LEARNING ABOUT ONE PLANET LIVING

AUGUST 26th, 2009

Last Thursday we were lucky enough to be given a guided tour of BedZED by BioRegional co-founder Pooran Desai. BedZED is one of the UK’s most exciting and inspirational eco-developments that has successfully improved residents standard of living while reducing their impact on the planet. So take that Tony Blair, who recently declared it ‘completely unrealistic to say to people you can’t have a car, you can’t use a motorbike. It is just not going to happen’. At BedZED car usage has been reduced by 64% just through clever design and making sustainable choices easy and normal.

Designed by BioRegional and Bill Dunster architects ZEDfactory Ltd and developed by the Peabody Trust, Beddington Zero Energy Development (BedZED) is the UK’s largest sustainable community with both residential and commercial spaces.

As we walked around the site Pooran explained how the various successes and failures of BedZED led to the development of the “One Planet Living” concept. Seven years on BedZED is a thriving eco-community where residents know on average 20 of their neighbours by name (as opposed to the national average of three!).

The One Planet Living principles have now been brought to life for the first time in a new development, OneBrighton, the UK’s first sustainable development on similar scale. Neo is working with Crest Nicholson BioRegional Quintain LLP to promote the commercial units available at OneBrighton. Watch this space for updates!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, AUGUST 26th, 2009 at 12:07 pm and is filed under POSITIVE CHANGE. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.