Selfsufficientish.com

OK, some help please guys.

I'm doing an open university course on Environmental Design. My next assignment is to design a project around food. The actual project is up to us but it has to be about food.

In Swindon, my ex-heart-throb, Kevin McCloud, is building a new housing development on the site of an old nursery. At the same time, there has been discussion in the news about the fact that there are around 1 million empty homes in the UK, of which 650,000 are in England (the only reason I'm concentrating on England is because I found some reliable statistics about England).

When this point was put to K McC in an interview, his comment was that new houses need to be built where people want to live for work etc.

OK, so how does that relate to food?

Well, if the floorspace of the average new house is 76sqm, then, assuming that the average house is two storeys, the average footprint is 38sqm. Multiply that by the just over 650,000 empty houses, and you get a land area in the region of 2,500 hectares. If this was returned to agricultural use we would end up around 50 new farms. (I have references for all these statistics). This doesn't take into account the thousands of empty industrial and commercial properties.

OK so my idea for my assignment is to design a campaign to force developers, who want to build new houses on land that was previously either greenfield or predominantly planted (such as a nursery, garden or school playing field) to compensate the environment by returning derelict property to agricultural land, allotments or smallholdings. It would be difficult and expensive but that's the point!

So, I'm looking for ideas for the campaign (bearing in mind this is just an assignment). How would you promote the idea, do you even think it's a good idea? The weirder and wackier the advertising ideas the better.
What would the objections be (cost being the obvious one).

Of course, there are massive environmental arguments about the agricultural industry and use of land, but I'd like to leave them aside for now.

Thanks for reading this and, as always, your comments will be a great help.

Zoe

I think that all developers should HAVE to leave some "green" land for allotments/ agriculture. They should be compelled to include it in the plans. Maybe the old wartime posters should be revived...dig for Britain, and developers given a rating according to how much enviromental compensation they had provided. They could get some sort of financial incentive from the government (you said whacky!!!) At present I think they often have to leave green playing space but they wriggle out of it and leave stupid little unusable bits...so it would have to be drawn up and agreed by a sensible person not a civil servant (excluding isher civil servants of course)
The problem with the developer demolishing derelict properties to provide new agro space would possibly be the ownership and how to compell the owners have to give it up. I feel that if land / property is left in really poor state for more than a set period of time, the owner should be given the option to let it be cleared and used or sort it out themselves!
Macdonalds could be asked to sponsor the scheme and incorporate details in their "green britain/ helping the enviroment" Tv ads.

Thanks, BB. Some excellent ideas there. I quite agree about the stupid bits of unusable space. The only people that make use of it are junkies and fly-tippers.

By the way, I have now set up a poll if anyone would like to do it for me please. It's very quick, just one question.
http://www.doodle.com/ez4car7va63kktr8

Thanks
Zoe

Yes the destruction of already built buildings would be costly, so there's got to be time limits to repair and to destroy. I bet that in Swindon like in any other towns, there are empty buildings, therefore they should be sorted out before they build new ones. (I am not helping, am I!?)
I love the idea that McDonald or other companies could get involved with donations to get the "return it to green land project". But this may be more a council thing than a building company thing. However the building companies which build low cost accommodation, likely to be bought by people who cannot afford anything else, should definitely enclose some allotments for gardening; not just a bit of grass for the drunks and drug addicts to use; with obviously priority 1st to the new home owners moving in the area and then if there is anything left, to the locals in the town. I hope I am making some sense....

Some more good ideas. Cost was my main concern at first, but given how much agricultural land is now worth, the developers could sell it on or rent it out to smallholders for income. The clearance would be an environmental issue though. To demolish a house would result in a whole load of rubble to go into landfill. It might be better to just knock the houses down to about 2 ft high and fill with compost from local composting initiatives. Huge raised beds!!!!

Zoe