Green Belt - what's it good for?

ukcarper

cells wrote: »

Generally most people would favour and benefit from larger homes on the inside. The space around the property in the form of front and back gardens is less important.

To that end I would much rather the UK built 100+ sqm homes with small gardens or even 120sqm apartments than the average semi today with 70-80sqm inside and gardens around.


You can fit about 6-7k 120sqm three floor terrace homes on a km2 of land. That would be about 14k persons per sqkm which is high density equivalent to the higher end of inner london. But all these terrace homes would have 120sqm of indoor space which is about twice as mich space as a typical uk home. So its high density outside but low density inside.

imagine a grid of 5km by 5km. 22km2 with 140k homes housing 300-330k people and 2km2 of commercial and service buildings and 1km2 of park in the middle. Everywhere within walking distance

I don't think most people would prefer a larger home with less garden.


Although you imaginary new town could work there is a lot more to it than identifying 25 sq kilometres and plonking 140 thousand homes on it.

ukcarper

cells wrote: »

There is the space to do low or high density

Both are needed. London probably needs to build ten new boroughs of some 300-400k population each. Those will have to be high density. Other parts of the country it may be more suitable to build lower density.

But in all this the main thing to understand is that you can have high density and big homes. You don't need crap 40sqm homes. You can build 120sqm terrace homes and still achieve 10k+ persons per sqkm

Perhaps you could say where you think those 10 new boroughs could be placed especially as using your figures they would need to be 5km x 5km.

CreditCrunchie

What's it good for? Well the millions of other species that live there for a start. We are not the only creatures on this planet that need somewhere to live and food to eat, though the "let's build more houses everywhere' brigade seem to have no concept of this!

princeofpounds

What's it good for? Well the millions of other species that live there for a start. We are not the only creatures on this planet that need somewhere to live and food to eat, though the "let's build more houses everywhere' brigade seem to have no concept of this!

But so much of greenbelt is monoculture of dubious environmental value.

Earlier I suggested we would be better off with common land because of the limited accessibility of much of the green belt.

Surely if ecology is the reason we would be better off with actual national parkland, not pony paddocks and scrapyards masquerading as farms?

CreditCrunchie

I think the major downfall of this entire discussion is the misguided idea that a value can be put on the earth. When there is none of it left, nowhere for ANY species to live, and nothing to eat, none of what we're discussing here will matter.

princeofpounds

I can just imagine the 25th century NIMBYS...

"No you can't possibly build a space station on Kuper Belt! It may be a bunch of empty space and icy asteroids, but my little Tarquinex need somewhere to keep his space horse!"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_belt

POPPYOSCAR

Well much to my surprise the 'plan' to build 16,000 new homes on the greenbelt of our side of the town have been scrapped.

Studies have shown that the infrastructure of the town would find it impossible to cope.

Common sense prevails.

princeofpounds

POPPYOSCAR wrote: »

Well much to my surprise the 'plan' to build 16,000 new homes on the greenbelt of our side of the town have been scrapped.

Studies have shown that the infrastructure of the town would find it impossible to cope.

Common sense prevails.

You see this a lot in planning applications being refused. It's a bit ridiculous as it ends up being chicken and egg; no houses as the infrastructure can't cope, no infrastructure built as it's 'not needed'.

Maybe your particular application was inappropriate anyway, but the hypocrisy always grates. All these NIMBYs live on roads that were freshly built once.

ukcarper

princeofpounds wrote: »

You see this a lot in planning applications being refused. It's a bit ridiculous as it ends up being chicken and egg; no houses as the infrastructure can't cope, no infrastructure built as it's 'not needed'.

Maybe your particular application was inappropriate anyway, but the hypocrisy always grates. All these NIMBYs live on roads that were freshly built once.

What about the hypocrisy of the people complaining about NIMBYs who would do exactly the same if was happening to them.

princeofpounds

What about the hypocrisy of the people complaining about NIMBYs who would do exactly the same if was happening to them.

If that's a personal charge, that's quite a stretch to apply it to an individual you know little about. It's probably true of the majority of people however, which is a good reason why the system actually needs the capability to discount some of these considerations.