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This is how it will be. Across the fair face of Albion, to the ringing of bells and the soft murmur of doves, appears a leafy flush of eco-towns. They are sun-dappled utopias, urban dreamworlds in which no human need is unfulfilled. Wildlife romps through bird-loud glades. People work at home or in business parks to which they can stroll or cycle. Public transport is swift, efficient and free, so cars are not needed. Community sports hubs, leisure and cultural facilities are so abundant that nobody wants to leave the town anyway. Children walk safely to schools in which the most popular subject is environmentalism. There are superstores for convenience, and farmers’ markets for friends of the planet. Allotments, too, for those who want to grow their own. Energy is renewable, insulation total and the carbon footprint zero.

Nothing is wasted. Grey water goes onto the gardens. Rainwater is dispersed via permeable pavements, swales and ponds into wetland habitats, which channel it safely back into the aquifers and rivers where it belongs. The town never floods. There are no dustcarts. Residents put their rubbish into cylinders that discharge straight into underground vacuum tubes, which whisk it to the local recycling centre, where at least 50% of it finds new economic use. The rest of it is converted into heat or energy. Ill health and unfitness are rare aberrations. “Eco-towns,” says the Department for Communities and

Local Government (CLG), “should be designed as healthy and sustainable environments, encouraging healthy living for all through ‘Active Design’ principles, community involvement and encouraging healthy behaviours.”

Given all that, you may wonder why local populations across the country are greeting the prospect of eco-towns with the kind of enthusiasm normally reserved for germ-warfare laboratories. What are eco-towns, anyway? The official answer is that they are the blueprint for life in the future: carbon-neutral, energy-efficient, healthy, fragrant and green as grass. Built in sufficient number, they will provide homes for the multitudes who currently cannot afford to buy; and they will lead the fight against global warming. The government said that every region should have one, and invited proposals from local authorities and developers.

Fifty-seven schemes were put forward, which CLG reduced in April to a shortlist of 15, from which, after consultation, a maximum of 10 will be built. The final decision is expected in the autumn. Of course, nobody carrying concrete to rural England can expect to be welcomed with tea and cakes. It’s more like stirring a wasps’ nest: the Nimbys swarm out with stings aloft, and developers at public meetings are lucky to get out alive. So it is with eco-towns. There are petitions, marches, letters to newspapers – all the predictable paraphernalia of rural protest.

But this time there is a difference: the Nimbys are not marching alone. Linking arms with them are not just the greenfield regulars of the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE): we hear also the measured tread of the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) and the Local Government Association. They have heard the dream, but they have not seen the light. They see only a suburban nightmare: remote, unsustainable, car-dependent housing estates on greenfield sites, built against the opposition of local people and doomed to become the slums of the future. Even the architect and Labour peer Richard Rogers has weighed in, saying: “I think eco-towns are one of the biggest mistakes the government could make. They are in no way environmentally sustainable… building in green areas for 5,000 to 10,000 people means it has to be car-based… It will not be a walking community.”

Planners have always had difficulty with plain English, and governments, too, like to slap on the jargon like camouflage paint. Thus, protecting “sustainable communities” in the Midlands and north of England has meant compulsorily purchasing people’s homes and knocking them down. These aggressively named “Pathfinder” schemes, which “sustain” communities by destroying them, are the legacy of John Prescott, whose bloated former department, the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, has been partially rendered down into CLG. Some of the merriment may have gone out of it, but not the talent for sense-mangling. Several of the putative green utopias were speculative housing projects already turned down by planners, but this did not prevent their being dug out of Prescott’s trash can and recycled as “eco-towns”.

In the foreword to her department’s prospectus, Eco-towns: Living a Greener Future, the housing minister Caroline Flint claims overwhelming public support for the Big Idea. “The enthusiasm for eco-towns,” she writes, “was reflected in the number of bids we received.” If disingenuousness were an art form, this would win the Turner prize. The enthusiasm came from developers with the reek of profit in their nostrils, not from local populations living next door to the targeted fields.

Out in the shires, hype was mating with wishful thinking and breeding chimeras. Zero-carbon house-building is about as likely as the odourless fart, and concrete is the baked beans of global warming. Cement kilns contribute at least 5% of the global output of carbon dioxide, and some calculations put it at double that. Every brick laid is a blow to the climate. Of course, this doesn’t mean there should be no new house-building; and it certainly doesn’t mean that houses should be any less carbon-efficient than technology can make them. There is no quarrel with the government’s decree that all new homes should be “zero carbon” by 2016. But note that word “all”. If the targets for eco-towns are the same as they are for everywhere else, then what gives them their special status? Why is the government so determined to drive them through? And if it is so hooked on sustainable housing, why is it pouring so much of its energy into new-build? The vast majority of people live, and will go on living, in homes built during the 19th and 20th centuries. Retro-fitting these to improve their carbon efficiency would yield exponentially higher benefit than a few flagship housing estates.

