In defence of eco-towns
bbcgreen.com 15th April 2008
After receiving stinging criticism in the national press, Caroline Flint comes to the defence of the government's plans to build 15 "zero-carbon" towns. "Eco-towns will not be green ghettoes, but thriving communities," the housing minister told the Guardian.
Ms Flint has at least one ally in Tristram Hunt, who provides a potted history of British new towns in the Times. "If we must build to meet the government's target of 3 million new homes by 2020, then these zero-carbon settlements seem as good a scheme as any," Hunt concluded.
But elsewhere, the mood appears less positive. In the Guardian, Dermot Finch said that eco-towns are neither the answer to climate change nor our housing needs. With most eco-towns sited in the countryside, away from jobs and amenities and transport connections into cities, they are an ill-advised idea and a "distraction" from bigger national issues.
If the government [instead] focused its energies on creating denser, more carbon-friendly eco-quarters in existing cities," he argues, "the economic benefits over the long term would outweigh the initial costs."