$20m eco village vision planned for inner city

Malcolm Rands , CEO and founder of Ecostore. Photograph by Dean Purcell.

Ecostore co-founder and CEO Malcolm Rands will be unveiling his vision for an urban eco-village at the Sustainable City Showcase on Thursday.

Rands, who has lived in Mamaki eco village (which translates as 'spirit of the fertilising waters') since 1984, says that their village has a strong emphasis on community - something which is often overlooked in both housing developments and the dialogue around sustainability. "Even though sustainability always talks about the triple bottom-line, the people part doesn't get mentioned that much."

Rands says that the focus of developers, and Housing New Zealand, is about creating houses for the lowest possible costs. Which is where the Fairground Foundation, the Rands' not-for-profit organisation, supported by a percentage of ecostore's profits, comes in. The organisation will need to raise $20 million to fund an urban eco village which will tick all the green boxes, whilst creating a neighbourhood feel.

With such transient populations, he emphasises, it's difficult to create spaces where human relationships flourish and people feel like they belong, because developers don't design with neighbourhoods in mind. "Getting to know your neighbours is no one's intention, so therefore you aren't designing for it." He says that the average person lives in a house for about five years, and seven years on a farm, which means that people make decisions that are focused on short-term outcomes. "If you were going to be in the same house 30 years later, you'd probably make different decisions than if you were just going to live somewhere and then flick it on as an investment."

The Foundation is currently researching how to create healthy houses that foster a sense of community, research that Rands wants delivered into the hot hands of developers so they can use the intellectual property, supply chain information and learn from any mistakes without having to invest a cent.

"The idea behind what we're doing with Fairground is that when we get going we'll get shitloads of publicity, as much as we can to get the idea out there... Then we'll sell out the first eco village, and we'll have a waiting listing for the next one. But the most important thing is that the first time we do it we'lll make a really good profit. Because then the property developers will go 'Well, if that idiot Rands can do it, imagine if a real expert can do it.'"

Rands says that he supports initiatives like the Sustainable City Showcase, because private businesses have the greatest ability to make positive change. He says the short-term nature of our political cycle and share market-driven companies coupled with the inability of humans to deal with long-term crises like human-caused climate change means it is hard to prioritise long-term decision-making. "Government can't do anything and leadership is gone. You can't be a leader anymore 'cause you'll get voted out."

Rand's tips for happy eco-villages:
1) Don't force people to do things for the good of the commons as it ends up causing resentment, says Rands. "If you had a shared organic veggie garden and you had to work on it between 10 and 12 on a Saturday, you would hate that." At Mamaki there are no common kitchens or veggie gardens. The only joint projects are things like roads with fruit trees on the verges, water, electricity and fencing.
2) Figure out what people want to use the commons for. Using surveys from ecostore's customer base shows that while Kiwis are happy to dry their clothes in a common space, they want to wash in their own house. "Those things are important. If you try and impose unwanted restrictions on people then they shut down."
3) Build in 'bump space'. "Every day when you go home there should be opportunities for you to bump into your neighbours." One of the most successful 'bump spaces' at Mamaki was the trampoline where parents gathered to collect their offspring.