What Are The Odds?

What are the odds that the one day I decide to go to Yarrow happens to be the day when Yarrow has a huge community fair/festival, complete with music and a goddamn steel-drum band? So awesome.

Anyway, aside from the awesome coincidence, the reason I went out to Yarrow was to check out the ecovillage that's being built out there. I will admit that at first glance, I was a little less than impressed. It looked like an ordinary farm with a couple townhouse-ish buildings at the back. However, after sitting around at the festival for an hour and eating some awesome food from said festival I went to the info booth thing for the ecovillage and had a great conversation with one of the women who lives there; after having her explain the whole concept to me, I'm pretty damn excited about the whole thing now.

There's twenty-odd (I think) buildings slated to be put in for housing - these will be high-density and efficient houses, each one with what looked like would be four "suites" each. The lady (whose name I unfortunately never got) was saying her place was around 700-odd square feet, which really is all anyone should need for just a couple people. The houses themselves (all four of them that were actually built, anyway) looked really nice, and they have NO driveways! (I'm finding this really cool 'cause I was thinking the other week that I would love to someday have a house without a driveway) The community is connected to the main road by a big gravel driveway with a small parking area near the homes, and then there is just a pathway leading through the center of the community; as the lady said, "now you actually have to, y'know, walk past your neighbours and say 'hi'". There's also a central common area - a "village square" if you will - and a big mound of dirt from excavations that they left for kids (and, let's face it, adults too) to play on; the diagram also had several areas designated as "bikes", which I assume denotes bike parks (parking). The rest of the "village" area will be "commercial" space - a grocery store, bakery, cafe - basically whatever any self-contained village would/should have.

And this whole area is only five acres of the whole land parcel. The other twenty is for organic farming - the whole parcel is like a big panhandle that stretches down from the road to the river that runs near the base of the mountain, including another wider area on the south side of the river. The farm will ideally produce most of (if not all, but I suspect that's wishful thinking) the community's food, as well as provide some external income from surplus production.


Anyway, summing it up, I'm extremely excited for this project. I'm actually kind of sad that I won't be around to see it fully mature, because as much as I'm starting to like it out here, I will never love it like I do Victoria. The community really is a fantastic idea though. As the lady told me (and I agree) we simply can no longer live like we're used to; the suburban "dream" (don't know why it's a dream - I hate it) is completely unsustainable and incredibly damaging to not just our natural environment - sprawl, pollution, car-dependence, almost no internal sustenance, I could go on and on - but also our social environment. Our houses are all isolated from the other; we don't go anywhere without our cars which nothing more than huge, heavy, smelly, noisy, and inefficient cages that go far faster than is really necessary; the fact that we're driving everywhere all the time obliterates any sense we may have of connection to our own community; the list could just go on
and on for pages.

What I mean by all this is that we simply cannot live in big, several-thousand square-foot houses anymore. There is no space, and, quite simply, there is no point. It's more expensive near the city, but guess what: if you have no car, you don't have to pay for gas, insurance, repairs, upkeep, and so on. That's a lot of money that you could now put towards rent, and in the meantime you have a huge palette of activities and community life within walking or biking distance.

My short posts always turn into rants. Ahwell - I guess that was kind of the point of the blog anyway. If you're also interested in urban redesign, here are some great resources for you:

My biggest recommendation is hands down "Ecocities" by Richard Register. I'm reading this right now and it's unbelieveable. Combined with a huge plethora of illustrations, it makes cities that, until very recently, in my eyes looked like science fiction, now seem completely reasonable and brilliant. Be warned, though: I've had to put the book angrily down several times because of the sheer idiocy of politicians, corporations, and attitudes that have made the kind of thinking in this book "crazy" or "unreasonable". Turns out that you can read the whole book on the link too. (that was a really big resource plug. geez louise.)

Also, here are a couple of websites too.

Livable Streets is a web network full of videos, news, and campaigns for urban redesign away from cars and towards pedestrians and efficient and great transportation.
and here is a lengthy article from Worldchanging about why car-centered development is the worst planning mistake ever executed and what the alternative is.

See y'all tomorrow mornin'.