ALLAMA IQBAL OPEN UNIVERSITY ISLAMABAD Unit 2 Environmental Sustainability in Villages and Localities
2.1 Historical Back ground
2.2 Locality Based forms in Modern Living Think Globally, Act Locally Unit 2 Environmental Sustainability in Villages and Localities 2.1 Historical Back ground VILLAGES, LOCALITIES, AND ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY
Why eco-villages (or eco- neighbourhoods),
The idea has emerged primarily because of our current concern with the ecological damage being done to the planet and our corresponding concern to construct environmentally sustainable ways of living. There is also something old in the proposal; they are (eco) villages. And, in a world where people have come increasingly to inhabit large towns and cities, the question naturally arises: why propose villages? Why not towns, or cities, or metropolises? Unit 2 Environmental Sustainability in Villages and Localities 2.1 Historical Back ground VILLAGES, LOCALITIES, AND ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY
As Gordon Cherry (1996) observed: ‘The preferred British
model remained the decentralist tradition based on Howard’s garden city and Unwin’s style of cottage architecture.. .’ One of the major pressure groups in the UK for town planning in the early 20th century was the Garden Cities and Town Planning Association, which was founded in 1899 explicitly to promulgate Howard’s garden city planning ideas. Unit 2 Environmental Sustainability in Villages and Localities 2.1 Historical Background VILLAGES, LOCALITIES, AND ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY
Within the context of garden city planning, the idea of
neighbourhood planning was another expression of the ideal of creating village-like communities.
The idea of neighbourhood planning originated in the 1920s
with the work of the American sociologist Clarence Perry (1939), who proposed the division of the city into distinct neighbourhood units, each with its own local communal facilities such as convenience shops, a primary school, a church, a local park. Unit 2 Environmental Sustainability in Villages and Localities 2.1 Historical Background VILLAGES, LOCALITIES, AND ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY
Within the context of garden city planning, the idea of
neighbourhood planning was another expression of the ideal of creating village-like communities.
The idea of neighbourhood planning originated in the 1920s
with the work of the American sociologist Clarence Perry (1939), who proposed the division of the city into distinct neighbourhood units, each with its own local communal facilities such as convenience shops, a primary school, a church, a local park. Unit 2 Environmental Sustainability in Villages and Localities 2.1 Historical Background VILLAGES, LOCALITIES, AND ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY
As Cherry (1996) observed, neighbourhoods were conceived
by town planning theorists as ‘self-contained islands for particular communities’ - in other words, as ECO-VILIAGES: ‘villages in the city’ (Taylor, 1973). Along with Howard’s garden city, Perry’s vision of neighbourhoods as relatively self-contained local communities also became very influential in British town planning after the Second World War. Thus, the neighbourhood unit became a central building block, or structuring device, in the plans for all the post-war new towns, as well as in Abercrombie’s plan for London itself. Unit 2 Environmental Sustainability in Villages and Localities 2.1 Historical Background VILLAGES, LOCALITIES, AND ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY
Moreover, it is not just that people are no longer so tied to
the localities within which they reside. These localities themselves have been increasingly penetrated by non-local forces and goods, and so are no longer so distinctly local.
Thus local shops have given way to national chains of
supermarkets selling standardized products, local buildings are often no longer constructed in local materials, even the news in localities is less local and more dominated by news from distant places transmitted by national media. Unit 2 Environmental Sustainability in Villages and Localities 2.2 Locality Based forms in Modern Living Think Globally, Act Locally
In the modern city, much of many people’s lives are not
lived in the neighbourhoods in which they reside, it still remains the case that local neighbourhoods exist - if only as distinguishable physical or geographical spaces. And with respect to these areas, it is possible to provide and/or organize things locally in ways which contribute to environmental sustainability, for example, by providing locally-based energy supply systems; local recycling of organic waste and refuse; local traffic restraint measures coupled with improvements to local facilities for walking and cycling; etc. Unit 1 Conflicting Perceptions of Neighborhood
THE AGENDA FOR FUTURE DEBATE
Are Neighbourhoods Important?
Is There a Role for Local Place Communities? How Far does Current Practice Achieve Sustainable Neighbourhoods? What Principles Should Guide the Planning of Neighbourhoods? What is the Potential for Local Resource Autonomy? What is the Potential for Local Health and Safety? What are the Implications for the Decision-Making Process?