The second plank of the case for eco-towns is to “increase housing supply”. This particularly excited the Town and Country Planning Association, whose chief executive, Gideon Amos, identified “a potential to deliver 200,000 new homes… to families and households crying out for decent homes in a good environment”. But this is a gross overestimate. On the basis of Caroline Flint’s own figures, the total yield is unlikely to exceed 90,000, or 3% of the 3m the government wants to build by 2020. Which leaves 97% to be built – where? In non-eco-towns? The idea that they will make a meaningful contribution to housing supply is, as Rynd Smith, head of policy at the RTPI, puts it, “a pretence”.

“So,” he says. “We are left with a large question mark. What is this all about?” Sceptics have alternative theories. There is a suspicion of “initiativitis” in a government that needs to be seen to be doing something. All but three of the 15 shortlisted sites are in Conservative constituencies and are opposed by their MPs, so it enables the government to brand itself as progressive and the opposition as selfish middle-class Nimbys who think low-paid workers have no right to a roof. The other suspicion is that, though the official target is 10 new towns by 2020, these are merely pilots for evaluation and more must follow. Otherwise, what’s the point? Announcing the shortlist on April 3, Caroline Flint said: “We have a major shortfall of housing and… more affordable housing is a huge priority… Building in existing towns and cities alone simply cannot provide enough new homes…” This may be so, but is 3% really enough to tip the balance? Can this truly be the extent of the government’s vision?

Planning has always been mixed up with social reform and, hence, politics. First came the garden cities – Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City – with their utopian vision of rus in urbe; then the post-war “new towns”, which applied social and political idealism to the problems of metropolitan overspill. The legacy was city-centre blight and a depressing rash of kit-form, everywhere-and-nowhere new towns – Stevenage, Crawley, Hemel Hempstead, Basildon and the rest. And now here we go again.

False accounting and ministerial gobbledegook invite us to believe that eco-towns are some kind of cynical wheeze. But it’s not all knavery. I spoke to one potential developer, Tony Bird, managing director of the family-owned Bird Group, who is either an actor of consummate skill or a man in the grip of a genuine passion. “I’ve got to live in the area afterwards,” he said, “and I don’t want to be remembered for building a ghetto.” His inspiration is the Prince of Wales’s model village at Poundbury in Dorset, with its intimate serpentine streets and cosy vernacular house styles. Bird proposes a development of 6,000 houses, 30% of which would be “affordable” and 30% “social”. There would be a market square the size of a football pitch, to be used for farmers’ markets, food and book fairs. The 240-hectare site is a former army camp near Long Marston, six miles southwest of Stratford-upon-Avon, so the land purchase will benefit the public purse. Bird himself is a prominent figure in the recycling movement and has an OBE for services to the environment. No surprise: his is the scheme that includes the subterranean rubbish tubes.

No surprise either: the local populace, as he puts it, are “jumping up and down”. For all that his reputation counts, he might as well be John Prescott. Hostile petitions gathered signatures by the thousand. Local MPs joined well-attended protest marches, an action group (the Bard campaign) was making headlines, local councils had linked arms in a coalition of the unwilling, and the CPRE had declared it to be “the right idea in the wrong place”. One MP saw it as a “sink estate of the future”; councillors fretted about loss of biodiversity, increased commuter and HGV traffic, and the butchering of “a delightful area of the north Cotswolds and south Warwickshire”. A bit of social housing? Yes, they could see the point of that – but not of a whole new town. You could make it as eco-friendly as you liked, and garland it with opera houses and swimming pools, but its residents were not going to stay inside like Indians on a reservation. They meant more cars on the road, more patients in hospital, more children in schools, more sewage in the pipes. They meant overload.

Across the country, suspicion hardened into conviction that the government was pulling a stunt; that eco-towns were spin, not original (or even joined-up) thinking, and that their contribution to the housing shortfall and climate change was almost too small to measure. Eco-towns looked like a rebranding exercise for Grimsville housing estates. The RTPI warned that the government risked creating “soulless Stepford Wives suburbia”.

