The Byron Shire Echo – February 7, 2018

Page 24

Property

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Property Insider

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What would community-driven development look like? Following recent press on the negative impact of ‘cookie cutter’ developments, Property Insider caught up with Bruns Eco Village for their take on what affordable, sustainable development might look like. Australians who care about the natural environment and affordable housing seem to be caught between a rock and a hard place. As much as we are told more housing supply is the answer, market forces have a questionable record when it comes to delivering attractive, sustainable housing options. Are endless swathes of crammed suburbia the only way deliver affordable housing? There is a growing grassroots movement in Australia called ‘deliberative development’. This movement refuses to accept that there must be a trade-off between affordability and high-sustainability values, and offers an alternative to ‘Big Developer’. In the deliberative development model, intending residents themselves become the project developer. Residents take control of

Kelvin Daly, focaliser of the Bruns EcoVillage and the Nightingale Village Apartments inMelbourne. Photo courtesy nightingalehousing.org

the project across the entire lifecycle, from land purchase to construction, removing the risk- and profitoriented motivations of traditional developers. Recent examples include The Commons project in Melbourne, which led to the Nightingale development, and the Nightingale Village – a network of six urban apartment complexes. Rather than developments being catered to an abstract concept of ‘market’, deliberative developments are tailored to resident needs and desires. As a result, they tend to have high aesthetic and design values, and

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24 February 7, 2018 The Byron Shire Echo

superior sustainability metrics. Not only that, a recent panel discussion in Melbourne, cohosted by the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects and Melbourne’s MPavilion, heard that in the absence of speculative developers, overall project cost were typically reduced by 25 to 30 per cent. This opens the way for projects to be sustainable, attractive and affordable. Kelvin Daly, focaliser of the Bruns EcoVillage, a proposed deliberative development on Saddle Ridge, says it was this holistic approach that

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attracted the working group to the deliberative development model. ‘We’re living in a housing crisis and our Shire is crying out for more affordable housing options,’ he said. ‘However, we’re also living through a climate crisis, and selling out our environmental and design principles just wasn’t an option. ‘ The community-driven, deliberative model opens the way to deliver something truly amazing.’ The deliberative model is not without its challenges. Governance and decision making can become tricky as communities grow in size. Funding also offers a new challenge,

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with the Nightingale projects turning to impact investor funding, rather than relying on conventional funding routes. Mr Daly agrees governance is a challenge. ‘It’s an issue that undoes a lot of communities. Over the past year and a half we’ve been organising ourselves in line with Dynamic Governance principles, and the entire community is training in nonviolent communication (NVC),’ he said. ‘It is a community’s culture that makes it strong, and this is something entirely overlooked by the market development model. ‘We’re all excited to be doing something different, and that shared sense of mission is really bonding the community together,’ he said. Bruns Eco Village’s second VDP (Village Development Program – a prerequisite for residency at BEV) begins this week. The third VDP is scheduled for some time later this year. Reference for statistic on project costs: https://www.foreground. com.au/private-domain/ deliberative-development-suburbs/

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