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Friday, 7 September 2007

SOCIETY - fresh ideas...

NEW SETTLEMENT IN AN OLD LANDSCAPE

A small house on a 250 square metre block with food garden at front and underground water tanks at rear. Solar water heater panels are visible on front roof.

Two Aldinga houses. The smaller house on the left is made of rendered strawbale. The double storey structure features an internal, solar energy absorbing, stone Trombe wall behind the upper and lower windows on left. The Trombe wall releases stored heat energy into the building as space heating and can be closed off in hot weather. Vegetable garden at front.

Stephen is not the stereotypical business director. He is not tall, does not wear a suit and wears his hair long to his shoulders. Nor does he drive a prestige car. For Stephen, his 4WD ute is more appropriate. He could easily be mistaken for one of the surfers who patrol the Gulf of St Vincent shoreline in search of the perfect swell coming in from the Southern Ocean. Catching swells is something Stephen does on occasion but his prime motivation these past few years has been getting his pet project off the ground.

Originally, the dream was a shared one. It began to move from idea to gestation well over a decade ago when a group of like-minded individuals, wanting somewhere to settle, got together and talked up the possibility of developing an urban-like settlement in a rural area. Practical people rather than dreamers, they wanted the advantages of urban living with space for a little primary production.

Burra looked promising. A town long since passed its heyday as a mining centre, Burra offered the advantages of cheap land within reasonable distance of Adelaide.

Plans were drawn up. They were publicised and attracted interstate interest. This new village was to be an example of how people could live on the land while improving it and, for some, deriving at least part of their livelihood from it. The idea was to create a new type of settlement that brought together the advantages of the village with the best in modern environmental design.

But Burra was not to be the place. A new government introduced new policies which ended the idea for the new village. The project was stillborn.

Learning frim experience

Swiss born Max Lindegger used to talk about combining rural living and village life back in the 1980s. He espoused much the same ideas as Stephen and, like him, went on to create it. By late in the decade, residents were starting to move into Crystal Waters Village near Canondale, back in the hills of the Sunshine Coast hinterland.

Environmental design was a criteria for the planners and architects behind the first of these new villages, so it comes as no surprise that they soon became known as 'ecovillages'. The next development of its type was Kookaburra Park, near Bundaberg, inspired by Crystal Waters. Max had a hand in that design too. Jarlanbah followed, a smaller development near the northern NSW town of Nimbin, co-designed by Robyn Francis and planner, Peter Cummings. The ecovillage was at last an Australian reality, a new way to enjoy rural life that was substantially different to life in a country town.

By the time the Burra project was underway there were already a number of ecovillages planned or existent around the country. There was much to learn from their experience. This Stephen Poole did.

Finding land

Burra failed at the hands of political policy. Disappointed but not completely discouraged, Stephen and his team decided to persist with their dream. The search for an alternative site got underway.

Eventually, they discovered Aldinga. Approaching council to broach their idea for a village, they were informed that a group of artists in the area already had a similar idea. Council thought it might be worthwhile talking to those artists.

It was, and soon land was found on the outskirts of Aldinga Beach and, once again, planning got underway. The outcome was Aldinga Arts Ecovillage - the 'Arts' in the name recognising the presence of the artists.

A place of dessication and dry grass

The highway from Adelaide passes through countryside the colour of dried grass. Most people would describe this as flat country; others, noting the mild rise and fall of the land, might call it undulating. Whatever, a low range parallels the highway through this part of the Florieau Peninsula and forms a natural boundary separating the coastal plain from the lands beyond. Here and there the range is topped with open forest but the coastal plain along which the road takes the visitor has a paucity of trees and give the impression of land cleared long ago to make way for grazing animals and walnut orchards. You see the remnants of those orchards from the highway, gnarled old trees enclosing the mouldering brick ruin of farmhouses long ago abandoned.

The Floriaeu Peninsula is a long finger of land that projects southward and it is here, about 45 minutes from Adelaide, that the turnoff to Aldinga Beach is taken. Aldinga is one of a series of coastal towns stretching back towards Adelaide to form a ribbon of development along the foreshore of St Vincents Gulf.

The road to Aldinga Arts Ecovillage passes through the undistinguished looking town and leaves it via a long, straight road that passes a new subdivision. Here, Stephen slows the ute to explain how the streets have been made with no apparent regard for access to the free solar energy so readily available in this Mediterranean climate. Failure to address solar espect, Stephen speculates, means years of high energy bills for residents.

It's a different story when we reach Aldinga Arts. Here on 34 ha of north-sloping land the streets follow the contours of the terrain, allowing houses on the 152 lots to be aligned towards the sun. A total of 16 hectares have been devoted to residential development and around 44 per cent of the site has been set aside as community land and common facilities, including the small pocket-parks with their young but fruiting fig, quince and persimmon trees

All houses in the village have solar water heating - reducing the cost of what is the most costly, energy consuming component of households in Australia. They must, according to a village by-law, store a minimum 10,000 litres of water to cope with the long, hot, dry summers and with drought. Sensibly, most houses store more than twice that volume.

