Principle of Local Self-Sufficiency

The Guide to Sustainable Settlements (Barton, et al., 1995), accepted as a defacto standard in the planning circle, argues that self-sufficiency is a key principle. The tension betweeen achieving local self-sufficiency and recognizing economic and functional interdependence is one reflected in planning ideas from Ebenezer Howard onwards. Howard stressed local provision of food, energy and services in and around small towns, but also the need for smaller settlements to be linked together by public transport into a 'social city' that offered high level services and a greater range of jobs.

Howard's balanced approach has sometimes been ignored by ecological utopians, who have promoted self-sufficiency at all costs. The "Blueprint for Survival" for example (The Ecologist Jan 1972, see Goldsmith et al., 1972)) shows how it is possible on a technical level to achieve a decentralized pattern of development. The Blueprint aims to satisfy human needs locally, with local food production in small-holdings, and soil fertility maintained through the recycling of organic wastes from the settlement; renewable energy captured at the scale of the individual building (e.g. through solar heating) or through local biomass, wind and water schemes: water can be also captured locally (off roofs for example), locally treated and reused before being returned to the natural cycle; building materials can be quarried or grown locally, then reused again and again so as to reduce demand for virgin materials. Thus towns are designed on a human scale, where walking and cycling are the obvious means of movement, and a strong sense of community provides for material support and sociable patterns of behavior. The people are linked by telecommunications to wider society, allowing them to participate in national or global economic and cultural activities. Energy efficient transport links the settlement to suppliers and communities, but the level of such contact is greatly reduced by comparison with today.

This seductive image has been influential both as a motivation for environmentalists and as a reason to denigrate the concept of self-sufficiency amongst cynics. It does not match up to reality. While it deals in technological possibilities, it does not deal with economic practicalities, in terms of the way in which employment or housing markets function. Nor does it provide the range of choices for social, leisure and retailing which people now expect. A small town does not, for example, offer a wide range of work opportunities, or of shops, or of cultural facilities like theatres, exhibitions and cinemas.

A realistic principle of self-sufficiency therefore stresses the importance of increasing local autonomy, while maintaining individual choice: self- sufficiency at the scale appropriate to social and economic needs.

A policy of increasing self-sufficiency is therefore appropriate at a wide range of scales, from the individual home or building up to a region, or the country as a whole.

At every level the decision-maker should be attempting to maximise the level of autonomy of the ecosystem while enhancing its life-giving qualities. That means, in essence, reducing dependence on the wider environment for resources, and reducing the pollution of the wider environment by waste products...

One way of approaching the problem of sustainable design is to see each development as an organism or mini eco-system in its own right. A home, or an estate, or a town is an eco-system in the sense that it provides the essential local habitat for humans, creating its own microclimatic condition, and should provide as far as possible for their comfort and sustenance. A settlement is like a living organism in that it has the capacity to reproduce or renew itself (both the people and the built environment); it ingests quantities of food, fuel, water, oxygen and other raw materials; it ejects quantities of waste fluids, solids and atmospheric emissions.

(Barton et al, 1995)

Articles under this Sustainable Development topic have been lifted from Part IV- Planning for Sustainability by Hugh Barton, from the book: Investigating Town Planning- Creating Perspectives and Agendas, edited by Clara Greed.