Patterns of habitation

I've been really noticing the patterns of villages, towns and cities as I travel, and how obvious it is which places were developed before cheap oil. In Los Angeles, the grid pattern of low rise buildings stretches on forever, covering the plains and spilling over into the neighbouring valleys. From the air it is a grey, dull expanse, with the only visual relief from the relentless grid provided, ironically, by the freeways snaking through. On the ground, roads are like rivers that you cross at your peril unless the traffic lights stop the flow. I had to walk for miles to find the few basic items I needed to buy. I spent 2 days in the central city looking for the heart of LA, and am still not sure I found it. The streets stunk of piss in every corner, and it was easy to feel lost and of no consequence.

Arriving in London was a complete contrast. Everything felt smaller, more compact and more vertical, busier, more alive. The cars are smaller, the streets are narrower, buildings crowd together and rise several stories high, even the buses are 2 story! The local shopping hub was bustling, vibrant and full of life, and the buildings are full of character. I found the few items I needed in local shops all within a few steps of each other. Though crowded and busy, inner London has a human scale that feels as if people belong.

London is surprisingly also leafy and green. Here they achieve a very high density of people living in 4 or 5 story walk-up apartments, surrounding small local parks which provide a green and pleasant outlook and shared open space. Nearly 40% of London's 1600 square kilometers is occupied by green space or water, in private gardens, parks, allotments and wildlife areas. While 14% of households now grow some vegetables in their garden, it is easy to see how this could increase hugely if the will and necessity arose to produce more food within the city.

Out of the cities, the theme repeats in different ways. Flying over the US, the houses were dotted far apart from each other, as if each was trying to surround itself with as much space as possible. What a relief then to fly over the west of Germany, and see the aesthetically beautiful pattern, repeated across the country, of tightly-clustered houses in small villages, surrounded by a pattern of small but intensively farmed fields, with forested areas between those providing a deep green boundary and linkage with the neighbouring villages. Many towns had a small cluster of 5 or 7 wind generators on a surrounding hill.


I saw this pattern repeated all over England and Scotland also; small tightly clustered villages, with houses and shops all within walking distance, enough fields and open space around them to supply most of their food, and with woods and wildlife habitats in between. Cars have definitely arrived after the village circulation pattern was established, and have to fit into the existing pattern - though sometimes this results in some very tight spots!


Sustainable Urban Patterns

At Findhorn I attended a talk by Christopher Mare, an architect from Seattle studying urban morphology or the pattern of cities, and in particular how existing patterns of cities will cope with the changes required as oil becomes more expensive and less available. He talked of Europe being based on a village substructure, even though this has been overlaid and surrounded by an oil-dependent pattern, and is in a better position than most of North America (or New Zealand) when urban patterns have to shrink back to a more local-based pattern.

His studies of the theory and examples of successful towns and villages lead him to suggest an ideal size of 5000 people for an urban village, being enough to support a wide range of services and facilities but still allow a sense of identity and participation. He advocates dense centres of commerce and housing within these urban villages, becoming less dense towards the edges but with a clearly defined boundary and green belts between for food and forestry. Much as I saw in Germany!! These urban villages could in turn be made up of “ecovillages” of around 500 people, and several urban villages could together form an “eco-city”. This matches my long-held belief that a much more viable and sustainable pattern for a city is to have layers of governance and identity, with several eco-neighbourhoods like Earthsong together making up an eco-village or eco-suburb, within a city of eco-suburbs.

I was also privileged to stay with Bill and Sheila Berrrit in Ilkley, Yorkshire. Bill is an architect and was one of the visionaries for the early design of Milton Keynes, a model city built in the 60s north of London. His concept was for many pods or villages of 5000 people, surrounded by green belts and linked by trains to the central city area. A network of paths for pedestrians and cyclists was to have complemented the road network, with every house no further than a 7 minute walk to the train, and employment was built in from the beginning. Unfortunately the central government took over the project and the village pod concept instead became a grid pattern, but many other useful features were retained.