Australia's changing demographic - the increasing number of retired couples, single parent with child, couples and singles - has been recognised and acted upon at Aldinga Arts through the diversity of housing options. Lots of 650 square metres for larger families, 450 and 200 square metre lots for smaller households will soon be complemented by the construction of the village's first townhouses.

The village is financed through the sale of lots - Stephen says that something like 30 per cent of total sales were made before work started on the village - and via the Bendigo Bank, a financial institution that has stepped in to service areas abandoned by the major banks. Infrastructure development has been made in advance of housing construction and in the three years since building started many of the lots in stages one and two have been sold and built on. Stage three was recently released and, already, two houses have been built and occupied. The market area separates stage three from stages one and two and, according to Stephen, markets will eventually be held more frequently than the present quarterly.

Conserving water in the landscape is a priority in this climate and a drive through the village discloses wide drains lined with rock known as rip-rap. These take winter's rainwater to storage in the small dams seen throughout the village. As the weather warms through the summer, the dams become muddy wetlands of dark green reeds.

Aldinga Arts is two kilometres from Aldinga Beach - the sea can be glimpsed between low headlands from the higher parts of the village. The far boundary of the farm that forms a yet to be developed part of the property is only a kilometre from the waters of the Gulf, according to Stephen.

At present, the 12 hectare farm area accommodates the village's sewage treatment system, the treated wastes of which will irrigate a woodlot. Eventually, the farm area will house an education centre and livelihood opportunities such as the planned community kitchen. Already, one family that has bought a lot and is waiting for a start to be made on their house is planning to make use of the kitchen as part of their livelihood mix. They hope to purchase organically certified produce from local farmers and process and bottle it in the community kitchen. Their market will be specialty retailers in Adelaide.

Another resident is planning to take advantage of passing traffic by developing a site at the entrance to the village into a coffee shop, cafe and bar. Stephen explains that the village will also feature artist's studios and performance space.

Demystifying renewable energy - the Heij hut

Elizabeth Heij is a middle aged woman who, with her husband, bought a lot at Aldinga Arts and has built a state of the art, modern house of modest size. Upstairs is Elizabeth's office - she teleworks for the CSIRO. In her front yard is a vegetable garden that yields fresh, organically grown herbs and vegetables for the household. The side yard conceals two buried 10,000 litre water tanks and water is also harvested from the garage and greenhouse roofs frem where it is stored in above-ground tanks.

Elizabeth Heij's resource-efficient house with solar water heater and photovoltaic array on roof. The greenhouse attached to the side wall makes a warm sitting room in winter and is used to air-dry fruit and vegetables in summer. Elizabeth has installed a number of above-ground water tanks as well as two large underground tanks. Vegetables and herbs are grown in the garden at the front of the house.

Further decreasing interior heating in summer are the utility rooms, such as laundry and bathroom, which have been placed on the western side of the house, the side exposed to hot, late afternoon sun of summer. On the sunward side, the eaves are of just the right width to admit warming sunlight into the interior as the seasons move into winter but to exclude it during summer. Inside, the heat energy of the sunlight is stored in solid, thermal mass floors which release it as the evening cools, reducing the need for supplementary heating.

Elizabeth's house is no McMansion - it is a modest-size but very high-performance dwelling suitable for two. Whether the heat of summer of the cool of winter, her house is comfortable, and, unlike those unfortunate homes in that subdivision closer to Aldinga, Elizabeth's has much lower energy bills. In fact, the energy authority pays her for power derived from the array of photoelectric panels on her roof.

A melange of compact homes

Aldinga Arts Ecovillage is a compact melange of modernist architectural styles but common to all is energy and water efficient design. As well as reverse brick veneer, houses are made of building materials such as timber plank, galvanised iron, timbercrete - a sawdust and concrete brick - and the economical but durable rendered strawbale. Architecturally, they are of modern design - there is nothing freaky or retro here - reflecting, perhaps, the type of people who live in the village - middle class professionals and service workers, artists and tradespeople.

Close to the job markets, specialist services and the big-city amenity of metropolitan Adelaide - the suburban train network terminates only ten or so kilometres away at Noralunga Centre - Aldinga Arts is also close to Aldinga township and the beach. It demonstrates in a most practical way that affordable, energy and water efficient housing of differing size, suited to the full range of modern Australian families, does not need to result in urban sprawl but can offer the benefits of private home ownership in a village-like atmosphere.

For Stephen Poole it has been a long journey from Burra to Aldinga, a move from the drylands to the sea. But Stephen is not yet ready to move onto his lot in the village - he still lives in town. Every now and then, though, when driving through, he stops his ute at his vacant lot, gets out and, fittingly for someone who likes to catch the occasional wave, looks towards the blue waters of St Vincents Gulf, just over a kilometre away.

READ THE RESPONSE to this article when it was published in the current affairs journal, Online Opinion...