A Pox on Both Your Eco-Houses

I'm unexpectedly torn on the kerfuffle over Eco-Towns. I agree almost entirely with Jonathan Glancey that this is little more than an act of urban offsetting, a vacuous gloss put on the simple act of expanding the commuter belt - and the woolly, woody, sustainability-miming architecture will no doubt be insultingly bad (see Mapping Melbourne on this from a little while ago). Also, the very idea that there should be environmental enclaves while the city multiplies its contradictions has a hint of Evil Paradises about it - those 'sustainable' outposts like Arup's eco-metropolis Dongtan, ecocities for the rich while the majority toil in grossly polluted conditions. Certainly if Brown's ecotowns weren't accompanied by the expansion of the road and air networks, the continued denigration and ticket inflation on the railways, the concentration of capital and employment in the South-East and a generally pitiful supine position before capital then they might have a modicum of credibility.



And yet - looking at photographs of the anti-ecotown protesters, reading their 'arguments', and noting their use of the term 'new town' (or 'new' in general) as an insult, one can't help but recognise one's natural enemies. From Tim Henman's Dad onwards these are the same people that fought against the mass trespasses and squattings of the 40s, who dubbed Stevenage 'Silkingrad', who oppose Wind Turbines but refuse to step out of their SUVs and who vote Tory in droves - motivated seemingly more by the fear that a) their fantasy of rurality might be impinged upon and b) the proles might move nearby than anything more altruistic. Morbid symptoms indeed.



A completely different - if perhaps equally ambiguous - view of the New Town has been brought to my attention by Collapse's Robin: this animated, hip-hop soundtracked site devoted to the Czech Modernist New Town of Usti Nad Lebem, where huge panelak estates were built in the surrounding countryside up until the Velvet Revolution. There's a rare, and unusual perspective on these (very common) places at this site - in place of the usual horror story, we have a beautifully written anatomising of the wilful historical amnesia that built it and the nostalgia for it today, combined with dreams of the new towns that could have been built in its wake, and never were. Though it doesn't sentimentalise the sometimes deeply unpleasant politics that lie behind these places, it wonders if they might have pioneered an idea of the city which we ought to be learning from - continuing, even. Not that anything so unashamedly machinic is ever going to get built in the Oxfordshire countryside today. More's the pity...