New German community models car-free living

Photos from the Vauban community website.

The Christian Science Monitor reports on a brownfield redevelopment in Freiburg, Germany, where the community was constructed by the local government to be the epitome of sustainability, including transportation. The Vauban community is car free! If you read German, you can poke through the community website, this summary in English, and here for photos. From the article:

Welcome to Germany's best-known environmentally friendly neighborhood and a successful experiment in green urban living. The Vauban development - 2,000 new homes on a former military base 10 minutes by bike from the heart of Freiburg - has put into practice many ideas that were once dismissed as eco-fantasy but which are now moving to the center of public policy...

There are numerous incentives for Vauban's 4,700 residents to live car-free: Carpoolers get free yearly tramway passes, while parking spots - available only in a garage at the neighborhood's edge - go for €17,500 (US$23,000). Forty percent of residents have bought spaces, many just for the benefit of their visiting guests.

As a result, the car-ownership rate in Vauban is only 150 per 1,000 inhabitants, compared with 430 per 1,000 inhabitants in Freiburg proper.

In contrast, the US average is 640 household vehicles per 1,000 residents. But some cities - such as Davis, Calif., where 17 percent of residents commute by bike - have pioneered a car-free lifestyle that is similar to Vauban's model.

This article from Builder Online, "World Tour 2006: Powerful Change: Two European cities transform brownfields into places people want to live," also discusses the project.


Index Keywords: urban-design-placemaking; car-culture; sustainable-land-use-and-resource-planning