Sir Simon Milton, chair of the Local Government Association, spelt it out: “It’s no use building carbon-neutral, environmentally friendly houses if they are in the middle of nowhere with no facilities, so that people have to drive miles to buy a loaf of bread or take their kids to school.” If there were no local jobs or training, he said, the emphasis on social housing would serve only to create “eco-slums”. What worries him particularly is the threat to democracy. “My concern,” he tells me, “is that the CLG document contains some extremely ill-conceived proposals about how such schemes might be delivered through the planning system.”

Planning policy generally is perceived as “boring”, which suits the vested interests very well indeed. Most people will be vaguely aware that, in pursuit of its 3m-by-2020 target, the government has imposed house-building quotas across the country, though they will not necessarily know that these are embedded in things called Regional Spatial Strategies (RSSs). There is one each for the northeast, northwest, Yorkshire and the Humber, West Midlands, East Midlands, east of England, southeast and the southwest. What they almost certainly will not know, unless they have been paying unusually close attention, is that the eco-towns do not count towards the published targets. They are additional to them. Less likely still are they to have actually read the strategies and understood their inherent contradictions.

The southeast RSS, for example, calls for housing to be concentrated in existing urban areas, and yet three of the 15 shortlisted eco-sites are in the southeast – already one of the most densely inhabited regions of Europe, which needs more development like John Prescott needs a bowl of dripping. Here again the government has reneged on its own policy. It promised an eco-town in every region, but instead is cramming them into the south and east. The west has only one, and the northeast and northwest have none at all.

There is another imbalance too. Though it is widely acknowledged that some local authorities are too reluctant to accept their share of the housing load and need geeing up, others are already straining every sinew. The irony is that it is the best and most willing performers – the ones that are already working flat out to meet their targets – that will be hardest hit. The best/worst example is Hanley Grange, near Cambridge, where the proposed eco-town site is a 500-hectare (1,235-acre) triangle bordered by three main roads and close to the M11. It is greenfield in the most literal sense – classified by the government as grade 2 (ie, “very good”) agricultural land.

Glimpsed between wiper-swishes on a wet May morning I see fields of emerging cereals enclosed by hedges and dotted with trees, the classic patchwork of lowland England. The village of Hinxton, just across the A1301, cleaves to a typical Cambridgeshire high street of timber and thatch, and is quite undisturbed by its discreet high-tech neighbour, the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus. Developers have had a shot at the site before. In a previous incarnation, rejected by planners in 2005, it was known as “Hinxton Grange” – a new town of 8,000 houses proposed by a company called Jarrow Investments, which owned most of the land. In its reincarnation it has picked up a new prefix, “eco”, and a new name, “Hanley Grange”, but is still a new town of 8,000 houses being proposed by a company called Jarrow Investments. It is well known now, though it caused astonishment when it leaked out, that Jarrow is a front for Tesco.

The fact is, an eco-town for Cambridge is a done deal. Even before he became prime minister, Gordon Brown identified it as the principal exemplar of the new carbon-neutral communities – known, inevitably, as “Brown’s towns” – with which England would salute the future. Nimbys were the first to feel the clunking fist. “If we are to meet the aspirations of every young couple to do the best for themselves and their children,” he declared, “then we need to build new homes, and we need to deliver well-planned, green and prosperous communities where they will want to live. And I say to those who always say, ‘Yes, but not here,’ you are denying people their rightful aspirations and you are condemning our children never to put a foot on the housing ladder.”

But the eco-town he was talking about was not Hinxton/Hanley Grange. It was Northstowe, on the site of a former RAF base at Oakington, five miles to the northwest of Cambridge city centre. Its planned total of 9,500 homes would make it the biggest new town in the UK since Milton Keynes. Northstowe met all the environmental standards required of an eco-town, including, unusually, transport – it would be connected to the city centre by a guided busway along a disused railway line. In planning terms it was a far better option than Hinxton/Hanley, which was exactly why it had been preferred in the first place. Given the backing of Brown and the then housing minister, Yvette Cooper, Northstowe could not be allowed to fail. Local authorities swung in behind it; so did the government’s official regeneration agency, English Partnerships (which co-owns the land); so did Cambridgeshire Horizons, a nonprofit company set up by the six Cambridgeshire local authorities, English Partnerships and the East of England Development Agency to steer the “Cambridge phenomenon” – Britain’s biggest growth area. The local structure plan prescribes 47,500 new homes by 2016, of which 38% have already been built. Nimbyville it isn’t, and Northstowe is central to the vision. Planning permission is expected by the end of the year, and building likely to begin early in 2009. Cambridge will get its eco-town.

