variety of innovative technologies, such as energy positive homes, renewable energy, energy storage, door-step high yield organic food production, vertical farming aquaponics / aeroponics, water management and waste-to-resource systems. Food waste will turn into fish food for aquaculture, and houses will filter rain water.

Homes in these communities are totally designed for sustainable living. The community shares water storage facilities and there are areas for livestock, communal dinning, playgrounds and communal learning centres.

A living machine system will use plants and trees to filter sewage, and a separate anaerobic digester will handle the neighbourhood’s sewage and provide irrigation or water reused in energy systems. A system for processing food and animal waste will use black soldier flies and aquatic worms to digest the waste and create both chicken and fish feed.

James Ehrlich is the founder of ReGen Villages. He reckons a neighbourhood can be connected the way it’s supposed to be which is around natural resources. As cities become increasingly expensive and crowded, Ehrlich believes this type of development may become more common.

There is a terrible housing crisis and Governments around the world are in a desperate situation to build probably over a billion new homes. At the same time they wrestle with a number of things including the commercial interests of farmers, the commercial interests of traditional real estate developers and material companies which have been doing things the same way for a long time. Without doubt we need to provide new kinds of suburbs and new kinds of neighbourhoods.

Have we missed the opportunity to lead by example, in our clean green country, to redefine residential real-estate development for the next three billion people coming to the planet?

 

First published in the Franklin County News 21 August 2018