Houses are being built bigger, i.e. mini-mansions. Solar heating is getting more common. Greenhouse farming is expanding. Annualized geothermal solar (AGS) is being improved at larger scales. Food production is becoming localized, i.e. the locavore movement. Fresh water for agriculture is becoming scarcer. Materials for buildings are being made stronger to last longer. Good farmland is being built over by suburban neighborhoods. All of these trends, and more, appear (to me) to be heading toward a single result: "Farm House Communities." Consider a farm with 40 acres of hoop houses. Across the street is the trailer park where the farm workers live. The owner's big house sits like a castle overlooking the kingdom. What happens if you attach a trailer house to each hoop house? Each worker's family now has ten times the indoor space. Now they can all work at home most of the time and cooperate when that is needed. There is more feeling of ownership among the workers. Improve the greenhouses with passive annualized heat storage (PAHS) and you have also eliminated the need for furnaces in the workers' houses. The PAHS insulation umbrellas can also be rain catching umbrellas so the farm can draw less irrigation water. Consider a suburban neighborhood. Each big house with its landscaped yard. All powered from central fires at the electric plant and the oil refinery. Water pumped from miles away. What if you put the yard inside of the house? You have more living space. The roof of a greenhouse can be made with a type of plastic film (ETFE) that will last more than 30 years and cost less than shingles that need to be replaced every 20 years. You have the option of growing your own food and you can enjoy your landscaping in all seasons. The greenhouse built with AGS can eliminate your heating and cooling bill. If the yard is big enough, there is the option of market gardening which can enable the house to pay for itself. From these examples you can see that the combination of residential greenhouses with annualized heat storage is being pushed toward from multiple directions. Add in some other capabilities, such as rainwater collection and onsite renewable electricity generation, and you can build neighborhoods almost anywhere. The house/greenhouse combinations can be made tent cheap or palace rich. No longer does your house need to be a money pit. Now your house can turn a profit for you, if you or a family member should choose to work at home. As permaculturists, you should note that the extension of the growing season throughout the year reduces the amount of land under cultivation. The immovability of massive heat storage systems makes longer lasting constructions more desirable. You end up with more population capacity in less area with less overall resource consumption. Key technologies: ETFE film coverings (makes large roofs affordable) PAHS / AGS (makes climate conditioning large spaces affordable and sustainable) Add on technologies: Aquaculture Rainwater collection Solar or wind electric power systems Super insulation Solar cookers I anticipate, based on evidence from history, psychology and anthropology, that this type of Farm Houses will eventually be built mostly in widely separated small town like communities. Unlike past farming villages, these communities will not need to be near good water sources. This should lead to an interesting variety of cultures. What could you imagine yourself doing with a 10 meter by 50 meter heated greenhouse at home?
In my area I see more of what I would term gluttony by home owners/ builders. Larger homes built on land, surrounded by lots of asphalt and concrete, very little in the way of solar or other alternative power sources. I think that while some are working towards sustainable goals, more people are rejecting the ideas of self sustaining neighborhoods, at least here it seems so. I would love to see communities like you describe be built but I also think for now it will be very small scale and very localized, to many people are operating in the mind-less mode than in the mind-ful mode. Since it seems (from my observations) so many countries are in great financial distress, to the point of bankruptcy, the types of neighborhoods you describe may not be able to be built because of financial collapse. That would be a pity.
Your points include: gluttony by builders, rejection of the ideas of self sustaining neighborhoods, scale, lack of funding due to financial collapse. I will address these four points in a different order. First comes rejection of the ideas. I agree that more people reject the idea of self sustaining neighborhoods. I argue that the specific point of rejection is primarily the idea of "neighborhood". They like the idea of self sustaining, they just don't trust other people to do their parts. Plus, there is the popular concept of "My home is my castle" which argues for the separation of power and control. These attitudes slant people more to the self sustaining 'single family home'. The predicted "farm houses" are mostly self sustaining as single units and can be completely self sustaining within a relatively small community. How much interaction you have with the neighbors is almost entirely up to you, the home owner. You are in charge. Second, builders want profit. buying and selling land in large quantities is only minimally profitable. Building and selling large houses on small lots is very profitable. This is so because so many people choose to buy large houses. For a builder of a housing development, the cost of installing utilities such as water, sewer, power, and roads is the same for each house. Whether the houses are tiny cottages or large mansions does not effect these costs, but size does effect the profit per house. Design a house to be built without connections to water, sewer, electrical, and fuel grids. Make it less expensive to build larger than most McMansions built today. That leaves only the transportation grid to build. The cost of roads will still lead to clustering of houses, just a little less tight than before. The gluttonous builders will build more of these new type houses because 1 people want to buy them, and 2 the profit per unit is high. Third, as I mentioned already, each 'farm house' is close to self, and residents, sustaining in and of itself. An isolated unit is the smallest scale. In the area where I live, there are thousands of houses on ten acre, dry land lots. How many people would choose to build 'farm houses' on their newly purchased lots depends on the marketing of the general contractors that are selling them. This is not something that requires a commitment to a different lifestyle. The 'farm house' does not have to be farmed, though that option will remain available. What produces the separate communities, at first, is the lower cost of land further away from water sources and relaxed zoning regulations outside of the city limits. There are already many 'bedroom communities' built outside of cities by speculators. It is no stretch to think that speculators would build developments of houses that buyers express a desire for. So, again, the spread of 'farm houses' relies upon marketing. I figure that three houses would do. One model home showing the ultimate luxurious self sufficiency, one market garden showing the home paying for itself, and one add on model for upgrading an existing house. What would also be great for marketing would be one of these buildings used for a bar / night club. Fourth, the fact that this type of housing insulates the owners from financial collapse is one of the main reasons why I believe it is worth promoting now! Add in the effects of increased local food production with reduced energy demand to insulate the local economy from the problems of national economies. People can still build more 'farm houses' even after an economic collapse, IF they know that their new houses will improve their lives. The cost / benefit analysis will only get better for 'farm houses' as the economy worsens. Seasonal thermal energy storage (STES) plus durable, affordable greenhouse covering film (ETFE).