Except that it won’t. Despite its champion in Downing Street, Northstowe’s eco-town credentials have been withdrawn. It will be built, it will be precisely the “exemplar of best practice” that the government wanted it to be – renewable energy, sustainable urban drainage, recycling, low car-dependence and all – but it will not be a designated eco-town. Why? Because it ticks every box in the checklist except one. In environmental and “sustainability” terms this still puts it far ahead of Flint’s Fifteen, but in political terms it is a killer.

Northstowe’s mistake was to come through the democratic planning system. It is part of the local structure plan; has the support of local authorities and counts against agreed local housing targets. To be an “eco-town” it would have to be imposed by the government and be outside the structure plan. Theoretically, planning authorities retain their democratic right to reject unsuitable development. The reality, however, is that what the minister wants, the minister gets. She can alter planning guidelines, “call in” controversial schemes and rule by fiat. Hanley Grange, if it happens, will be more like Roundabout Grange – a remote, car-reliant satellite dropped into farmland within a web of main road junctions, with a nice big Tesco to attract car-borne shoppers from the villages. And yet it will wear the eco-town badge denied to the much more credible Northstowe.

The result is the alienation not just of local people but also of planning professionals who cannot believe what they are seeing, and of cash-strapped local authorities that cannot keep pace with the government’s demands. The chairman of Cambridgeshire Horizons (motto: “driving forward sustainable communities”) is the former Conservative minister Sir David Trippier, a man whose worst enemy would not accuse him of hostility to development. He complains that the resources of South Cambridgeshire district council, a relatively small local authority with a huge amount of building on its patch, are being “absolutely stretched beyond belief”.

“Hanley Grange would be the straw that breaks the camel’s back,” he says. “They just couldn’t handle it. We can’t be party political, and we haven’t been… We’ve got on with the government very well, and their ministers and their civil servants, and we simply cannot understand why they’ve been daft enough to put this in.” The result is waste, dilution of effort, and delay. Time that should have been spent forging ahead with Northstowe now has to be spent fighting the interloper.

Other than Tesco, nobody will much mourn Hanley Grange if it falls off the shortlist. But the pity is that so much public sympathy has been lost for the idea of new development as a whole. Not all the proposed new towns are poorly sited; and, for all the duplicitous waffle uttered in their defence, some might even be pleasant places to live. After I spoke to him on the telephone, Tony Bird wrote to me about his vision for Middle Quinton: “You asked me why I mentioned Poundbury… Firstly, I believe that eco homes should not be highly insulated boxes with extreme angled roofs covered in solar panels with a windmill in place of a chimney. There is no reason why zero carbon development should not look attractive… Poundbury has… convinced me that the Poundbury-style homes, enhanced with local materials, should be the route that we take.” Not everyone will agree with him – Poundbury is a real divider of opinion – but you can’t accuse him of not caring.

If you want to turn people into Nimbys, by far the best way is to override the planning process and impose upon them huge out-of-town developments that their elected representatives – councillors and MPs – ultimately are powerless to influence. The issues of climate change and housing cannot be solved by a few thousand zero-carbon homes. If building targets do need to be revised, then the answer is to review the Regional Spatial Strategies, keep faith with democracy and do something that, in the words of Cambridgeshire Horizons’ chief executive, Alex Plant, “will genuinely meet the need rather than what appears to us to be a rather ill-thought-through sideshow”.

All this reinforces the obvious argument that the only genuine eco-communities are the existing towns and cities, which have infrastructure already in place, and that the most sustainable form of development, exemplified around Cambridge, is the “densification” of the urban fringe. The unremarkable truth is that car use is at its lowest where people live closest to city centres and are linked to them by public transport. Nobody voluntarily lives without a car in the garden cities and “new towns”, and nobody will do so in the eco-towns either. The government likes to quote the example of the Vauban district of Freiburg, Germany, as proof that people can live without cars. But Vauban was built within an existing urban area well served by public transport and a short distance from the centre: it is not a remote satellite among the fields.

The wildest fantasy of all may be that, with property prices falling and credit dried to a trickle, the building industry can actually deliver the government’s promise. To qualify for the label, eco-towns must contain between 30% and 50% low-cost or “affordable” housing, which of course dilutes the developers’ profit. The Local Government Association’s Sir Simon Milton points out that even in boom-time London, when the former mayor Ken Livingstone set a target of 50% affordable, only 34% was achieved. If you add in the cost of zero-carbon technology, schools, roads, heat-and-power plants, cycle-ways and all the other bits and pieces that go to make up any new town, then the decimal points start to dance around like ping-pong balls on water jets.

