Start with a Village

(this is the second part of the post below - villages first)

Considering that Start with a Village is a derivative theory that arose out of Malcolm Coulton’s Villages First policy, it’s perhaps surprising that there’s some disagreement about the origins of the idea.

David Sergeant certainly wrote a paper titled Start with a Village for the Environmental Policy Review, but the small environmental group, Defending Devon’s Villages, produced a pamphlet of the same name at around the same time and claimed to have been using the phrase in its meetings for some time beforehand. There was also some confusion about whether or not Sergeant had ever attended any of DDV’s meetings.

But the issue of provenance is something of a distraction. The essence of the theory is that, just as in African development, so in western environmental planning, the village should be the starting point.

For the purposes of his paper, Sergeant took the village of Ampney Magna in Gloucestershire and invited the Parish Council to explore ways in which the village could become more environmentally friendly. To his surprise, their first observation was that the river passing through the village had two weirs and a disused mill, all of which could be used to generate power. They’d suggested several times to the district and county councils that the resource should be utilized but without success.

The eventual blueprint that Sergeant produced for Ampney Magna would have seen the village meeting nearly all of its energy needs from a variety of renewable sources within the parish boundaries. Extrapolating from this, Sergeant argued that if the power to make changes were placed at a “parish” level, the nation as a whole would make far greater moves towards environmental sustainability.

DDV made similar arguments, but interestingly, they also added a dimension relating to house-building, a source of some contention in rural England. They pointed out that the present top-down system (central government decides how many houses are required in each region, the region decides how many will go in each county, the county council decides how many will go in each borough and the borough decides where to put them) is destroying the countryside. They suggested it would be better for parishes to decide how many houses were needed locally and where it was possible to put them, acting as the first step in a bottom-up process. Naturally, the counter-argument from construction companies and some politicians was that this would lead to nimby culture (though equally, it could be seen as a way of exploring simby culture – see below).

Finally, it should also be pointed out that some business thinkers have looked at how Start with a Village could be applied in the organization of large companies. In business however, this is not a truly original concept as it’s been long-established wisdom that small mutually supportive units work better and produce more than a large flat workforce. In other words, most businesses dream of becoming cities, but cities function best when they are made up of distinct neighbourhoods.

(coming next - demographic optimization)