Thursday, August 14, 2008

Imposed mass housebuilding makes no sense

2 comments:
Very striking front page image and story in todays Bristol Evening Post. This centrally imposed mass house building move (36,500 inside Bristol's boundary and tens of thousands more around the city) makes no sense at all from a sustainability point of view. Even if the houses themselves were all zero carbon, the land take, resources used in construction, and all the consequent impacts of population increase (forecast to be 30% higher by 2030 in and around Bristol) will significantly raise the local footprint.

Best science and economics tells us we need to be significantly lowering our social and environmental impacts but massive population increase, massive land take for housing and infrastructure and all the pressures on transport, job availability and so on, make this even more difficult than it already was.