villagetowns

[Myakka]

I ran into this site earlier today:
http://villagetowns.net/en/
It is looking really, really cool to me so far. Like an ERE-ers dream come true in a lot of respects.
I like to hear what others think, and I will probably add more about them as I read more.
This is the early swept-off-my-feet stage where I am in love with what I am seeing and haven't read too much about it yet.

[chenda]

Looks very interesting, it's somewhat similar to the garden city movement of a hundred years ago, which were fairly successful.
Many of the design elements they are advocating already exist in various forms; the challenge is to bring them together in the mainstream.

[dragoncar]

I don't get it - they need 10k people to commit and move in within a year? I can't even find a rough ballpark of what it would cost. This is something that should be on page 1. How will they ever get the critical mass required? I think the answer is they won't. The random people who are interested will go live in one of those Eco earthship community things in the desert.
Edit: and they are touting some Greek project that seems less than convincing in view of the recent financial mess

[jennypenny]

I saw a couple of TV commercials for a different one of these this week. Same concept--need a lot of people right away, etc. I wondered if they were making a push in my area because there are still a lot of Sandy victims living in cold, leaky houses who might be tempted to uproot.
I like the idea of these--I LOVED the concept of an ERE city--but I wonder what happens when people start to leave. Are the remaining people responsible for the whole town? I always wonder this when I see all of the new retirement communities being built everywhere. I know the Boomers will fill them, but what happens after they die off?

[chenda]

Well we should' nt dismiss all things Greek because of recent events, Greece has some excellent examples of urban design. A key question for this; is it going to be a real public town with participatory decision making, or some rebranded gated community, built primarily for developers to profit from ?

[J_]

3-4 Months a year I live in winter in a kind of ere-village in the Alps in Europe. 3 years ago all buildings (houses and hotels) of this 2000 person village were connected to one central wood-rocket-burning installation for heating. Wood chips coming from the local timber industry, which get their wood sustainable from the surrounding forests. Water comes from a spring in the surrounding mountains. The sewage treatment of the village gets its electricity by a generator which is mounted on the outlet pipes 600 yard lower in the valley, where the cleaned water flows in the valley river. And 75 % of all other electricity (of the whole country) comes from water driven generators. All shopping we do with backpack on foot. The center of the village is car free, and connected to a good working railway system. Luckily a normal mixture of people live here.This village exists for more than a hundred years.
Is future already arriving?
Ps heating costs where down by 30%!

[Spartan_Warrior]

Well, "ERE" in particular (if not early retirement itself) is a fairly new concept and a lot of us are still in the process of working toward it. When I'm FI, I'd be all for moving to ERE City, but it seems implausible right now.

[C40]

Also see http://www.fourlightshouses.com/pages/t ... on-complex
It's not the same thing, as Schafer's plan is just some houses and one common building, but I think it's more likely to actually happen in the U.S.

[anomie]

I see this (based on admittedly superficial reading of the site) as another (welcome) variation on other types of intentional community building.
Perhaps akin to cohousing communities http://www.cohousing.org/directory
Or any type of effort where people plan out a neighborhood or alternative living situation based on a common interest. And there are plenty of these in existence. One list is here: http://directory.ic.org/iclist/
hth.