“If you’re going for a very high percentage of affordable,” says Alex Plant, “that takes another element out of the commercial viability. At Northstowe we’re going to be in a battle with commercial viability even with some £100m of upfront government support for the guided busway.” Only a few days earlier, Britain’s biggest house-builder, Persimmon, which is part of the consortium bidding for an eco-town at Rossington in South Yorkshire, announced a 24% year-on-year sales drop and lost 8.1% of its share price. It was not alone. Barratt’s shares fell 11% to a six-year low, Taylor Wimpey’s fell 8.3% to an eight-year low, and Bovis’s fell 4.7% to a four-year low.

“The very concept of eco-towns,” says the RTPI’s Rynd Smith, “is based on a boom-time economic model that might not hold good in harder times.” In an inflamed atmosphere of hype and counter-hype, the understatement is balm to the ears.

Green dreams

British architects have more ambitious plans for new ‘eco-cities’ in the Middle East and China

If only the UK’s new rash of eco-towns was as exciting as the high-profile eco-cities being planned abroad by British designers. “In Masdar,” says Lord Foster, “the pedestrian is king.” Masdar, the distinguished British architect’s scheme for a site near Abu Dhabi, will be a pioneering zero-carbon, zero-waste city. At first sight, its narrow streets, palm-tree-lined walkways, mosaic floors, low-rise buildings and sunlit open spaces are redolent of a modern Middle Eastern city. But there’s something profoundly otherworldly about Masdar. Sky rails meander overhead, solar-panelled awnings shade the streets, and there are no cars above ground. “We’re designing a new kind of transportation system,” explains Foster, “with driverless electric vehicles below street level that you can operate using your mobile phone.” When you dial them up, they take you straight to your destination.

Masdar has received $15 billion in investment from the United Arab Emirates government, eager to lead the way in renewable energy and ensure that future prosperity is not oil-dependent. When completed in about 2018, the city should have a population of around 30,000. Foster is fired up. “This is actually doing something about the future, rather than talking about doing it,” he says. But it hasn’t been easy. “It’s an awesome challenge,” he says, describing the desert as “probably the most demanding environment on the planet in which to seek to achieve these objectives”.

Masdar will be entirely self-sustaining. Outlying solar-panel “fields” shimmer in the distance; wind turbines and solar-powered desalination plants cluster near tree plantations for biofuel and waste-recycling factories. To reduce energy demands, Foster looked to traditional walled cites for inspiration. “It is learning from tradition, creating shade, designing the buildings to encourage the movement of air in the way of gentle breezes,” he says. “We may develop materials for the project.There will be innovations and discoveries that we don’t have any awareness of now.”

Four thousand miles away, on the southeastern tip of Chongming island in the mouth of China’s Yangtze river, a second project is under way. This wetland haven, punctuated with rivers and lakes, will be home to Dongtan, an eco-city designed by the global engineering company Arup. The city on this 86-square-kilometre site will be a modern, green Venice, with waterways, arching bridges, grass-roofed low-rise buildings, rooftop solar cells, and wind turbines. Work on the first wave of buildings should have begun by early 2009, and it is predicted that the population will be up to 5,000 by the time of the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai.

Like Masdar, Dongtan will produce its energy from renewable sources. “Waste from rice production can be burnt in a biomass plant to create steam, which then creates electrical energy to power everything in the city,” says the Arup director Roger Wood, who is project-managing Dongtan. “We’ve got power from a mixture of rice husks, solar and wind. We can also digest sewage and waste materials into methane gas, which can then be used to create electricity.” Initially, 90% of waste will be recycled or used for power or fertilisers, but Arup has a zero-waste goal for the city. As technology advances, it is hoped that none of the waste created by the 500,000 people Arup expects to be living here by 2050 will go into landfill.

“Dongtan is a special place because of the location and the need to protect the environment,” says Wood, whose company has drawn up guidelines encouraging architects to build in a sustainable way by using materials from renewable sources. High air quality is also a priority. Transport within Dongtan will be zero-emission, running either on electricity from renewable sources or on hydrogen, the only by-product of which is water. “We’re not banning cars,” says Wood. “We’re saying you need to comply with Dongtan’s emissions standards.

Cars that run on diesel or petrol stay at the site boundary, but systems will switch hybrid cars into only battery mode when they go through the site gate. It’s about noise as well: it makes a much quieter, nicer place for people to live.” Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe

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